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Several new publications
I’ve published several things in the last few months, and thanks to UC’s institutional repository, I’ve been able to make them available to everyone. “See No Evil” Logic Magazine no. 4 (buy a copy of this great magazine!) This is a piece for general readership that investigates the software behind today’s massive, sprawling supply…
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New book chapter
I’m really proud to have a new chapter in an open-access volume edited by Eric Hoyt and Charles Acland called The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, published by the UK press REFRAME. The chapter, which is called “How is a Digital Project Like a Film?” is really about data and narrative. What does…
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Dissertation advice
Recently, a much-loved friend asked me for advice on dissertation-writing, not because I’m any paragon of efficiency, but because she knew I’d struggled myself. She wanted to know if I had any words of wisdom about getting through the process with a minimum of pain. My immediate impulse was to decline to answer, on the…
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Research tools redux: What I use
I posted recently about tools for managing a research workflow, and one of the points I made is that no set of tools will be right for everyone. I’ve tried and failed to foist my favorite tools on enough people to know that this is true. Still, after I wrote the post, a few people asked…
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History, Narrative, and the Body
Want to read a great big chunk of formal prose? Of course you do! This is an excerpt from the introduction to my dissertation, which is called Depth Perception. Here, I attempt to explain why anyone would write (or care) about medical films. When we picture the human body, what do we see? The answer…
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Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States
I’m excited that we have a publication date for an essay collection I’m contributing to. Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States will be published by Oxford in winter 2011. The editors are Marsha Orgeron, Devin Orgeron, and Dan Streible. From the flyer: Learning with the Lights Off is the first…
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Walter Freeman’s photographic forebears
Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist who popularized lobotomy, called photography his “magnificent obsession.” There’s no doubt that Freeman loved to shock, and his lobotomy photographs and films were part of Freeman’s arsenal of attention-getters. But Freeman was also part of a long tradition of looking at a patient’s face and body in order to deduce the…
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Writing about lobotomy photographs
It often seems to me that writing history is an exercise in hubris. I never felt that more than when trying to write about Walter Freeman’s photographs of the people he lobotomized. These are really difficult photographs: difficult to see, difficult to analyze, and difficult to talk about. Lobotomy has become a kind of joke…
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A dustyard of graves
I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, which is a truly bad-humored memoir about procrastination and D.H. Lawrence and depression and some other things. There seems to be something awesome on every page. I was so delighted by some of the passages that I wanted to share. This, on…
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The best-laid plans …
I’ve been working hard to get the second chapter of my dissertation finished before the end of the month. I wouldn’t say I’m panicking, exactly, but I’m definitely feeling a heightened sense of urgency. It’s been funny to watch all my carefully designed notetaking and citation plans get shoved out the window now that I…