Colloquia, Civic Media Sessions, and Communications Forums

• Second Wind, 13 min
• Overboard, 16 min
• Downward Facing, 6 min

Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

See Part 1 of this series, from September 6, featuring Francis Steen.

The Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview of the activities of Red Hen and surveyed the study by Francis Steen and Mark Turner of international network news coverage of the Anders Bering Brevik event in Oslo, Norway, in July, 2011, with an emphasis on the way in which network news is occupied with the assessment of culpability, blame, and credit. This talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals.

Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University.

He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publications are Ten Lectures on Mind and Language and two edited volumes, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, and Meaning, Form, & Body, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin. His other publications include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and many more. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. For 2011-2012, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

This presentation develops a theoretical framework (rooted in Science and Technology Studies) for understanding how, generally, social media’s technical feature-sets create a system of capture and conversion. Capture describes the persistent ways in which social web platforms record and fix online/offline social and technical practices. Conversion applies to the way in which technical architectures convert what is captured into value (both culturally contingent and economic). The notions of capture and conversion are developed in light of other work in the field that seeks to understand how social web platforms use technology to leverage user generated content (UGC). The framework bridges a focus on ongoing social practice within/through platforms with analysis of technology as a determinant of probable practice. Ultimately this work is part of a larger project that seeks to develop a way of critically engaging the political economy of the social web while at the same time not ignoring the subject positions of those whose lives on display make it compelling.

Hector Postigo is Associate Professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University's School of Media and Communication. He is the co-founder of the blog culturedigitally.org and most recently the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright from MIT Press and co-editor of Managing Privacy Through Accountability from Palgrave Press. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. He teaches and writes about video game culture, labor in digital networks, and privacy and copyright on the social web.

(Note time.)

This forum launches the Futures of Entertainment 6 conference at MIT. Despite many infrastructural and economic hurdles, entertainment media industries are burgeoning in West Africa. Today, the Nigerian cinema market--"Nollywood"--is the second largest in the world in terms of the annual volume of films distributed behind only the Indian film industry. And an era of digital distribution has empowered content created in Lagos, or Accra, to spread across geographic and cultural boundaries. New commercial models for distribution as well as international diasporic networks have driven the circulation of this material. But so has rampant piracy and the unofficial online circulation of this content. What innovations are emerging from West Africa? How has Nigerian cinema in particular influenced local television and film markets in other countries across West Africa, and across the continent? What does the increasing visibility of West African popular culture mean for this region--especially as content crosses various cultural contexts, within and outside the region? And what challenges does West Africa face in continuing to develop its entertainment industries?

Fadzi Makanda is a business development manager in the New York office for iROKO Partners, a distributor of African—and particularly Nollywood—entertainment. Makanda leads the development and execution of U.S. advertising sales strategies for the company.

Colin M. Maclay is the managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Both as co-founder of Harvard's International Technologies Group and at Berkman, Maclay's research pairs hands-on multi-stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveal trends, challenges and opportunities for the integration of communications technologies in developing communities.

Ralph Simon is founder of the Mobilium Advisory Group, which studies innovation in mobile usage in such countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. He has served as an executive at Capitol Records, Blue Note Records, and EMI Music, and he co-founded the Zomba Group with Clive Calder of South Africa. Simon earned the title "Father of the Ring Tone" when he created the first ring tone company in 1997.

Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in living. The game simulates Henry David Thoreau's experiment in living a simplified existence as articulated in his book Walden. It puts Thoreau’s ideas about the essentials of life into a playable form, in which players can take on the role of Thoreau, attending to the “meaner” tasks of life at the Pond—providing themselves with food, fuel, shelter and clothing—while trying not to lose sight of their relationship to nature, where the Thoreau found the true rewards of his experiment, his "finer fruits" of life. The game is a work in progress, and this talk will look closely at the design of the underlying system and the cycles of thought that have gone into developing it. It will also detail the creation of the game world, which is based on close readings of Thoreau’s work, and the projected path forward for the team as we continue our sojourn in experimental in play.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of "Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games," a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Purple Blurb is a series of presentations for digital writing, with its thanks given to Angus N. Macdonald Fund and MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies.

The role of the library in the digital age is one of the compelling questions of our era. How are libraries coping with the promise and perils of our impending digital future? What urgent initiatives are underway to assure universal access to our print inheritance and to the digital communication forms of the future? How is the very idea of the library changing? These and related questions will engage our distinguished panelists, who represent both research and public libraries and two of whom serve on the steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, Director of the Harvard University Library and one of America's most distinguished historians. He serves on the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America and has been a trustees of the New York Public Library since 1995. In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Darnton defended a NYPL plan to liquidate some branches in the system while renovating the main Fifth Avenue branch. The essay sparked a number of responses. In November of last year, Darnton provided a status report on the DPLA. Darnton is the author of many influential books including The Case for Books, Past, Present, and Future and The Great Cat Massacre.

Susan Flannery is director of libraries for the City of Cambridge and past president of the Massachusetts Library Association.

Linda Gregerson will discuss her new book of poems, The Selvage, and her calling as a poet and professor of Renaissance literature in conversation with Forum Director David Thorburn and members of the audience.

A 2007 National Book Award finalist and a recent Guggenheim Fellow, Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. She is the author of four books of poetry and two books of criticism. Gregerson's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Among her honors and awards are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Kingsley Tufts Award, four Pushcart Prizes, grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Humanities Center.

Gediminas Urbonas is artist and educator, and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio - an interdisciplinary research program that advocates for the reclamation of public culture in the face of overwhelming privatization, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Often beginning with archival research, their methodology unfolds complex participatory works investigating the urban environment, architectural developments, and cultural and technological heritage.

The Urbonases have established their international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic, social, and political conditions of countries in transition. Working in collaboration they develop models for social and artistic practice with the interest to design organizational structures that question relativity of freedom.

They use art platform to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups, evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination. Combining the tools of new and traditional media, their work frequently involves collective activities such as workshops, lectures, debates, TV programs, Internet chat-rooms and public protests that stand at the intersection of art, technology and social criticism.

They are also co-founders of VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art), and VOICE, a net based publication on media culture. They have exhibited internationally including the San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon and Gwangju Biennales – and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions – among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their work was awarded a number of high level grants and residency awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); a fellowship at the Montalvo Arts Center in California (2008); a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and the Special Prize for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007).

Their writings on artistic research as a form of intervention to social and political crisis was published in the books Devices for Action (2008) by MACBA Press, Barcelona and Villa Lituania (2008) by Sternberg Press.

Gediminas Urbonas is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at ACT - the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

We have come to associate the internet with narratives of appealing unpredictability. We have become accustomed to scanning for the next best thing, to expecting novelty at our fingertips. We are habituated to stories of people using computers to throw established authorities into disarray: stories of surprising computer-related business start-ups, from Apple and Microsoft around 1980 through Facebook and beyond; of peculiar digital inventions taking the world by storm; of internet use by political rebels from Howard Dean to the Tea Party to the Arab Spring; of disruptive events that throw entire industries into disarray, like college students downloading music or uploading videos. The habit of throwing money at internet-related businesses in rough proportion to their air of rebelliousness persists to some degree, even if dampened by memories of the stock collapses and scandals of the early 2000s. Novelty in the digital does not surprise us; it is an expectation – at the same time that we have nearly given up on the idea of change in other in other aspects of our lives (e.g., in dysfunctional politics, our dependence on the automobile, the persistence of poverty).

This presentation elaborates on the sociology of this pattern of expectant novelty, using Papacharissi's suggestion that the digital world offers a "habitus of the new," with its own distinct inducements and blindspots. Bourdieu's notion of a habitus offers a non-dualist, non-determinist way to make sense of the way digital novelty has become woven into the fabric of how we live our day to day lives.

Thomas Streeter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. He has also taught for the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, and was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (NYU Press, 2011) is a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology. His award-winning Selling the Air, a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus, was published in 1996. He edited, with Zephyr Teachout, a volume about the use of the internet in Howard Dean's run for President, called Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, published in 2007. He has published articles and chapters in outlets ranging from the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal to the Journal of Communication to Critical Inquiry.

The so-called "yellow journalism" of the New York Journal and the New York World in the 1890s has been discredited by scholars and journalists for privileging sensational and biased stories. In its day, however, many within the news industry considered this experimental form of journalism to be a promising new direction for news writing. Both newspapers explored a reform-oriented form of news that some commentators and reformers believed could play a vital new role in advocating for the public interest. Revisiting the activist impulse behind yellow journalism provides a window on a changing media ecology in which the future of news was under debate. This moment of transition within nineteenth-century media also provides insight into the promise and potential dangers of activist media for today’s civically minded experiments with news.

Kelley Kreitz is a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research brings together media studies, the history of journalism, cultural studies, and U.S. and Latin American literary studies. She is completing a book called Electrifying News: A Hemispheric History of Newspapers, Novels, and Media Change. Kelley has also served as a radio journalist and as the director of the Idea Lab at Root Cause, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing new solutions to social problems. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.

The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies Seminar Series and co-sponsored by Literature, HTC, and the SHASS Dean's Office

Writing, in relation to such affiliated topics as literacy, linguistics, cognition, and media studies, has a central place across and beyond the humanistic disciplines. It is time, in turn, for historians of medieval art to take a broader view of paleography, rather than view it primarily as a means of dating or localizing monuments, or, at the most literal level, deciphering illustrated texts or epigraphic inscriptions.

Within the realm of visual imagery, the written word can rise to a form of representation in its own right, prior to and independent of the complex phenomena generally considered under the rubric of “text and image” -- a generalization as true of modern art as it is of the Middle Ages. In contrast to modernity, however, through much of the Middle Ages, as in Antiquity, the primary status of the spoken word and oral delivery ensured that writing, no less than picturing, was subject to suspicion.

Professor Hamburger's presentation will survey some, if hardly all, of the many aspects of medieval script as a pictorial form, using examples ranging from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages and beyond.

Jeffrey Hamburger's teaching and research focus on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. Among his areas of special interest are medieval manuscript illumination, text-image issues, the history of attitudes towards imagery and visual experience, and German vernacular religious writing of the Middle Ages, especially in the context of mysticism. Much of his scholarship has focused on the art of female monasticism. His current research includes a project that seeks to integrate digital technology into the study and presentation of liturgical manuscripts, a study of narrative imagery in late medieval German prayer books and a major international exhibition on German manuscript illumination in the age of Gutenberg.

