Miriam Posner

Tag: Tools

  • 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…

  • Embarrassments of riches: Managing research assets

    Last updated May 15, 2013 There’s research, there’s writing, and then there’s that netherworld in between: wrangling all the digital files you gather over the course of your work. Digital files are often easier to deal with than stacks of paper, but they can also proliferate frighteningly quickly. I teach a workshop on this topic,…

  • Make tutorials dead-simple with ScreenSteps

    If you’re wondering how I got so fancy with my instructions on how to make a DVD clip reel, I had a trick up my sleeve. ScreenSteps is an application specifically designed to create software tutorials. It has everything you need packed in: screen capture, image notation, links, and text. Because it’s designed specifically for…

  • Zoom in and out of presentations with Prezi

    Prezi is a presentation maker (still in beta) that avoids the standard linear slideshow model. Instead, you can zoom in and out of one big presentation, hopping between ideas however you want. Here’s an example of Prezi in action. I like the ability to escape the rigid structure of the PowerPoint presentation, and this seems…

  • Make a quick timeline with Google News Timeline

    Here’s a kind of fun new visualization tool from GoogleLabs. Google News Timeline lets you search for a topic (after you pick a category) and then arrays significant events on a timeline. I don’t really understand how the Wikipedia category works, and I wouldn’t trust the timeline to have every relevant piece of information, but,…

  • Dropbox: Sync and share files across multiple desktops

    If you work on multiple computers, you probably need a way to get ahold of your files and documents. You could email them to yourself, put them on a USB drive, or use a file server, but it might be easier to use a free service called Dropbox. This service allows you to stick a…