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Multimedia ebooks (THATCamp SE session idea)
A group of us at the Emory Library are deep in the throes of organizing THATCamp Southeast, an “unconference” on technology and the humanities. It’ll be on March 4, 5, and 6, and we’re expecting about a hundred people. At THATCamps, everyone posts session ideas in advance. Then, on the day of the camp, we…
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Head and Shoulder Hunting in the Americas
I’ve posted a number of times about Walter Freeman, the lobotomist, and his photographs of his patients. I presented on the subject for a Film Studies colloquium here at Emory, and you can view a recording of that presentation here. (See this bibliography for sources.) I’ve noticed some distortion in this Flash video; you can…
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What I Do All Day
It’s been about seven months since I started at Emory, and sometimes I feel a world removed from my life as a grad student in New Haven. My day-to-day life has changed in a thousand different ways: I have new colleagues, new friends, a new kind of work. I sometimes have trouble explaining my work…
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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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Technology postcards, which are exciting to me (but probably not to you) because I made them!
Here’s something kind of silly: a set of postcards I made for Yale’s Instructional Technology Group to advertise the Teaching with Technology Tuesdays series of workshops on technology and pedagogy. Each one is an image of older reading technology, which I have improved and modernized! This was a really fun project for me because it…
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So, you’re moving to New Haven: what to do
Surprisingly, this is one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. I wish you the very best of luck on your move, but I regret that I don’t have time to answer individual questions about your situation. (This is Part II in a series of posts about living in New Haven. Look for more,…
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Everybody must get spammed!
If you tried to leave a comment and got spammed, it’s because you’re a cylon. Just kidding, it’s nothing personal. I’m trying to fix the settings, but I’m having trouble. Send me an email to let me know, or just hang on, and I’ll keep monitoring my spam folder.
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How to ask questions at academic presentations without being a jerk
OK, let me just start by saying that I have been That Guy (in a gender-neutral sense) many, many times. You know what I mean? The one who asks a question that makes you surreptitiously elbow the person next to you or doodle “WTF?” on your notepad. It’s hard! There are so many ways to…
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What I learned from the Scholars’ Lab and the Center for History and New Media
A big part of my new job at Emory is researching models of digital scholarship. The idea is that by getting a sense of what’s out there, Emory can benefit from others’ experience when it launches its own center for digital scholarship. So my colleague, Stewart Varner, and I have been going on field trips…