Professor Hamburger's books include The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany.

Hamburger holds both his B.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. He previously held teaching positions at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. He has been a guest professor in Zurich, Paris, Oxford and Fribourg, Switzerland.

Close reading is a classic humanities methodology for the analysis and understanding of texts across a variety of media. It's a rigorous discipline — in the words of van Looy and Baetans: "The text is never trusted at face value, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is at the same time a demolisher and a constructor." This is a difficult task — the practice of close reading requires that the scholar immerse herself in the experience of the text on its own terms, and at the same time maintain a critical distance in order to observe and understand the construction and the effects of the text. Bizzocchi relies on close reading for his own scholarly work and uses various strategies to reconcile the contradictory states of experience and analysis.

Close reading can be used to explicate works across a variety of dimensions: thematic, cultural, historical, sociological, and others. Bizzocchi's goal is to understand the poetics — the creative decisions — embedded in media works. Bordwell describes poetics as "inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed, and the effects that flow from these principles". Bizzocchi has always loved the magic of immersion in the experience of the moving image. As a scholar, he says his role is "to seek within that immersive experience the details of how the magic is created". He will present his analyses of Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair, Tom Tykwer's Run, Lola, Run, and Gerrie Villon and Alex Mayhew's Ceremony of Innocence (an interactive adaptation of The Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock).

Jim Bizzocchi is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. <www.dadaprocessing.com> His research includes work on narrative, interactive narrative, and the evolution of the moving image. He teaches classes in these areas, and is a recipient of the University Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a practicing video artist, creating award-winning works in a genre he calls "Ambient Video". <www.ambientvideo.ca> Jim is a graduate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (2001).

Co-sponsored with the Open Documentary Lab @ MIT

18 Days in Egypt is a collaborative web-native documentary project about the ongoing Egyptian revolution. Co-creator Jigar Mehta will show the power of engaging audiences in the act of storytelling. The talk will highlight their process, success and failures of making the source the storyteller and maintaining journalist values while engaging hundreds to collectively tell the story.

Jigar Mehta is a documentary filmmaker and a journalist. He is currently co-creator of the collaborative documentary project, 18 Days in Egypt, about the ongoing Egyptian revolution. It was a project developed while Mehta was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, Mehta was a video journalist for The New York Times.

Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of 'piracy,' yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren't before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face?

Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), Internet Inquiry (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage). For the last two years she has been interviewing musicians about their relationships with audiences.

Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Part 1 (Join us for Part 2, with Mark Turner, on November 29.)

Television news provides a window into the cognitive processes commonly deployed to frame, explain, and reason about events. What Hart & Honoré (1959/1985) show for courtrooms also holds for newsrooms: they rely on commonsense notions of causation to reconstruct events, assemble narratives, and determine responsibility.

The media provide a vehicle for a finer-grained ethical process than is captured by the legal system, often holding people accountable to a higher standard than the law. These standards emerge out of the different voices that appear in the media, creating either a more narrowly elitist or a more broadly-based and inclusive social dialogue. The implied goal of this dialogue is to help move society towards a better and more skillful level of functioning; the media firmly holds that free will is real and that human intentions and actions are potent forces of history that cause social change.

To achieve the intended results, however, journalists and others whose voices appear in the media must reconstruct events carefully, identifying possible windows of missed interventions and specific causal forks realistically. Illustrating the social debate in this Comparative Media Studies colloquium, Steen will examine the global media coverage of the July 22, 2011, attack in Norway, demonstrating that the news is not primarily about reporting what happened but about constructing narratives, performing event surgery, and assigning responsibility. Cultural values strongly influence the process of causal reasoning, subtly shaping the future direction of society.

Francis Steen is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Library Communication Studies Archive, a multimodal research corpus of some 200,000 television news programs automatically annotated by two billion words from closed captioning and transcripts. He will demonstrate some of the tools developed for the project, along with results from the ongoing NSF/CDI collaboration with computer vision and text mining teams. He and Mark Turner jointly direct the Red Hen Lab, a globally distributed laboratory for research on multimodal communication.

Invented by Bell Labs in 1928 to reduce bandwidth over the Trans Atantic Cable, the vocoder would end up guarding phone conversations from eavesdroppers during World War II. By the Vietnam War, the "spectral decomposer" had been re-freaked as a robotic voice for musicians. How To Wreck A Nice Beach is about hearing things, from a misunderstood technology which in itself often spoke under conditions of anonymity. This is a terminal beach-slap of the history of electronic voices: from Nazi research labs to Stalin gulags, from World's Fairs to Hiroshima, from Churchill and JKF to Kubrick and Kinski, The O.C. and Rammellzee, artificial larynges and Auto-Tune. Vocoder compression technology is now a cell phone standard--we communicate via flawed digital replicas of ourselves every day. Imperfect to be real, we revel in signal corruption.

Dave Tompkins' first book, How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop, is now out in paperback. Amazon named it "top pick" for Entertainment book of the year in 2010. He has presented on the vocoder in Germany, Netherlands (Jan Van Eyck), New York (Eyebeam Institute), London, Poland (Unsound Festival), and at the NSA Cryptologic Symposium held at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Tompkins has written for Grantland, Oxford American, The Believer and The Wire. Tompkins is currently researching Sustained Decay bass sub-frequencies in Florida. Born in North Carolina, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes far beyond today's e-books. The creators of electronic literature have developed new interface methods, new techniques for collaboration, and new ways of linking language, computing, and other media elements. How has electronic literature influenced other media, including the Web and the book? What are the implications of having literary projects in the digital sphere alongside other forms of communication and art?

Katherine Hayles is professor in the literature program at Duke University. Her books include Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005).

Rita Raley is associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she directs Transcriptions, an online publication covering digital humanities. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.

What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research, pedagogy, access, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument, curation, display, editing, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

S. Craig Watkins studies young people's social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig is also a Faculty Fellow for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.

He is the author of three books, including The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's research network on Connected Learning.

Among other things his work in the network will include leading a team of researchers in an ethnographic study of teens and their participation in diverse digital media cultures and communities.

Working with an Austin-based game studio Craig is also developing a game design workshop for young teens. The workshop will explore the connections between digital media, game authorship, literacy, and civic engagement.

Craig blogs for dmlcentral, the online presence for the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub hosted at the UC Irvine campus, and the HuffingtonPost. For updates on Craig’s research visit his website, theyoungandthedigital.com.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Media; Comparative Media Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies

New communications technologies are revolutionizing our experience of news and information. The avalanche of news, gossip, and citizen reporting available on the web is immensely valuable but also often deeply unreliable. How can professional reporters and editors help to assure that quality journalism will be recognized and valued in our brave new digital world?

Jay Rosen is director of NYU's Studio 20, a master's level journalism program which uses projects to teach innovation in journalism. He is the author of the blog PressThink, and of the book What are Journalists For?

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at the Media Lab. He blogs at ethanzuckerman.com/blog.

A Knight Science Journalism event.

The urban database documentary is a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems as generative processes and organizational frameworks to explore the lived experience of place. The genre emerges in the early 20th century, and can be read as symptomatic of panoramic perception, sensory estrangement and networked participation, cultural utopias which respond to modernity’s underlying paradoxes. As such, the invention of the computer did not give rise to the urban database documentary, it only enabled new forms of its realization. The hope is to shift the conversation from a fetishization of ever-­new technological possibilities to a discussion of the underlying cultural aims/assumptions of media art practice and the specific forms through which works address modernity’s cultural tensions.

Jesse Shapins is a media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, PRAXIS and Wired, cited in books such as The Sentient City and Networked Locality, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues. He is Co-Founder/Chief Strategy Architect of Zeega, Co-Founder/Associate Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, and on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has invented courses such as The Mixed-Reality City and Media Archaeology of Place.

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today’s unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a director who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age – a curator of digital artifacts.

Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise.

Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section of the event.

Ingrid Kopp, Tribeca Film Institute

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history and a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians.

Moderated by MIT Comparative Media Studies co-director William Uricchio.

The American postal service has an impressive history, but an uncertain future. Older than the Constitution, it was a wellspring of American democracy and a catalyst for the creation of a nationwide market for information and goods. Today, however, its once indispensable role in fostering civic discourse and facilitating personal communications has been challenged by the Internet and mobile telephony. How is the post office coping? What are its prospects in the digital age?

Richard R. John is a professor in the Columbia University Journalism School who specializes in the political economy of communications in the United States. His many publications include two monographs: Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).

David C. Williams is the Inspector General (IG) of the US Postal Service. The IG's office conducts independent audits and investigations of postal service operations. Previously, he served as IG for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Social Security Administration, Department of the Treasury and Housing and Urban Development.

Kent B. Smith is the manager of strategic business planning for the U.S. Postal Service and is involved in developing perspectives of the future of the postal service and the mailing industry with such groups as the Institute for the Future, the Universal Postal Union, and the International Postal Corporation.

Moderator: Shiva Ayyadurai is currently working with the US Postal Service Office of the Inspector General to explore ways to save postal workers' jobs through the provisioning of EMAIL services. His book The EMAIL Revolution is forthcoming this fall.

David Kelley primarily works with digital video installation and photography, with recent projects involving performance and sculpture. His practice consistently interrogates the apparatus of photography and film to encounter narrative in the process of becoming. His latest films, set in Newfoundland and the Brazilian Amazon, draw on the genre of ethnography as a narrative device to rehearse the real and imagined social relations of these sites. In Newfoundland, Kelley participated in a remote art residency founded as a socio-economic redevelopment project on Fogo island, an outport community with a failing fishing industry. In Manaus in the Amazon, he filmed rehearsals of an independent film about drug-fueled indigenous suicides in the colonial Teatro Amazonas. The theater was funded by the fortunes of rubber barons and also served as the location for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Kelley will show selections of his recent projects and related narrative and ethnographic films, as well as rehearse a lecture/performance about architectural morphology and global tourism.

Kelley is an artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Wellesley College. He received his MFA from University of California in Irvine and is a recent alumni of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Kelley's work has been shown at MassMoCA, The Kitchen, BAK in Utrecht, and Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. His project with Patty Chang Flotsam Jetsam (2007) exhibited in New York at Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 New Directors New Films Festival and won the Golden Pyramid at the Cairo IMFAY Media Arts Festival.

Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This talk investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops an analytical framework of social movement media culture: the set of tools, skills, social practices, and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate, and amplify movement media across all available platforms.

Movement media cultures are shaped by their location within a broader media ecology, and can be said to lean towards open or closed based on the diversity of spokespeople, the role of media specialists, formal and informal inclusion mechanisms, messaging and framing norms, and levels of transparency. The social movement media culture of the Occupy movement leans strongly towards open, distributed, and participatory processes; at the same time, highly skilled individuals and dedicated small groups play key roles in creating, curating, and circulating movement media. Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative insights come from semi-structured interviews with members of Media Teams and Press Working Groups, participant observation and visual research in multiple Occupy sites, and participation in Occupy Hackathons. Quantitative insights are drawn from a survey of over 5,000 Occupy participants, a crowdsourced database of the characteristics of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million tweets with Occupy related hashtags.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is Assistant Professor of Civic Media in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, co-PI of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and cofounder of the Occupy Research Network.

As a journalist covering games since 2001, Chaplin has seen a lot of changes in the industry and among game academics. In this talk she will give an overview of the most important and interesting trends, including emerging thinking on ideas about game literacies and the acceptance of games as facilitators of transformative experiences. This will include ideas about play as a crucial part of human development and a potentially subversive act, and the rise of systems thinking. Chaplin is not a games evangelist, so the talk will cast a skeptical eye on the current trend of games as an answer for all that ails society. She will also talk about my experiences in general as a journalist during the rise of the Internet, and share my thinking on the journalism program she is developing at The New School.

Heather Chaplin is an assistant professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She was a regular contributor for All Things Considered, covering videogames. She has been interviewed for and cited in on the topic of games for publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning.

“This game meant everything to me” – statements like this emphasize how players encounter deep and meaningful experiences playing video games in their lives. Playful mediated experiences strike players’ minds at particular phases of their lives, in relation to the space and time they inhabit, and in the context of specific subjective experiences. However, these transformative experiences cannot be standardized; they do not happen to everyone through the same game or at the same time and place. The question arises, how we can trace these highly subjective experiences. What methods are appropriate for researching, how players put meaning into their games and how their biographies reflect these experiences?

In this talk the methodology of playographies – a visualization of playful experiences as part of qualitative biographic interviews – is introduced. Insights from my research on transformative playful experiences are provided and the development of this mixed-method research tool will be outlined. Besides demonstrating the methods and presenting recent results, the theoretical framework guiding this study are outlined. It will be reflected why and how games foster transformative experiences of players. On this basis the limits and potentials of this research method will be debated and future research challenges will be discussed. This talk will be accompanied with a small self-exploration exercise...

Konstantin Mitgutsch is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. His research focuses on learning processes in computer games, empirical research on players' experience, educational game design, and transformative learning in games. He worked in the fields of learning, media studies, computer games and age rating systems at the University of Vienna for several years. In 2010 he was Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Education Arcade at CMS. In his recent research project he investigates learning patterns in games and different methodologies of game evaluation.

If we are what we eat, does it hold that we are also what we read and watch? You've made a New Year's Resolution to eat healthy, but do you ever consider what you feed your brain? When's the last time you took a critical look at the news and information sources that help you form opinions, learn new things, and generally live your life?

Center director Ethan Zuckerman will discuss these questions with Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, and Sean B. Cash, Associate Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

We'll have a lively, interdisciplinary conversation about health and sanity in an age of overconsumption, and how to best design tools to help people.

Ethan Zuckerman is leading a research project at the Center for Civic Media to help people visualize their media diets and create a nutrition label for the news so consumers and news providers can make better decisions. The platform is under active development.

Clay Johnson just published an extremely relevant book, The Information Diet, on the same topic (and much more). Clay argues that we can alleviate a host of our society's problems if we take a more critical look at the information sources that make up our diets. Previously, Clay directed Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation and founded Blue State Digital.

Given the shared use of the nutritional metaphor, we're lucky to have on hand an expert in the field of nutrition. Sean B. Cash researches how food and nutrition policies affect both producers and consumers, including the efficacy of food label and price interventions as public health tools. Sean also studies how consumers value social aspects of food relative to other attributes, and how point-of-sale health messaging impacts consumers’ demand for food.

Otto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he elaborates standard cognitive metaphor analysis (as is used for printed texts), blending cognitive science with humanist scholarship, to attempt to capture the full semiotic range of televised reporting. His review of a full year of contemporary network news stories about Latinos reveals both the high production values and journalistic limitations of network reporting. This critical semiotic analysis offers an explanation about how news viewers construct partial understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. At the end of this talk he offers a range of recommendations, from modest to radical, to address these limitations.

Otto Santa Ana, UCLA Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana’s scholarship has focused on language that constructs social hierarchies, particularly how the mass media reinforce unjust inequity in their representations of Latinos. His first book, Brown Tide Rising (2002) offered a close study of newspapers. The American Political Science Association named it Book of the Year on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology. Santa Ana has now extended his research to multi-modal mass media. His forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: The Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Evening News, (University of Texas Press) analyzes a year of network news imaging of Latinos. He maps out an explicit procedure by which news consumers build their understandings out of the multimodal stimuli of television news stories using recent cognitive science scholarship (Lakoff, Fauconnier) as well as humanist theories (Foucault, Calvin McGee, Barthes, Hadyen White) to explain how news viewers construct their skewed understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. Throughout the book, Santa Ana offers explicit suggestions to television news professionals.

In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most widely seen – and widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all time, The Family of Man. For the last forty years, critics have decried the show as a model of the psychological and political repression of cold war America. This talk challenges that view. It shows how the immersive, multi-image aesthetics of the exhibition emerged not from the cold war, but from the World War II fight against fascism. It then demonstrates that The Family of Man aimed to liberate the senses of visitors and especially, to enable them to embrace racial, sexual and cultural diversity – even as it enlisted their perceptual faculties in new modes of collective self-management. For these reasons, the talk concludes, the exhibition became an influential prototype of the immersive, multi-media environments of the 1960s – and of our own multiply mediated social world today.

Fred Turner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality television to the culture of engineering at Google. He is currently drafting a history of immersive media environments in the decades after World War II.

This talk will explore what it means to consider games an aesthetic form -- something akin to literature, music, or film. That this is the most appropriate category within which to place games seems like an emerging consensus. But what does it actually mean? Are only video games an aesthetic form, or do non-digital games also deserve that status? Are the aesthetics of games a hybrid blend of other forms or a distinct form unto themselves? Do they express a new aesthetic fresh-born of the computer age or a primal, fundamental aesthetic that computers have amplified and brought into focus? The talk will examine these and other related questions.

Frank Lantz is the Interim Director of the NYU Game Center. For over 12 years, Frank has taught game design at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications. In 2005 Frank co-Founded Area/Code, a New York based developer that created cross-media, location-based, and social network games. In 2011 Area/Code was acquired by Zynga and is now Zynga New York. Frank has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive. Over the past 10 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world's largest boardgame; ConQwest, which featured the first major application of semacodes in the United States, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

Game design is developing very rapidly, and insights, tools, and practices from gaming are increasingly integrated across different areas of life, leading to talk of the 'gamification' of everything -- including civic media.

This session brings together Innovative game designers, theorists, and activists in a conversation about the possibilities of and challenges for civic games. Independent game designers, networks like Games for Change, and perhaps even major industry players are moving towards linking gameplay with realworld civic actions. What is the state of play, and what is coming just over the horizon? In theorizing and developing civic games, what can we learn from games with civic content -- as texts, processes, and points of community engagement? How can we understand game design itself as civic engagement, as communities become not only game players but increasingly also design, mod, develop, and critique games?

Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning /Lab).

Elizabeth Lawley is a Professor of Interactive Games & Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she also runs the Lab for Social Computing.

Scot Osterweil is the Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade and a research director in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a designer of award-winning educational games, working in both academic and commercial environments, and his work has focused on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects. He has designed games for computers, handheld devices, and multi-player on-line environments. Scot is the creator of the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games, and leads a number of projects in the Education Arcade, including Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Curated Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medical science), and iCue (history and civics). He is a founding member, and Creative Director of the Learning Games Network where he leads the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Language Learning Initiative (ESL).

In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. In this talk, Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine, discusses how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. How did this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture create its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media? By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, Prof. Ito will provide fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.

Her web site is at itofisher.com/mito.

Co-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Research Project.

As a prologue to the Futures of Entertainment conference, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? How does the nature of these cities shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation now permit individuals to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these apparently opposed trends co-exist? What is their likely impact on audiences and on the international media landscape?

Speakers include Sérgio Sá Leitão, president of RioFilme; 2005 CMS graduate Parmesh Shahani, now at the University of Pennsylvania and of Godrej India Culture Club -- and who previously worked for Mahindra & Mahindra, one of India's largest business conglomerates; and Ernest James Wilson III, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The Forum will be moderated by Mauricio Mota, a co-founder and Chief Storytelling Officer of the Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co.

This talk will focus on digital spaces to support positive youth development.

As the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns, there is a sense of urgency for developing strategies and educational programs that promote positive development by taking into consideration the children's social, emotional, cognitive, physical, civic and spiritual needs. But we should also consider the unique design features of each technology and the practices and policies that shape different interactions in the digital landscape. Although this talk will focus on new technologies, it is inspired by an old question: "How should we live?" This talk will present an approach to help children gain the technological literacies of the 21st century while developing a sense of identity, values and purpose. Too often youth's experiences with technology are framed in negative terms. This talk acknowledges problems and risks, and takes an interventionist perspective. Based on over a decade and a half of research, this talk provides a theoretical framework for guiding the implementation of experiences that take advantage of new technologies to support learning and personal development, as well as examples from concrete experiences. These engage children in playful learning by supporting digital content creation, creativity, choices of conduct, communication, collaboration and community building. These are the six C's proposed by the Positive Technological Development framework. They can guide the design and the evaluation of digital experiences from early childhood to adolescence, and offer a possible path to help children out of the playpens into the playgrounds of this technological era.

Marina Umaschi Bers, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote positive youth development. Dr. Bers received prestigious awards such as the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a five year National Science Foundation Young Investigator's Career Award and the American Educational Research Association's Jan Hawkins Award. Over the past decade and a half, Dr. Bers has conceived, designed and evaluated diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds in after-school programs, museums, hospitals, and schools both in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Bers has received several NSF grants and is active in publishing her research in academic journals. Her book Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom was published in 2008 by Teacher's College Press. Most recently, Dr. Bers wrote The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: Out of the playpen into the playground, to be published by Oxford University in early 2012. Dr. Bers is from Argentina. In 1994 she came to the U.S. and received a Master's degree in Educational Media from Boston University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory.

