Miriam Posner
Assistant Professor
Office: GSEIS 318
I’m interested in the way that data and technology shape people’s lives (and vice versa). To understand this, I use methods from fields like history, media studies, science and technology studies, software studies, and digital humanities. My book, Seeing Like a Supply Chain (forthcoming from Yale University Press), is a blow-by-blow account of the technology of supply-chain management (SCM), from punch-cards to neural nets. I argue that SCM is what you get when you treat the world like a computer. I’m always interested in “boring things,” like infrastructure, outmoded databases, and obsolete software, because they’re often enormously consequential to the way we live our lives. I’m also very involved in the broad field of digital humanities, which uses digital tools to explore humanities questions, and I often think and write about the combination of technology and humanities scholarship. If you’re curious about that, you might be interested in the tutorials I’ve written for my students.
Education
- Ph.D., Film Studies and American Studies, Yale University, 2011
- M.Phil, Yale University, Film Studies and American Studies, 2006
- M.A., Yale University, Film Studies and American Studies, 2007
- B.A., History, Reed College, 2001
Research Interests
- Data visualization
- Mapping
- Network analysis
- Web design
- Data manipulation, etc.