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Depth Perception: Surgical Film and the Problem of Anatomical Legibility
Jacob Sarnoff (1886–1961) was a pioneering physician-filmmaker. He was an early and enthusiastic proponent of using film to educate new physicians and demonstrate surgical procedures. He made hundreds of films, some of which survive in the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m interested in Jacob Sarnoff because I think his…
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The best thing I found at NARA
I was recently doing research at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. I was looking at documents related to the military’s venereal-disease prevention efforts during World War I. Here’s the funniest document I found: The more I work on this subject of venereal disease prevention the more I am impressed with…
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The iPad in academic settings: what I like, what I’d like to see
One of the developers here at the library asked me to tell him a little bit about my experience using the iPad in an academic setting. Here are his questions: Where do you find your self using the device the most? What do you really enjoy/hate about the device? Is there anything that you think…
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Anatomy on film: the imaginary archive
A lot of my research is on medical filmmaking: films that physicians and other medical professionals made for each other. It turns out that there are a lot of these. Doctors have been making movies since the invention of the medium. I’m fascinated by a strain of thought that recurs frequently in discussions of anatomical…
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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:…
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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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Opposite sides of the cafetorium: notes from a THATCamp Southeast session on librarian-scholar collaboration
I attended a session at THATCamp Southeast (which Shawn Averkamp proposed) on ways to promote collaboration between librarians and scholars (a subject close to my heart). We took notes together using a collaborative Google doc, and here’s my attempt to summarize. “We get paid to be interrupted!” The academics in the room started out by…
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Batch-processing photos from your archive trip
Today at THATCamp Southeast I helped organize a session (with Andrew Famiglietti from Georgia Tech) called Research Hacks. We brainstormed ways to use technology to enhance research, both at the archive and when examining born-digital sources. After I proposed the session, I had a moment of panic when I realized I didn’t really have any…