More on Dr. Bers

This session looks beyond platforms to explore the concept of media ecosystems. How do we understand, map, visualize, and ultimately shape the flow of texts across an increasingly diverse and complex media ecosystem? What are the relationships between professional and citizen, participatory and broadcast media? How do we understand what people are encountering, both in terms of supply (tools like Media Cloud that examine what's published) and demand (tracking/logging efforts that look at individual or group consumption?

Hal Roberts is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He studies various issues around the flow and control of content online, including Internet filtering and circumvention, online surveillance, distributed denial of service attacks, and new media. Hal has worked on the technical side of many Berkman projects over the years, including H2O, Weblogs at Harvard Law, and Global Voices Online.

Erhardt Graeff is a founding member of the Web Ecology Project and a research assistant on the Good Participation and GoodPlay projects at Harvard Project Zero. His research focuses on questions of internet and society with a heavy emphasis on civic engagement, digital inequality, education, journalism/media, and social capital. Additionally, Erhardt is the co-founder of BetterGrads, an online college mentoring organization, and a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation, which gives monthly grants to awesome projects. He has an M.Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformations (i.e. sociology) from the University of Cambridge and bachelor’s degrees in information technology and international studies from Rochester Institute of Technology. Erhardt’s personal website is erhardtgraeff.com. On Twitter he’s @erhardt.

Gilad Lotan is the VP of Research and Development for SocialFlow, where he utilizes data driven approaches to draw insight and understanding from social streams. Previously, Gilad served as a program manager at Microsoft's FUSE labs. Past work includes 'Retweet Revolution', visualizing the flow of information during the 2009 #IranElection riots, and a 2011 IJOC study investigating the relationship between mainstream media and social media channels during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Gilad's work has been presented at TED, IXDA, Summit Series, Berkeley BCNM, Boston Book Festival, and published at HICCS, CHI and Ubicomp.

Digital technologies have exponentially expanded the power of government and corporations to keep tabs on citizens. But citizens in turn are exploiting new technologies to expose the activities of governments, companies and even each other. How does the persistence and ubiquity of surveillance in our digitizing world affect what it means to be a citizen? Does our emerging condition of constant surveillance encourage individuals to curtail how they speak and act -- or to offer more information? In what ways are new forms of citizen surveillance and public witness instruments of democracy and transparency? In what ways are they tools of distortion and propaganda for ideologues or special interests? Our panel of three distinguished scholars will engage these and related questions on evolving notions of citizenship in the digital age.

Panelists include Sandra Braman, a professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power from The MIT Press; Susan Landau, a visiting professor at Harvard University and author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, also published by The MIT Press; and Marcos Novak, professor and artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Maps, Geographic Information Systems, and spatial analysis are powerful tools that recently have become increasingly accessible to non-specialists. Dynamic maps with user created content are becoming part of daily life in the 1/3 world (developed countries and elites in the global South). There is a long history of maps as tools for civic engagement, with public participatory GIS and community engaged mapping playing key roles in (for example) indigenous land rights struggles, mapping health disparities, and the environmental justice movement's demonstration of the unequal spatial distribution of pollution. Most recently, new tools and platforms like Open Street Maps and Grassroots Mapping are democratizing maps even further.

What challenges still constrain the effective creation and use of Civic Maps? What tools and platforms are most promising? What steps can developers, practitioners, and researchers take to help build the field of civic mapping?

In revising their own texts, or other people's texts, writers erase the past, remodel it, or reinvent it. They create versions of themselves, and those versions are recorded in the textual identities they create through revision. By studying revision, we are able to see not only how a single writer evolves but also how a culture insists upon certain evolutions, with or without the writer's consent.

Therefore, the dynamics of revision can take us to the heart of identity formation both in its expressive and repressive strains. What compels a culture to rewrite its texts? How do we track revision in order to "see" or rather "give witness to" revisionary processes? In addressing these problems, digital scholarship can offer far more access to the fluid texts that expose the dynamics of revision and help us confront the necessity of revision in our culture.

John Bryant will draw upon examples from revision studies, adaptation, and translation in order to highlight the elements of creativity, appropriation, and cultural difference that are at stake in dealing with the ethics and editing of revision. Along the way, he will demonstrate TextLab, the Melville Electronic Library's revision editing tool, and discuss the ethical as well as editorial dimensions of other imagined tools, such as Melville Remix and How Billy [Budd] Grew.

Bryant is Professor of English at Hofstra University and received his BA. MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago. He has written on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, and textual scholarship. He is also editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. His recent book, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008), is based on his online fluid-text edition Herman Melville's Typee. He is currently working on a critical biography, Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online critical archive and "We the People" project.

By providing a critical description of existing technologies and projects related to the use of information and communication technologies to enhance social connectivity, this talk will illustrate innovative ways to design creative new media and digital interactions to foster connections between people, information, and places.

Federico Casalegno, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2008, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. He is adjunct full professor at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy.

A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Casalegno both teaches and leads advanced research at MIT, and design interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.

Digital technology is increasingly utilized in film production to achieve the technical and imaginative compositing of live-action and computer-generated imagery. Hye Jean Chung’s talk will explore how digital effects are not only used to mediate the real but to replace or enhance human capabilities via cyborgian hybrids. When bodies become digitized into pixelated formats, does this effectively incarnate physicality in ways unforeseen? How do nationalist desires and transnational aspirations intersect in computer-generated bodies of imaginary entities? What is lost when a digital aesthetics that accentuates seamlessness, transcendence and transmutation translates into a naïve political rhetoric that elides the material practices of labor in film production pipelines? Even though computer-generated characters are often described as de-materialized because they are simulated images of digital bodies and virtual camera movements, they can also be regarded as material incarnations of visual and sonic traces that link them to corporeal bodies and territorial concerns. This talk will examine how layered traces of national bodies become re-animated and re-corporealized along the film production pipeline through the multiple bodies of actors, voice actors, stunt actors, movement coordinators, body doubles, and animators.

Hye Jean Chung is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is working on a book project that analyzes the globally dispersed and digitally networked workforce of film production pipelines, and its relation to the fictional spaces, computer-generated imagery and digital aesthetics of contemporary cinema. She received her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary research interests include transnational cinema, cross-border mobility, production studies, digital visual effects and animation, and East Asian cinema. Her work has been published in journals such as Spectator and Contemporaneity, and in the anthology Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. Other essays will soon appear in forthcoming issues of Cinema Journal and The Velvet Light Trap. She has recently co-edited and contributed to a themed issue of Media Fields Journal on the intersection of media, labor, and mobility. In addition to her scholarly endeavors, Chung has worked as a journalist, and published translations of literary works from Korean into English and vice versa.

Is local news a casualty of the digital age? A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission suggests that although the broad media landscape is more vibrant than ever, many state and local communities face a shortage of professional reporting, undermining journalism's watchdog role at the local level. This Forum will assess the state of local journalism, paying special attention to the changing environment for news in New England.

Our speakers, drawn from traditional as well as online media, include Callie Crossley, host of her own talk show on WGBH; David Dahl, who oversees local news initiatives for the Boston Globe; and Adam Gaffin of the online news site Universal Hub. Dan Kennedy, a media analyst who teaches at Northeastern University, will moderate the discussion.

Jason Pramas and Steve Meacham

Social movements have always been productive spaces for the creation and circulation of media texts, tools, and frames for understanding the world. In the past, movement narratives were often told by specialists: filmmakers, writers, radio producers.

These roles still exist, but more recently, the rapid spread of digital literacies allows increased participation in movement media making by everyday participants.

This session brings together social movement media makers and scholars in a conversation about what the transformation of the media ecology means for movements. Under what conditions does media making by a movement's base help strengthen the movement and advance its goals, and when does it produce confusion and a lack of narrative power? How can filmmakers rooted in movements open up their processes to increased participation? What movements today are engaged in innovative cross platform practices?

Jason Pramas is editor/publisher of Open Media Boston - an online metro news weekly with a progressive editorial stance covering the labor and community beats since 2008. A photojournalist by trade, he has been active in movements for democracy and social justice for over a quarter century. He is working on an MFA in Visual Arts at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, and teaches social media in various academic and professional settings.

Steve Meacham is organizing coordinator of City Life/Vida Urbana and has been an organizer for almost forty years, working in areas of housing, labor, community democracy, peace work, and economic conversion. He emphasizes a radical approach that links day-to-day issues to systemic change, that generates new leaders, and that can rapidly expand. His current position at City Life/Vida Urbana has allowed for the full development of this organizing model. It has combined an aggressive day-to-day response to housing displacement with a series of conferences and institutes called the Radical Organizing process.

Media dialogues in America have often centered on the role of Islam in US and global society. The representation of Islam in debates over the Park 51 Mosque in lower Manhattan, for example, offers the voices of many non-Muslims offering their interpretations of Islam, not all of which are well-informed. The panelists we've invited have taken on the challenge of representing Islam to American and global audiences, in different contexts - they offer scholarly research on what Islamic scholars believe and argue, to challenge discourse about "Sharia law"; they feature a multiplicity of voices offering different visions of what it is to be Muslim.

What does it mean to represent roughly one-fifth of humankind? How does participatory media change the dynamics of representing Islam...or representing any other faith, belief or conviction?

Intisar A. Rabb is an assistant professor of law at Boston College Law School, a faculty research affiliate at Harvard Law School in the Islamic Legal Studies Program, and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (for the project islawmix.org – an online resource for issues related to Islamic law). She is also a 2010 Carnegie Scholars for research on contemporary Islam. Her research centers on comparative Islamic law and legal history, advanced constitutional law, and criminal law. Rabb received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, an MA and a PhD from Princeton University, where her thesis on Islamic law won a prize for best PhD dissertation. She has traveled for research to Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.

Amir Ahmad Nasr is a digital media and marketing consultant and leading Sudanese blogger. He's been featured on USA Today, BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera’s English TV channel, German magazines and many more media outlets. He is the host and curator of The Future of Islam In the Age of New Media, an audio seminar that convened 60 speakers in 60 seconds each for a total of 60 insightful minutes. He is also the author of the upcoming book, Islam: A Love Story – How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind, Broke My Heart, and Blogging Freed My Mystic Soul.

