CMS News Archives

The Education Arcade Project Manager Scot Osterweil's "The Road From Zoombiniville" was the top rated presentation at this year's Serious Games Summit. The Summit was part of the Game Developers Conference held March 5-9 in San Francisco.

Continue reading "Scot Osterweil Gives Highest Rated Presentation at Serious Games Summit" »

Posted by Brad Seawell at 11:22 AM in Accomplishments | Permalink

Inside WWE, the official news site for World Wrestling Entertainment, reports that Jim Ross, announcer for WWE's Monday Night Raw, is "excited" about his chance to guest lecture at MIT for our students.

“I’m really interested and excited to see what questions these very bright men and women are going to have after having studied sports-entertainment all semester,” said JR. “You’re looking at some of the most elite college students in America and the world going to MIT.”

Read the full article.

"Good Ol' JR" Jim Ross is visiting MIT for two days and will give a public lecture as part of the CMS Colloquia Series, entitled: "This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker". This is also part of a series of wrestling events brought to us by CMS graduate student and lecturer Sam Ford as part of his Topics in CMS course, American Pro Wrestling.

Other public events in this series include the colloquium, The Real World’s Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley to take place April 12th and What's Live Got To Do With It? with Sharon Mazer (author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle) on April 26th.

As always, audio recordings of these colloquia will be distributed as part of the CMS Podcast.

Posted by Rik Eberhardt at 2:59 PM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

CMS Director Henry Jenkins was interviewed recently for PBS' website companion to their 4-part Frontline series, News War, touching on topics covered by the New Media Literacies and Convergence Culture Consortium research initiatives.

We are living through a shift in the communications environment on a scale that has only occurred a few times in human history, comparable to the shift from [an oral tradition] to literacy, the emergence of print and the rise of modern mass media. Each of these moments fundamentally altered pretty much everything in the culture, touching every major institution, impacting all aspects of everyday life, and fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it meant to be human.

Read the full article.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 10:59 AM in Media Appearances | Permalink

BBC News online recently posted a summary of CMS Director Henry Jenkins' keynote speech at this year's Beyond Broadcast conference held last week at MIT and co-hosted by Comparative Media Studies (along with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society).

In his keynote, Jenkins utilzed examples of participatory democracy online (a key theme of the event), such as the popular Ask a Ninja series of online videos. The article summarizes Jenkins' speech:

Even in a US primary election season, where would-be presidential contenders raced to announce their candidacy in online videos, Mr Jenkins' keynote speech was an eye-opener.

The point, set out more fully in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, is essentially this - that politicians should not ignore the fun, frivolous side of the net because the web enthusiasms of the young: games, online video, machinima and mash-ups are the new online-tools that sooner or later will be used for political purposes.

Read the full article at BBC News.

Posted by Rik Eberhardt at 5:41 PM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

The Feb. 15 "Remixing Shakespeare" forum looked at how interpretations of Shakespeare reflect and are reflected by contemporary culture. The "home team" panel, as host Henry Jenkins described them, consisted entirely of MIT Literature faculty: Diana Henderson and Peter Donaldson presented while Mary Fuller moderated.

Henderson's talk focused on different versions of Shakespeare throughout time, spanning from The Restoration version of Nauhm Tate's King Lear and its happy ending to Campbell Scott's horror-film influenced retelling of Hamlet. Henderson explained "how the remix shows you a reflection of the culture at large" and emphasized that this urge is not new to digital culture. Reinterpretation and remixing is what keeps Shakespeare's works relevant and alive over time.

Donaldson brought the discussion online with his presentation of Michael Almereyda's 2000 film version of Hamlet. In this film, Donaldson finds a predecessor of collaborative culture with "characters now contributing to the remixing" within the movie. A pastiche of video diary, multi-layered meanings communicated through audio, visual, and referential metaphor, the film uses media to evoke new meanings unavailable to the text or performance versions.

Donaldson showed some Shakespeare-influenced YouTube videos and touched on some upcoming research ideas regarding collaborative authorship, sampling, and of course, remix.

This forum is available for download as part of the CMS Podcast or as streaming Real Audio.

Posted by Rik Eberhardt at 1:19 PM in | Permalink

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.

The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event.

Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "Remixing Shakespeare"" »

Posted by Rik Eberhardt at 12:15 PM in , Podcast | Permalink

Our Research Fair this past February 22nd was a great success! Thanks to all that came and all that participated!

Our hard work was noticed by the MIT News Office, which wrote:

CMS fetes digital games, cultural research

The students, staff and faculty of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program showed they could walk the walk and talk the talk of transformative media technology when they turned the Stata Center lobby into an attention-grabbing interior landscape on Feb. 22.
...
[O]n hand to chat and answer questions were representatives of the Convergence Culture Consortium, New Media Literacies, the Educational Arcade, Hyper Studio and other programs within CMS, itself part of MIT's literature section.

Read the full article (and view their photos). Or download the February 28, 2007 edition of MIT Tech Talk.
Our own photos of the event, plus an online version of our presentation will be featured on this site shortly.

Posted by Rik Eberhardt at 10:51 AM in CMS In The Press | Permalink