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Frequently asked questions about lobotomy
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating the history of lobotomy, and particularly the kinds of visual evidence doctors used to support this practice. It’s part of the book I’m finishing, Depth Perception, which is broadly about the ways doctors have used film and photography during the twentieth century. In one of my…
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How Did They Make That? The Video!
After I wrote my original “How Did They Make That?” post, on some common types of DH projects, I got to thinking about whether there might be ways to help people reverse-engineer digital projects on their own. I used a talk I gave at CUNY as an excuse to think of some of these ways. This presentation, a…
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Reflections on my digital materiality and labor class
I was really glad to get the chance to teach a special topics course on Digital Labor, Materiality, and Urban Space last quarter. I’ve been thinking about this class for years, and the syllabus is the (imperfect) culmination of lots and lots of reading and thinking. In the event, the class was terrifically generative and…
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How Did They Make That? at CUNY, March 27, 2014
Here’s a list of links for my talk at the CUNY graduate center, for the audience members who’d like to follow along: My original “How Did They Make That?” post (with Dot Porter’s Zotero library!) UCLA Digital Humanities 101 Ben Schmidt, A Year of Ships University of South Carolina Digital Libraries, Negro Travelers’ Green Book…
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Commit to DH people, not DH projects
We’ve seen digital humanities in terms of “projects” since Roberto Busa indexed Thomas Aquinas. But lately it seems to me that the imperative to continuously produce something is getting in the way of how people actually think and grow. What if we viewed digital methods as a contribution to the long arc of a scholar’s…
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Advanced Scroll Kit Techniques: The Parallax Effect
My Digital Labor, Urban Space, and Materiality class will be using the drag-and-drop framework Scroll Kit to create multimedia “device narratives.” Here’s the tutorial I’ve created to teach them to use Scroll Kit. You’re welcome to download these instructions as a PDF or as a Word document, in case you’d like to modify them. This is my second Scroll Kit tutorial; the…
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Basics of Creating a Scroll Kit Narrative
My Digital Labor, Urban Space, and Materiality class will be using the drag-and-drop framework Scroll Kit to create multimedia “device narratives.” Here’s the tutorial I’ve created to teach them to use Scroll Kit. You’re welcome to download these instructions as a PDF or as a Word document, in case you’d like to modify them. This is…
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New course for winter 2014: Digital Labor and Materiality
[Edit: the website for this course, including the syllabus, is now available here. And here’s a little story about our class field trip to One Wilshire, the largest Internet exchange point on the West Coast.] Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours…
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What Alt-Ac Can Do, and What It Can’t
This is a cleaned-up, lightly edited version of a talk I gave on November 22, 2013, as part of a panel on “Digital Humanities and the Neoliberal University” at the American Studies Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Our original proposal for this session read like a lot of attempts to grapple with controversy in…
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A dead-simple weekly email: A little workflow for bringing people together
UCLA’s Digital Humanities program, which I coordinate, is interdisciplinary in the extreme. Unlike some other programs, which sit in English or History departments, UCLA DH is an entity unto itself: a standalone minor and graduate certificate housed within the division of the humanities. In a lot of ways, this is great: We have no particular…