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New job, same school! (Same office, even!)
I can never keep my mouth shut, so this announcement already made the rounds on social media, but I’m really excited about my remodeled job title: as of July 1, I’m an assistant professor of Information Studies and Digital Humanities (still at UCLA!). For those who care about such things, the appointment is 100% in…
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New tutorials on network analysis with Cytoscape
For some reason I got it into my head to write a bunch of tutorials on using Cytoscape for network analysis. They’re now all up on Github. (I’ve been moving to Github for tutorials because they’re easier to update there.) I started writing these for the students in my spring-quarter class and, even though the class is over, I’ve been…
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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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Materials on Image-Mining for Medical History
Last week, I taught the image-mining portion of the Images and Texts in Medical History workshop at the National Library of Medicine. I am far from an expert on OpenCV, the open-source computer-vision library. But as usual, that didn’t stop me from attempting to teach it. The materials I created for the workshop include detailed…
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Money and Time
This is an edited version of a talk I gave at UC Irvine on February 5, at a symposium organized by Peter Krapp and Geoffrey Bowker. Digital humanities, as we all know, is sexy right now. It seems to be everywhere, including the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. Mellon’s funding it,…
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A better way to teach technical skills to a group
My DH101 class this year was my biggest yet, with 45 undergrads. I suppose that’s not huge compared with many other classes, but DH101 is very hands-on. I am fortunate enough to have a TA, the awesome Francesca Albrezzi, who runs separate weekly labs. Still, I often have to teach students to do technical things…
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Rehabbing DH101
I’m teaching Introduction to Digital Humanities for the third time this year, along with Francesca Albrezzi, my wonderful two-time teaching assistant, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a challenging but rewarding class, with 45 students, a 10-week quarter, and a large number of moving parts. I reworked the syllabus quite a bit for this iteration, and…
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The (sort-of) selfies class
Last winter I taught a class called Selfies, Snapchat, and Cyberbulles: Coming of Age Online. It was incredibly fun and rewarding, and I learned a ton. Mark Marino simultaneously taught a great class on selfies over at USC, and while we weren’t able to sync up our classes as much as we might have liked,…
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What’s in your conference travel bag?
Anyone else have a weakness for those “What’s in your bag?” features? My stuff is not nearly as nice as the stuff those people carry, but deep in my heart, I seem to cling to the belief that my life really would be better if I could just optimize a few things. Anyway, I posted on…
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“Stronger and Whiter Light Down Deeper and Darker Holes”: Jacob Sarnoff and the Strange World of Anatomical Filmmaking
I have an essay up over on the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Movies on the Web site about Jacob Sarnoff, a Brooklyn surgeon who made thousands of anatomical and surgical films. I’m also so excited that the NLM posted Sarnoff’s weird 1927 film “The Human Body in Pictures.” From the essay: Motion pictures’ utility…