A native of Mauritania, Nasser Weddady is the civil rights outreach director of the American Islamic Congress. He grew up in Libya and Syria, traveling extensively through the Middle East, before coming to the US seeking asylum in 2000. A few days after the September 11 attacks, Nasser was falsely detained by the FBI because of his ethnic appearance. A long-time activist in the struggle to end slavery in his homeland, Nasser has organized conferences for young activists across the Middle East; published in the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and Baltimore Sun; appeared on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes, BBC World Service, Al Jazeera, and Radio Liberty; and testified to Congress’ Human Rights Caucus. Fluent in five languages, Nasser has lectured at the US Institute of Peace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and diverse interfaith settings.

Over the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed the ocean from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1990's and kicked off this new era in board gaming. These modern board games, or Eurogames, are more engaging experiences and based less on luck than the typical roll-and-move board game design prevalent in the 20th century.

Attendees will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games, so attendees will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work.

Dr. Scott Nicholson is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade. He is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where he has focused on games in libraries and game design as a pedagogical tool. He was the host of Board Games with Scott from 2005-2010 and is the designer of Tulipmania 1637, a board game published in 2009. In addition, he is the author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages, published in 2010 by Information Today.

Drawing on recent U.S. television series "The Unit" and "Sleeper Cells," Cynthia Young examines recent shifts in media representations of African American men, arguing that in the context of the "war on terror," the image of the criminal and anti-social young black male has mutated into the image of the black patriot, at war against a new enemy of the nation, the Muslim terrorist. Exploring the figure of the black soldier, her work asks the questions: What kind of popular culture is made in the context of war? How do notions of civil rights shift in a post-Civil Rights era? And when and how are such notions mobilized in service to violent and racist conceptions of Iraqis, Arabs, and other Muslims? In his commentary, Visiting Scholar Anamik Saha will draw upon his research on popular cultural representations of South Asians and Muslims in Britain during the same period.

Cynthia Young is an Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches courses on literature and popular culture. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her book on U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. She is currently working on a project that considers race, specifically blackness, after the September 11 attacks. Interrogating popular culture and political organizing sites, this project considers how the Civil Rights legacy has been hijacked by Conservatives supporting an anti-immigrant, pro-war and often white supremacist agenda.

2011 has seen a wave of popular protests threaten authoritarian regimes around the world. Protests in Tunisia removed a much-loathed dictatorship, and the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo promises to reshape the government of Egypt. Even in countries where protests are unlikely to unseat entrenched leaders, the prospect of unrest has led leaders to make major political concessions.

Is this wave of civic disobedience best explained as a reaction to economic and political conditions in each country? The viral spread of Tunisian unrest infecting other vulnerable nations? Or are changes in the media and communications environment — near-universal mobile phone use, social media, the internet, satellite television — enabling popular protest in a way we've not seen before? Is civic disobedience easier, or perhaps more effective, in a connected age?

To explore this question, we've invited a team of experts to closely examine the public protests we've witnessed this year and consider questions about media and civic disobedience. Our discussion includes:

Ethan Zuckerman (Moderator) Co-founder of Global Voices Online; Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Visiting Scientist at the Center for Future Civic Media

Clay Shirky Writer, consultant, and Associate Professor at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program

Zeynep Tufekci Writer, journalist, and Assistant Professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County exploring how technology and society co-evolve

Sami ben Gharbia Tunisian human rights activist and director of Global Voices Advocacy

There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are "born" in the new medium, as opposed to those that have "migrated" to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with "virtual methods" that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-á-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, he will propose propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. Rogers will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, he proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term "online groundedness." The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods.

Prof. Dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair and is full University Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His forthcoming book, Digital Methods, is also with MIT Press.

In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discussed phenomenon mark the Death of Shame, perhaps even a return to pre-modern notions of public and private? What does it mean to live in a historical moment when the faces in our high-school yearbooks materialize, without warning, in our Facebook lives, Walking Dead eager to rekindle friendships we thought we'd buried long ago? In his illustrated lecture, "(Face)Book of the Dead," cultural critic and media theorist Mark Dery, author of seminal essays on online subcultures, culture jamming, and Afrofuturism, will address these and other questions, from the posthuman psychology of disembodied friendship to our growing unwillingness to untether ourselves from our social networks or the media drip, even for an instant. What does it say about us, as a society, if we're unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is this, at root, a fear of the emptiness in our heads? Should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude -- a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?

Mark Dery (www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Wired; on websites such as True/Slant and Thought Catalog; and in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery's latest book is an anthology of his recent writings, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and Lady Gaga's Lesbian Phallus, published in Brazil by Editora Sulina. Dery is widely associated with "culture jamming," the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs," and "Afrofuturism," a term he coined in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future" (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.

Designers often want to help people that they perceive as being in need -- whether those affected by natural or human-caused disasters, the economically or physically disadvantaged, or those who are on the losing end of a cultural power dynamic. However, naive attempts to "help" through simplistic techno-centric design can be at best ineffective, and at worst counter-productive.

What can designers do to better connect with the communities and individuals they wish to serve? How can design projects avoid patronizing attitudes and economic colonialization? How can a designer be effective in promoting social change while following their conscience?

This panel brings together designers who have worked in the mental health industry, international development, the prison system, and community environmental action to discuss what has worked and what hasn't, and what approaches designers can take to increase their chances of success.

• Charlie DeTar (Moderator)
  Co-founder of Between the Bars, a blogging platform for prisoners. Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media, and PhD student at the MIT Media Lab.
• Patricia Deegan
  Creator of the CommonGround web application which supports shared decision making in psychopharmacology consultation. Adjunct Professor at the Dartmouth College School of Medicine and at Boston University, Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.
• Liz Barry
  Director of Urban Environment at Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a collaborative developing inexpensive and community-led means to explore environmental and social issues; Co-founder of TreeKIT, an initiative to collaboratively measure, map, and manage urban forests.
• Nathan Cooke
  Born and raised in California, USA, Cooke works at MIT’s D-Lab documenting technologies and working with students on design projects. He has previous experience working for Frog Design in San Francisco and at Autodesk as part of their Sustainability division.

The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

David Thorburn is Professor of Literature at MIT and director of the Communications Forum.

Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT.

Speaker: Steve Kurtz, Critical Art Ensemble

A talk about models and techniques for public interventions and soft subversions aimed at undermining authoritarian tendencies in a time of neo-liberal domination.

Known for his work in Electronic Civil Disobedience and BioArt, Steve Kurtz is a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.

Formed in 1987, Critical Art Ensemble’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism.

Amaranth Borsuk discusses her poetic practice as a multi-media writer and artist, reading selections from recent work and showing images and performance footage from current projects. What is a poetics of materiality and how does it play out across print and digital media? What does a focus on the material of language do to our constructions of authorship? Borsuk will read from Between Page and Screen, a digital pop-up book of poems, Tonal Saw, a chapbook constructed from a religious tract, and Excess Exhibit, a flip-book of conjoined poems that mutate from constraint into rapturous abundance. She will also show digital work in progress and read selections from her recently completed manuscript Handiwork, whose poems explore the relationship between torture and writing, trauma and creativity through a combination of Oulipo constraint and surreal lyricism.

A poet and scholar, Amaranth Borsuk's work focuses on textual materiality--from the surface of the page to the surface of language. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she works on and teaches digital poetry. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she co-founded The Loudest Voice cross-genre reading series and the Gold Line Press chapbook series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in print and online. Poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, FIELD, Eleven Eleven, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She is the author of a chapbook-length poem, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and Excess Exhibit (ZG Press, forthcoming), a book of conjoined poems written collaboratively with poet and performance artist Kate Durbin, which includes drawings by Zach Kleyn. She has also collaboratively translated and transverted the work of Oulipo poet Paul Braffort together with Gabriela Jauregui and crafted an augmented-reality chapbook, Between Page and Screen, together with Brad Bouse. Recent collaborative work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Caketrain, New American Writing, and Action, Yes!. In addition to writing and studying poetry, Amaranth is also a letterpress printer and book artist whose fascination with printed matter informs her work on digital media.

Location-sharing services have a long history in research, but are only now gaining mass usage. Most popular commercial location-sharing services such as Foursquare and Gowalla differ from previous research efforts in important ways: they use manual check-ins to pair user location with semantically named venues; locations are shared in mixed private-public settings with a potentially very large audience and they employ (game-based) incentives.

This talk will present a selection of findings from research at the Mobile Life Centre on current location-sharing practices, including new emerging appropriations, conflicting norms (not) to check-in and clashes between more playful and coordination-oriented usage motivations. In addition, it will discuss experiences in launching two foursquare-based applications: Spotisquare and ϕ2 (Phisquare), both part of 'Research in the Large', the wide distribution of apps for research purposes. Spotisquare adds music to places by allowing users to connect foursquare venues with Spotify playlists, while the ϕ2-project explores 'physical check-ins' and ways to bridge the gap between the physical world and 'invisible' services.

You're invited to join the discussion in how we as a research community can further leverage existing location-based services and the ever-growing stream of data generated by their users to both enhance, and gain insight in, a wide variety of aspects of urban life."

Henriette Cramer is a researcher at SICS and the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research focuses on mobile services, location-sharing practices and locative media, wide distribution of research apps, mash-ups, interaction with autonomous 'things' and human-robot interaction. She is co-organizer of a workshop at this year's CHI on ethics in large scale trials, previously co-organized a 'Research in the Large' workshop on issues surrounding large-scale deployments of apps for research purposes at UbiComp 2010, and is currently guest editor of an associated special issue of the Int. J. of Mobile Human-Computer Studies. She is also involved in the organization of this year's HRI, UbiComp and MobileHCI. Her previous PhD-work at the University of Amsterdam focused on people's responses to adaptive and autonomous systems ranging from spam filters and recommenders to social robots.

Digital filming has transformed documentary, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers have been able to work more informally with their subjects, giving rise to the fusion format of reality TV as well as changing the nature of documentaries themselves. From the audience perspective, affordable digital platforms mean that almost everyone knows what it is like to film and be filmed. The result is a transformation of the documentary genre, where films are now seen as documents of interactions rather than expositions of fact. Ellis explores this new phase in documentary, using methods derived from Goffman as well as an intimate understanding of the technologies of filming.

