Heewon published "Paul Ekman and the Search For the Isolated Face in the 1960s" in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhbs.22322?af=R
The essay examines the detailed process of isolated facial data from the context of its emergence through the works of psychologist Paul Ekman in the 1960s. It explores how Ekman's data practices have been developed, criticized, and compromised within the political and intellectual landscape during his early career. The article was made possible through Heewon's visits to the Consortium institutions, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society Library and the University of Pennsylania.
Heewon Kim
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Coding Actions, Making Faces: Understanding the Human Through Faces 1960 – 2000
Coding Actions, Making Faces explores the emergence and development of the sciences and technologies for understanding human emotion with facial expressions throughout the second half of the 20th century. I argue that face-analyzing technologies reconfigured the human face into a codable entity, thus normalizing and legitimating the use of such intrusive techniques in analyzing every human being with a face. Drawing from the documents and films in the collections of psychologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists, along with institutional records, I will illustrate the cultural, intellectual, and institutional conditions in which documenting the movement of the human face was conceived as a desirable practice. Through this work, I hope to explore the historical and cultural implications of human-reading technologies in the data-driven informational world. I plan to use the collections at four Consortium member institutions which hold the materials of different regimes of face transcribing technologies.
Updates
Heewon published “Paul Ekman and the Search for the Isolated Face in the 1960s,” in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. The article explores how Ekman’s data practices shifted from analyzing faces in interactions to studying them in isolation from 1961 to 1967 and is part of Heewon's broader project on the history of facial recognition systems. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhbs.22322