Miriam Posner

Category: Teaching

  • My “day of digital humanities”

    If you’re curious about what I do all day (and I actually do get that question a lot), I’ve documented my day here, as part of the Day of Digital Humanities project.

  • The wind in the trees: Regimes of attention

    “What the modern movie lacks is beauty,” said D.W. Griffith, melancholy at the end of the a long career, “the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” At film’s inception, it’s said that viewers didn’t necessarily know where to rest their eyes. Film hadn’t organized itself into the streamlined patterns of cause-and-effect that we…

  • The subtle art of workshop-giving

    Over the last couple of years, I’ve given a number of (somewhat) technical workshops for grad students and faculty here at Emory. I love doing it. It’s really gratifying to impart skills, and preparing for workshops gives me a chance to think through and develop my own knowledge in a systematic way. It’s not that…

  • Teaching HTML & CSS

    This week I twice taught a two-hour workshop introducing Emory people (students, faculty, and staff) to the very basics of HTML & CSS. The workshop was called How a Website is Born: The Very Basics of HTML & CSS, and here’s how I described it: Ever wondered how a website goes from an idea to…

  • Film Study: an iPad app built for cinephiles

    I’ve been using an iPad for about six months now. I like it, don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t been the life-changing device I’d sort of been expecting. I haven’t found that many apps that really take advantage of the specific qualities of the iPad: its shape and size, the multi-touch surface. (Some exceptions:…

  • As film studies goes digital

    I don’t think it’s any secret (among those who care about such things) that the Film Studies program at Yale is at something of a crossroads. Film studies as a discipline has been increasingly turning into media studies, and Yale’s program, like a lot of programs, is having to decide how much it wants to…

  • Miriam, on tape

    As you can surely guess from my long silence, the last few months have been really, really busy for me. I’m plowing through my dissertation, plus teaching, working, and applying for jobs. I wish I were the kind of person who could operate on no sleep. One of the things keeping me busy was a…

  • Very practical advice for a first-time T.A.

    For me, teaching has become a real pleasure. I feel inspired by my students and I love the feeling of camaraderie that develops in a well-managed classroom. It wasn’t always that way, though. When I first started teaching, I couldn’t believe how much harder it was than I’d imagined. It was all I could think…

  • Radio in the classroom

    I spent a year and a half commuting between New Haven and Providence a couple times a week, and over the course of that time I developed a serious addiction to podcasts and audiobooks. For some reason, listening to recordings hits home for me in a really pronounced way. I noticed this when I absorbed…

  • Documentary filmmakers and DVD encryption

    I was interested to learn (via NPR’s On the Media, funnily enough) that there’s a dispute between the International Documentary Association (IDA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The dispute is about DVD encryption. Basically, it’s legal for documentary filmmakers to use snippets of copyrighted films in their own movies, under a provision…