John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, and this semester's visiting scholar at the Annenberg Institute, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000) and TV FAQ (2007) and the co-author of Language and Materialism (1977). His Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation will appear in 2012, and is based in part on his 19 years as an independent producer for British TV, making documentaries about cinema and the arts, the politics of media, and the food industry. He served on the editorial board of Screen magazine (1975-1985), was the vice-chair of the film producers' association PACT (1988-1994), and now chairs the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).

In this annual tradition, see open-to-the-public demos of the latest, greatest civic media tools from researchers at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, the leader in cutting-edge community-based technology.

You'll see ways to hack live bus data, how to make your own high-res map imagery on the cheap, brand new techniques for scraping state environmental reports, and lots more.

The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as news and information are available from a seeming infinity of websites, what do we actually know about the dynamics of news-consumption online? What does the public do with online news? How influential are traditional news outlets in framing the news we get online?

Pablo Boczkowski is a Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern Univeresity where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004) and News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (2010).

Joshua Benton is the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University -- an effort to help the news business make the radical changes required by the Internet age. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent and rock critic for two newspapers, The Dallas Morning News and The Toledo Blade.

Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff, a 2010-11 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world "Second Life," premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on Oprah Winfrey's documentary film club in 2011. He served as producer of NOVA's The Great Robot Race, and the development producer for PBS's Emmy-winning Rx for Survival, as well as documentaries for Frontline and Time magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

What do Shakespeare and videogames have in common? Clara Fernández-Vara, a Comparative Media Studies alumna, explains her journey from researching Shakespeare in performance to studying and developing videogames. Applying concepts from theatre in performance illuminates the relationship between the player and the game, as well as between game and narrative.

Videogames are not theatre, but the comparison gives way to productive questions: What is the dramatic text of the game? How does this text shape the actions of the player? Who are the performers? Who is the audience? These questions will be addressed in the context of adventure games, a story-driven genre where the player solves puzzles that are integrated in the fictional world of the game.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where she teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing, as well as develop games with teams of students. Clara is a graduate from the Comparative Media Studies program, and holds a PhD in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research concentrates on adventure games, game playing as a performance activity, and the integration of stories in simulated environments. She has released two experimental adventure games, Rosemary (2009) and Symon (2010).

Cities are vibrant, complicated organisms. A still-working 200 year old water pipe might rest underground next to a brand new fiber optic cable, and citizens blithely ignore both if they are working well. Cities are constantly rewriting themselves, redeveloping neighborhoods and replacing infrastructure, but deliberative structures like school boards and city council meetings continue to run much the way they have for generations. In what ways can information systems rewrite our understanding of civics, governance, and communication, to solve old problems and create new opportunities in our communities?

Nick Grossman is Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans. He oversees development of new products around smart transportation, open municipal IT infrastructure, participatory planning, and local civic engagement.

Nigel Jacob serves as the Co-Chair of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, a group within City Hall focused on delivering transformative services to Boston's residents. Nigel also serves as Mayor Menino's advisor on emerging technologies. In both of these roles Nigel works to develop new models of innovation for cities in the 21st century.

Max Ogden is a fellow at Code for America and develops mapping tools and social software aimed at improving civic participation and communication. This year Max is working with Nigel and the Office of New Urban Mechanics to create technologies that better enable education in Boston's Public Schools.

This lecture will examine the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009, in which a group of contemporary New York artists were invited to photograph Amsterdam to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of Manhattan.

Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the selected artists sought to produce work capable of defamiliarizing established images of Amsterdam. The claim of the exhibition was that seeing Amsterdam through the lens of New York photographers enabled new and surprising perspectives on four key aspects of the city: the street, the night, the water, and the outskirts. Interrogating this claim, the lecture will analyze individual artworks, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibition, and -- most importantly -- the role that transnational exchange can play in both resisting and reinforcing dominant, globalized images of contemporary city spaces.

Christoph Lindner is Professor of Literature and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of London Institute in Paris. His recent books include Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities (2010), Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture (2003).

Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.

However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don't cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.

With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?

Andrea Pitzer is editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that looks at how storytelling works in every medium. Storyboard's mission is to feature the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting.

An investigative reporter for ProPublica, Abrahm Lustgarten's recent work has focused on oil and gas industry practices. He is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rosalind Williams is a historian who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology. She has taught at MIT since 1982 and currently serves as the Dibner Professor for the History of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has also served as head of the STS Program and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs at the Institute, as well as president of the Society for the History of Technology. She has written three books as well as essays and articles about the emergence of a predominantly human-built world and its implications for human life. Her forthcoming book extends this theme to examine consciousness of the condition of "human empire" as expressed in the writings of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late l9th century.

Moderated by Tom Levenson, who is Head and of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies as well as Director of its graduate program. Professor Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, The Sciences, and he is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.

Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

There are a growing number of games that are location-based. They use mobile devices and locative technologies to turn physical space into a game board. Games like Foursquare get people moving from place to place, exploring the world around them and potentially meeting people nearby. But while many games use location as the context for interaction, few use location as the content for interaction. Local Engagement Games (LEGs) are location-based games designed for the specificity of a location, with the intention of integrating into local cultures and local institutions. They reinforce existing geographical communities because the rules of the game are couched within existing rules of civic participation. Whether it's a game built around a town hall meeting or a government planning process, LEGs scaffold local processes to foster community and commitment to civic life.

In this talk, Gordon will discuss two LEGs developed at the Engagement Game Lab. Participatory Chinatown is a 3-D role-playing game designed to be integrated into the master planning process of Boston's Chinatown. And CommunityPlanIt, a location-based mobile game platform (in development), is designed to engage neighborhoods in official planning processes, while forging geographically-based communities and advocacy groups around local issues.

Eric Gordon is an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College and director of the new Engagement Game Lab. He is the author of The Urban Spectator: American Concept-cities from Kodak to Google (Dartmouth, 2010) and the co-author of the forthcoming book tentatively titled, Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell, 2011).

What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.

Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight's mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.

Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In December of 2007, Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu, two of the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000, assembled many of the original members of that cult TV phenomenon to form Cinematic Titanic, a live and DVD version based on their original formula of riffing on terrible movies. The actors essentially play themselves as they participate in an experiment for some unknown, possibly shadowy corporation or military force. The story currently provided to the cast is that there is a tear in the "electron scaffolding" that threatens all digital media in the world. Their experience doing MST3K is key to the organization's plans. Two of the cast will discuss their thoughts on producing Cinematic Titanic which is coming to Boston on October 29th at the Wilbur Theater.

What is happening to the intellectual field called the humanities? Powerful political and corporate forces are encouraging, even demanding science and math-based curricula to prepare for a globalized and technological world; the astronomical rise in the cost of higher education has resulted in a drumbeat of complaints, some which question the value of the traditional liberal arts and humanities. And of course, and far more complexly, the emerging storage and communications systems of the digital age are transforming all fields of knowledge and all knowledge industries.

How has and how will the humanities cope with these challenges? How have digital tools and systems already begun to transform humanistic education? How may they do so in the future? More broadly, is there a significant role for the humanities in our digital future? Our panelists will explore these and related questions in what is expected to be the first in a continuing series on this subject.

Alison Bylerly is provost and executive vice president and professor of English at Middlebury College.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and previously taught at MIT. He is the author of many essays and books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How the Mind Works.

Professor Wang will discuss the genesis and implementation of a civic media project that she conceptualized and launched in China in May 2009. The project, titled NGO2.0, is a social experiment that introduces Web 2.0 thinking and social media tools to the grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China. How has new media complicated social action and civic engagement? What are the evolving stakes for social change proponents? How are change agents coping with governmental intervention in a country where social media is held suspect? Professor Wang will speculate on the emergence of a new field of inquiry -- social media action research -- while sharing insights and findings about her involvement in shaping an NGO 2.0 culture in China.

The fate of newspapers is an ongoing subject for the Forum. This conversation explores the migration of newspapers to the internet and what that means for traditional concepts of journalism. Amid the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, newspapers are adapting to a changing mediascape in which print readership is in steady decline. David Carr, culture reporter and media columnist for the New York Times, and Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of the Media Nation blog, explore these developments with Forum Director David Thorburn.

Among their topics: the best and the worst examples of news on the net, online-only news sites, hyperlocal news and collaborative journalism, business models for online newspapers, and the impact of social media on journalism.

One theme in the contemporary use of space involves the shift from production modeled around a physical, centralized "locus" to new virtual, extended and multi-axial modes of "projective" organization. We see this in new sculpture, new architecture, and, in electronic art, an expressive embrace of geographic dispersal. Although new materials, methods, and media have been central to modernist optimism, many of their resulting physical and actual constructions have been dismissed, discredited, misunderstood, or attacked. Using physical and virtual examples, Ricardo examines the strange tension between unanimous acceptance of new media and materials and the frequent rejection of new forms and structures they have made possible.

Francisco Ricardo is media and contemporary art theorist. A Research Associate at the University Professors Program and co-director of the Digital Video Research Archive at Boston University, he also teaches digital media theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research examines historical, conceptual, and computational intersections between contemporary art and architecture, on one hand,and new media art and literature, on the other. Recent publications include Cyberculture and New Media (Rodopi, 2009) and Literary Art in Digital Performance (Continuum, 2009).

Professor Fox Harrell's research group -- the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab -- builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts -- "phantasmal media" systems.

In particular, his research uses artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques to understanding the human imagination to invent and better understand new forms of computational narrative, identity, games, and related types of expressive digital media. In this talk, he will discuss his recent works and collaborations including the "Living Liberia Fabric," an AI-based interactive video documentary produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia to memorialize 14 years of civil war, "Generative Visual Renku," an AI-based form of generative animation, and several other projects.

Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press. Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Humanists have adopted visualization techniques with enthusiasm in recent years, borrowing display formats from quantitative approaches rooted in social and natural sciences. But are the standard metrics and conventions developed for analysis of empirical inquiries fundamentally at odds with tenets of traditional humanistic interpretation? How are complexity, contradiction, uncertainty, ambiguity, and other basic features of interpretative activity to be given graphical expression? Does the introduction of affect into visual displays simply shift all visualization towards idiosyncratic and subjective approaches that lack clear legibility? Or can we imagine conventions that might introduce some of the necessary qualifications and variables essential to creating graphical expressions of humanistic interpretation?

