Ellen Hume on the Future of Journalism
From the Christian Science Monitor's Centennial Conversation. The full playlist, including more clips of Ellen Hume, Mark Jurkowitz, Doug Smith, and Sree Sreenivasan is available here.
CMS News Archives
December 28, 2008
December 27, 2008
Matthew Weise: "Press the 'Action' Button, Snake! The Art of Self-Reference in Video Games"
It is useful to think about the boundary between player and fiction as an elastic membrane -- a threshold -- rather than a wall, like Adams does. Drawing attention to how this threshold functions through self-reference can actually enhance fiction rather than destroy it. It can draw the player and game fiction together rather than driving them apart.
Read the article at Game Career Guide, and follow a discussion about the article at Slashdot.
December 22, 2008
Help for landowners who could be victimized by natural gas drilling
From ABC7 (Los Angeles):
Drill, baby, drill may be what's on the minds of gas companies, but if you're a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.
Thanks to a new software application that's being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies' proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who've been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.
The term "land man" refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who've been targeted as having prospective drill sites.
"People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door," says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. "There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don't know they can."
December 17, 2008
Production makes Gertrude Stein sing
From Minnesota Public Radio, featuring director and MIT faculty member Jay Schieb:
Stein's novel [The Making of Americans] had a much larger subject."(It's) a telling of everyone, at every time, at every place," says director Jay Scheib.
Scheib says the novel is an extended portrait of multiple generations of a single family.
And from the Minnesota Post:
Surely, the most tantalizing thing about the show is its impressive cast of artists and co-creators: Boston-based experimental director and MIT professor Jay Scheib concocts a media-rich environment in which Stein's renderings of past, present and future can simultaneously unfold.
December 12, 2008
Neil Gaiman DVD available Dec. 17
A DVD of last spring's inaugural Julius Schwartz lecture featuring comics writer and New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman is now for sale exclusively at New England Comics.
Pick up copies at New England Comics' eight stores or online, including pre-order.
Watch a clip:
December 9, 2008
Sam Ford: "Centenarian Newspaper Columnist Leaves Us Many Storytelling Lessons"
Sam Ford--CMS alum, research affiliate with the Convergence Culture Consortium, and Director of Customer Insights for Peppercom, a PR agency--writes in the Huffington Post about the late Rev. John C. Morris, storyteller extraordinaire:
John didn't look like most neophyte columnists, though, mostly because of his life experience. He was 101 years old. And, throughout the past few years, this man -- who never used a computer a day in his life, as far as I can tell -- taught me some valuable lessons about media and about storytelling. When he died a few weeks ago, Morris closed the final chapter on the unlikely story of a man who was surely the world's oldest newspaper columnist.
Read Sam's full piece at the Huffington Post . . .
December 8, 2008
Podcast: "Transnational, U.S.-Asian Cinema: The Case of Tekkon Kinkreet (2006)" with Christina Klein
Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become ever more common, distinct national cinemas are being replaced by a variety of transnational cinemas. Anime, often considered a uniquely Japanese cinematic form, is no exception. This talk will explore one recent example of transnational anime: Tekkon Kinkreet, the first Japanese anime to be written and directed by Americans. Christina Klein is associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 and is currently writing a book about the globalization of U.S. and Asian film industries.
Wyn Kelley on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
From Project New Media Literacies, Wyn Kelly discussion how her thoughts on Melville's Moby-Dick changed after she worked with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley on the play, Moby-Dick: Then and Now. View the video at MIT Tech TV.
Landman Report Card highlighted in Good Clean Tech, PC Magazine
Fortunately, MIT is working on a suite of software applications that helps aggregate all the necessary information about land deals, along with input from citizens in the affected areas, in a clear, user-friendly format. The so-called Landman Report Card (LRC) will be the first program to be tested with landowners in Colorado and Ohio. MIT then hopes to extend the tests to New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia -- states where the all-familiar "Drill, Baby, Drill" is drawing too close for comfort.
Read more at Good Clean Tech and PC Magazine . . .
December 5, 2008
Landman Report Card, helping landowners negotiate with oil and gas representatives
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, of the MIT Media Lab and CMS' sister group the Center for Future Civic Media, has announced the launch of the Landman Report Card.
From the MIT News Office:
When representatives from natural gas companies knock on doors in rural areas to try to lock up deals for drilling rights, they typically hold most of the cards. They have the knowledge and experience about the process, while the landowner often has little or no information about what kinds of deals other residents in the area have agreed to -- or about such issues as toxic chemicals that have been used in other drilling sites and the health effects residents say they have experienced. Currently, there is no easy way to find such information.A team of MIT researchers hopes to remedy that. They are developing a suite of software applications to extract information from government and corporate databases, along with input from citizens in the affected areas, and make it all available in a clear, easy-to-navigate form. "This is an experiment to see if we can develop new tools to help communities self-organize," says Chris Csikszentmihalyi, head of the Media Lab's Computing Culture group and co-director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media.
Within the next few days, the MIT team will begin tests of one of their new software tools, Landman Report Card (LRC), with small groups of landowners in Colorado and Ohio, and eventually extend the tests to New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, all of which are experiencing new booms in natural gas exploration.
Read more: "Bringing the power of information to the people"
December 1, 2008
Podcast: "The Authoring Challenge for Interactive Storytelling"
Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment. As head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at Santa Cruz, he is involved in such projects as automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Mateas is a collaborator on the interactive drama Facade (see interactivestory.net).
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