Featured speaker: Johanna Drucker is the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA where her research focuses in modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, and the history of visual information design. Her teaching interests include the history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation.

Moderator: Kurt Fendt is director of HyperStudio, MIT’s Center for Digital Humanities, and teaches a range of upper-level courses in the German Studies Program.

Co-sponsor: MIT HyperStudio

This forum launches the humanities + digial: Visual Interpretations conference at MIT (May 20-22).

Henry Jenkins' 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returns to talk with long-time colleagues about his pioneering scholarship on digital culture, his work as the founding director of Comparative Media Studies, and his experiences as a teacher and housemaster at MIT.

Moderated by William Uricchio.

This global call-in show, streamed live at web.mit.edu/webcastnow/1 will feature a number of journalists, advocates and programmers who utilize new technologies to gather information in contentious geographic regions:

• Cameran Ashraf, Iran
• Mehdi Yahyanejad, Iran
• Georgia Popplewell, Haiti
• Huma Yusuf, Pakistan
• Ruthie Ackerman, Liberia
• Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark, Zimbabwe
• Lova Rakotomalala, Madagascar

Moderated by Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center and fellow at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media.

Co-Sponsor: MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

This talk explores the making of Exit Zero, an in-progress documentary film about deindustrialization, community, class, and family in a former steel mill region in southeast Chicago. It examines questions of historical memory, the use of personal voice, and the long-standing relationship between anthropology and documentary filmmaking. The film utilizes material from multiple sources, including cinéma vérité footage shot over the course of a decade, interviews, and home movies made by steel mill area residents between the 1930s and 1980s. The talk raises broader questions about the shifting nature of anthropological engagement with media-making and documentary film in particular. Clips from the work-in-progress will be shown.

Chris Boebel is a documentary and narrative filmmaker. He is the writer/director of a number of award-winning short fiction films, the independent feature film Red Betsy, and is co-director of the documentary Containment: Life After Three Mile Island. He currently works as a producer of films about science and engineering at MIT with AMPS/MIT Libraries.

Christine Walley is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. In conjunction with Chris Boebel, she is making Exit Zero. The film serves as a companion to an in-progress book entitled, The Struggle for Existence from the Cradle to the Grave.

Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt, who has contributed significantly to elaborating and communicating the version of this question named in the title of today's forum.

The concept of a "Gutenberg Parenthesis" -- formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark -- offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period -- Shakespeare's -- when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.

MIT professors Peter Donaldson and James Paradis will join Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.

In December, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departments to implement "principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration," including deadlines for providing government information online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources. What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness? Our speakers Linda Fantin, director of public insight journalism at Minnesota Public Radio and Ellen Miller, executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, will explore this and related questions. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, moderates the discussion.

Co-Sponsor: MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Ian Condry, Associate Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the prevalence of giant robots in anime (Japanese animated films and TV shows). From the sixties to the present, robot or "mecha" anime has evolved in ways that reflect changing business models and maturing audiences, as can be seen in titles like Astro Boy, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion. How can we better understand the emergence of anime as a global media phenomenon through the example of robot anime? What does this suggest about our transmedia future?

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and founder/director of the Lab's Personal Robots Group, will discuss how science fiction has influenced the development of real robotic systems, both in research laboratories and corporations all over the world. She will explore of how science fiction has shaped ideas of the relationship and role of robots in human society, how the existence of such robots is feeding back into science fiction narratives, and how we might experience transmedia properties in the future using robotic technologies.

Computing plays an important role in some types of media, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature. It seems evident that an understanding of programming and computing systems may help us learn more about these productions and their role in culture. But few have focused on the levels of code and platform. Adding these neglected levels to digital media studies can help to advance the field, offering insights that would not be found by focusing on the levels of experience and interface by themselves. The recent project of Critical Code Studies and two book series just started by The MIT Press, Software Studies and Platform Studies, represent a new willingness to consider digital media at these levels. With reference to mass-market and more esoteric systems and works, ranging from Atari 2600 and arcade games to Talan Memmott's Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], this talk will describe how looking at the code and platform levels can enhance our comparative media studies of computational works.

Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT and has been part of dozens of academic, editorial, and literary collaborations.

Organized by the MIT Writers Series. Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian music in 1990's Britain and the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Through a dynamic mix of live performances, candid interviews, and rare archival footage, Mutiny presents the story of a generation that grew up defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation became some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents' cultures with electronica, hip-hop, reggae, and punk and producing unique and powerful new sounds.

Featuring: Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, Fun-Da-Mental, Anjali, DJ Ritu, Black Star Liner and many others.

Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His previous films include "Taxi-vala/Auto-biography" (1994) about the lives, experiences and activism of immigrant taxi drivers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in early 1990s New York City, as well as "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (2003). His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, "In Search of Bengali Harlem." He is Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Comparative Media Studies.

Joel Burges and Wayne Marshall, MIT's Mellon Fellows in the Humanities (2009-11), will contribute to the rethinking of media studies at MIT by taking up the shared metaphor of fashion—the fashionable, the old-fashioned, the re-fashioned. Burges will talk about the turn away from the digital in contemporary cinema, particularly the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, in an attempt to think about the uneven development of media over time. Marshall will discuss how popular but privatized platforms like Facebook and YouTube, pop culture fashion—and the negotiable refashionability of both—present crucial challenges to the study of media today.

Joel Burges works at the intersection of literary studies, critical studies, and media studies. His first book, which is in progress, is entitled The Uses of Obsolescence; it considers the fate of historical thinking in the media of late modernity, especially literature and cinema. His second book, in its very early stages, is called Fiction after TV; it considers how a major mode of imaginative processing—fiction—is altered by the introduction of TV to post-1945 mediascapes.

Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger (wayneandwax.com), and DJ, specializing in the musical and cultural production of the Caribbean and the Americas, and their circulation in the wider world. Currently a Mellon Fellow at MIT, he's writing a book on music, social media, and digital youth culture. He co-edited and contributed to Reggaeton (Duke 2009) and has published in journals such as Popular Music and Callaloo while writing for popular outlets like XLR8R, The Wire, and the Boston Phoenix.

Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever. Panelists Doug McLennan (editor of ArtsJournal.com) and Bill Marx (editor of TheArtsFuse.com) will discuss how cyberspace is transforming arts journalism, in some cases radically redefining its form and content. The forum will debate what critical values from the traditional media should survive, explore how digital media is changing the ways we articulate our responses to the arts, and point to promising contemporary business models and experiments in cultural coverage.

Many people talk about "cinematic" games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture will present film clips from a number of classic movies, analyze how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggest ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.

Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven FPS Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.

H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man reads as if it were an instruction manual for the uses and abuses of the nascent radio voice. Picker will begin to argue that, in conjunction with the racist basis of much fin-de-siecle anxiety, the acousmatic status of Wells's protagonist allows for a conspicuous if incoherent racial performance. This performance tests the limits of Wells's sympathetic imagination even as it further amplifies the voice of Griffin, the Invisible Man. Picker begins with Wells's story and goes on to show how, when one attends to questions of voice and sound technologies in several different media, the racial and ethnic dimensions that become audible forge invisible connections among modes of art that we have been taught to keep distinct. Tracing a transatlantic route from fiction to radio and sound film back to fiction, this approach offers a new way to characterize a crucial period of change from the late Victorian to the modern world.

John Picker is Visiting Associate Professor of Literature at MIT. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes and has ongoing interests in sound studies, media history, and the literature and culture of the Victorian era. His many articles and book chapters include, most recently, an essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors and out this September from Harvard University Press.

Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We?ll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix's ability to effect actual change.

Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.

The election of an African-American president in Nov. 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama's ascension transformed anything? Many people's answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media's coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?

Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News will discuss these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the MIT Communications Forum.

Ethan Gilsdorf will discuss some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds?from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such "escapist" adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?

Gilsdorf will talk about the culture's discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and will look at society's ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author's own past misgivings and final acceptance of his "geek" identity.

A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?

Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.

In humans, gender--femininity, masculinity--is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Robertson explores and interrogates the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She shows that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a "posthuman sexism," and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.

Co-Sponsored by Cool Japan and Foreign Languages and Literature.

Artificial Intelligence methods enable the creation of believable characters with rich personalities and emotions, interactive story systems that incorporate player interaction into the construction of dynamic plots, and story generation systems that capture large and well-formed collections of potential stories. The goal of these approaches is not to replace human authorship but rather to move human authorship to a meta-level, and thus to support a richness and depth of player interaction that is not otherwise possible. However, there are significant authoring challenges in creating AI-based interactive stories.

In this talk Michael Mateas will describe the authoring approaches and challenges involved in creating Façade, the first fully-produced, AI-based interactive drama and describe current research efforts to support authors in telling stories in this new medium. Mateas is a faculty member in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Cruz and has presented papers and exhibited artwork internationally including SIGGRAPH, the New York Digital Salon, AAAI, CHI, the Game Developers Conference, ISEA, AIIDE, the Carnegie Museum, and Te PaPa, the national museum of New Zealand.

The Obama campaign's extensive deployment of digital media, especially its tech-savvy outreach to the young, was widely reported before the election. Some predicted that this digital advantage would make a decisive difference. Did it? What role did the Internet play in the election? How has it changed presidential politics? What are the future implications of the impact of new media on journalism and on American society? These and other questions will be addressed by Marc Ambinder, who covers politics for The Atlantic; Cyrus Krohn, the director of the National Republican Committee's eCampaign; and Ian V. Rowe, who headed up MTV's coverage of the presidential election.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum.

Lev Manovich is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, Black Box - White Cube, and The Language of New Media, which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He has written 90+ articles which have been reprinted over 300 times in many countries.

He is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California-San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2), and a Visiting Researcher at Godsmith College (London) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having delivered 270+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years.

In this lecture, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi will talk about the various meanings of what counts as a "compelling experience" for military simulation -- and how this phrase “compelling experience” can be used as a thematic marker for differentiating the present moment from cold warera immersive simulations. Ms. Ghamari-Tabrizi is an independent scholar currently living in Altamonte Springs, Florida. She is the author of The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Harvard University Press, 2005).

Co-sponsored by the STS Colloquium.

Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.

Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.

In this Forum, Darnton discussed and took questions about the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.

This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses -- scientific, everyday, and anthropological -- of embodied sonic presence.

Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of "life" as an analytical category for contemporary biology.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson will present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (Simon & Schuster, 2008), including the complex ways in which video games may benefit or disadvantage children. They will also talk about myths and politics in media violence research, and how they influence the views of academics and mass media. Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D. are cofounders and co-directors (with Eugene Beresin, M.D.) of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. They are both on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. Kutner received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and trained at the Mayo Clinic. He’s a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He wrote the “Parent & Child” column for the New York Times as well as five books on child development. Olson was principal investigator for a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers, which formed the basis for Grand Theft Childhood. She has a Doctor of Science degree in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral certificate in pharmaceutical medicine from the University of Basel.

A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbean, and the failure of realism as a narrative strategy to describe the deep history of the New World. Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. He is the author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Longtime soap opera writer Kay Alden will talk with about her decades in the industry with CMS graduate student Sam Ford ’07 who is writing his thesis about soap operas. Alden worked for more than 30 years on The Young and the Restless, the top-rated daytime drama that she served as head writer for from 1998 to 2006. Recently, she took on a consulting position with ABC Daytime and continues working with the genre during what is seen as a period of substantial change for the daytime television industry. Ford’s thesis, “As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment,” focuses on the shifting technologies and cultural patterns that are affecting daytime television.

It is possible that live performance is not so live any more. In this talk, Sharon Mazer will look at the ways that audience “performances” may be seen to challenge the live-ness of the onstage action in the Road to Wrestlemania 23, which the WWE takes to New Zealand in early 2007, and in Te Matatini, the National Kapa Haka Festival, a biennial Maori cultural performance competition happening that same weekend. Mazer is head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand). Her book Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle was published by the University Press of Mississippi, and her current research is focused on Maori performance.

Recent trends in music composition push bounds by creating pieces which are either more complex or simpler than works of the past. And yet, our ability to understand and be interested in the compositions at these extremes has kept pace. In this talk, Michael Cuthbert will show how simple minimalist processes give rise to highly ambiguous structures, while many of the most complex moments are reducible to easier to comprehend processes. The effect of potentially endless works—including sections of Beethoven symphonies--will generalize the talk to other musical styles and other media. Cuthbert, visiting assistant professor of music at MIT, has worked extensively on fourteenth-century music and on music of the past 40 years. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy, Cuthbert earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.

Mick Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, will talk about his experiences as an entertainer and bestselling author who has written three memoirs (including Foley Is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling) two novels, and a variety of children’s books. Foley has been a professional wrestler since the mid-1980s and was a headlining star for World Wrestling Entertainment (www.wwe.com) under the personas of Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love. Foley will discuss telling stories in a variety of written and performative genres and how he has managed to bridge the gap across multiple genres and entertainment forms.

American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. In this Forum, our speakers discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement’s use of media technologies. Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to James Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family (www.family.org). Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. The Forum will be moderated by the Rev. Amy McCreath, MIT’s Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT (web.mit.edu/tac).

Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling world. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.

NOTE: This is the first of two colloquia about American professional wrestling being organized this term by Sam Ford ’07. Ford is teaching a spring class on the pro wrestling industry and is a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He is a weekly columnist for the Ohio County Times-News in Hartford, Ky., and performs in pro wrestling events on occasion. A third colloquium on April 26 with Sharon Mazer will also examine aspects of wrestling.

Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing.

While visualization is traditionally viewed as an efficient way of transferring a large amount of information from a database into an individual’s head, we believe that visualizations become far more powerful when multiple people access them for collaborative sense-making. To test this hypothesis, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab recently launched Many Eyes, a website devoted to a new social style of data analysis and visualization. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg will discuss the design goals behind the site and provide a preliminary report on the usage patterns we have seen. Viegas is a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab where her work focuses on social and collaborative aspects of data visualization. Previous projects explored e-mail archives, newsgroup conversations, chat-room interactions, and the editing history of wiki pages. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Wattenberg, also a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab, focuses on information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, and art. Wattenberg’s visualization artwork has been exhibited in venues ranging from Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A conversation between Frank Moss, new director of the Media Lab, and CMS Director Henry Jenkins about ongoing projects and inventive digital applications at MIT's legendary laboratory.

What do Yahoo!, Shakespeare, GPS, Bullet time, Spacewar and MIT have in common?

CMS!

Yahoo! ... along with MTV, GSDM, Turner Broadcasting and Fidelity with the Convergence Culture Consortium respond to the demands of a new media landscape and an empowered client base;

Shakespeare ... early comics, modern dance and the citizens of Berlin are among the many topics explored in the rich multi-media data bases of MetaMedia and Repertory

GPS ... is one of many technologies that we us in handheld gaming applications, all part of our exploration of computer games for education in the Education Arcade

Bullet time... and other special film effects, comic book production, dj-ing, graffiti, and other media expressions come into focus in Project New Media Literacies.

Spacewar ... is where computer gaming all began at MIT, and now it moves into a new generation with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

Join us to explore the many facets of research on cutting-edge digital games, media literacy, innovative humanities databases, and redefined corporate/consumer relations now underway in MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Faculty, staff and students will be on hand to showcase their work and answer questions about their latest findings. Refreshments will be served.

New technologies are enabling forms of borrowing, appropriation and "remixing" of media materials in exciting, provocative ways. In this Forum, two MIT scholars who have studied and written about the remixing of Shakespeare will describe their research, show some salient audio-visual examples and discuss the implications of their work for contemporary culture. Literature Professor Peter Donaldson is director of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive which since 1992 has used computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production. Literature Professor Diana Henderson is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. She is an active participant in MIT's partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The forum will be moderated by Mary Fuller of the Literature Faculty.

Men Imagining a Girl Revolution with Sharon Kinsella. At various points in the twentieth century, male novelists, journalists, intellectuals, artists, editors and cultured men have become fascinated by the lives and characters of single women and their potential for prostitution and revolution. In this presentation, Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.

MIT Communications Forum

The Craft of Science Fiction, readings and conversation with Joe Haldeman, four-time Nebula winner, author of The Forever War and many other books.

Mimesis, Sacrifice, and Victimhood with Rey Chow. Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University where she teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. Chow's talk will be based on her latest book, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (2006, Duke UP). Co-sponsor: History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art.

This round table is made up of leading figures in the field of media art curators, authors, network directors, and innovative developers who will address the current issues on art in the age of digital reproduction. Speakers: Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; Jon Ippolito, media artist, curator, author; and Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome and professor of media arts at Brown University.

The Art of the Improbable with Scott Foe. Foe was a member of the Dreamcast Network product development team at Sega. He joined Nokia in 2003 and currently serves as a producer for Nokia Games, where he is responsible for pushing the limits of connected mobile gaming.

Lost Control: Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment with Scott Donaton. Digital technologies have empowered end users, and that transfer of control -- from content creators and distributors to consumers -- impacts all forms of communications, including marketing. Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine will talk about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

why newspapers matter Thursday, October 5 5-7 pm Bartos Theater Abstract Working journalists, media critics and digital visionaries discuss the ongoing transformation and apparent decline of American newspapers. Topics to be addressed: the aging of the newspaper reader, the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, the fate of local news and the local newspaper, news and information in the networked future.

Chris Boebel and David Tamés will discuss the production of ZigZag, MIT’s video podcast and reflect on the evolution of broadcast media and the rise of video on the web. Chris Boebel is manager of multimedia development at MIT’s Academic Media Production Services (AMPS). His films include Red Betsy (2003) and Containment (2004). David Tamés is a producer and editor for AMPS. His work includes The East Village, a web-based soap opera.

MIT Communications Forum.

News, Information and the Wealth of Networks, featuring speakers Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins , William Uricchio.

This is part of a series of forums that ask the question, Will Newspapers Survive? Also in the series: The Emergence of Citizens' Media, andWhy Newspapers Matter.

Working journalists, media critics and digital visionaries discuss the ongoing transformation and apparent decline of American newspapers. Topics to be addressed: the aging of the newspaper reader, the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, the fate of local news and the local newspaper, news and information in the networked future.

This is part of a series of forums that ask the question, Will Newspapers Survive? Also in the series: News, Information and the Wealth of Networks (Sept. 21), Why Newspapers Matter (Oct. 5).

David Milch has been called television's first artistic genius, its great writer. His powerful dramas have troubled the censors in the networks and in Congress and have explored human weakness and violence in disturbing and artful ways. One of television's most honored writers, his credits include Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue (co-created with Steven Bochco) and the pioneering HBO series Deadwood. In this Forum, Milch will discuss his career as a writer and creator with Forum Director David Thorburn, a historian of television who knew Milch as a Yale student. The session will include clips distilled from Milch's best work.

Tonight's CMS Colloquium tackles the topic of Consuming/ Producing/ Inhabiting South Asian Digital Diasporas with Radhika Gajjala, associate professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University and author of Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Co-sponsored with the Center for Bilingual/ Bicultural Studies.

No aspect of television has changed more decisively in recent years than its news programming. The proliferation of news channels, the passing of the last generation of news anchors bred in the era of the broadcast networks, the appearance of partisan outlets such as Fox News, the fragmentation of the audience, the relative indifference of the digital generation to television news programming of any sort - these powerful and perhaps disturbing changes will be among the topics discussed at this Forum. Our speakers have extensive first-hand experience of the recent history of television journalism.

More information is available on the Communications Forum website.

Colloquium goes on the road! For the last colloquium before spring break, join CMS for a road trip to 5W!TS with Matt DuPlessie, founder of 5W!TS, a provider of immersive, interactive experiences.

Though younger technologies such as Ipods and cell phones signify the emerging digital era in the popular imagination, the transformation of television from a broadcast medium offering limited channels to a digitally enhanced environment of (apparently) infinite choice may be far more significant in social and historical terms. Today’s Forum will examine the changing economic base of American television, the role of audiences and audience-measurement, the broader role of consumption and advertising in the evolution of American television. Our speakers are renowned for their mastery of this complex economic and demographic history.

In this wide-ranging conversation, the former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will discuss his collaboration on an opera with Tod Machover of the Media Lab, his ongoing Favorite Poem Project, his ideas about poetry and democratic culture, and his recent prose book, The Life of David, an account of the biblical poet-king. Forum Director David Thorburn will moderate the forum.

Machover will join the forum at the beginning of the conversation to discuss the opera-in-progress Death and the Powers.

Sex in Games with Brenda Brathwaite, Professor of Game Design, Savannah College of Art & Design, whose book Sex in Video Games will be published in the fall.