Henry Jenkins' 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returned 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.
Congratulations to this year's Media Spectacle winners!
The 12th annual CMS Media Spectacle was on Monday and featured a ton of short films from members of the MIT community. Thank you to all who attended and to all you ambitious souls who submitted pieces.
Winners this year included:
Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry
"Mario vs Wario"
Garrett Hemann, Joshua Kastorf, Ashley Nash, Nick Ristuccia
Best Non-undergraduate Entry
"How to Win Friends and Influence People"
Jess Wheelock
Best Narrative
"Moment"
Marleigh Norton
Best Nonfiction:
"Living Room Monologues"
Audubon Dougherty and David DiMaria
Best Animation
"Modern Escher"
Otto Ng and Mavis Yip
Best Experimental
"Study Break"
Claxton Everett
Audience Favorite
"How to Win Friends and Influence People"
Jess Wheelock
Interested in learning more about the CMS graduate program? An on-campus information session is this Monday, May 3
With the CMS graduate program application process re-opening this fall, we're holding an on-campus information session this Monday, May 3, from 9:30am to 4:00pm.
Thank you to all who have already RSVP'd. If you'd like to add yourself to the list, please write us at cms-admissions@mit.edu.
Podcast: CMS 10th Anniversary: "International Media Flows: Global Media and Culture"
Panelists: Aswin Punathambekar, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb, Orit Kuritsky, and Jing Wang
Aswin Punathambekar is an Assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He teaches and writes about media globalization, with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.
Xiaochang Li lives in New York, where she consults as something of a media and branding mercenary, specializing in the intersection of globalization, digital media, and rampant delight.
Ana Domb recently graduated from CMS and is currently working on user experience research at The Meme, a design consultancy firm based out of Cambridge.
Orit Kuritsky--a scriptwriter, content editor, and creative director--is also a graduate of the CMS master's program.
Jing Wang is a professor in Chinese Cultural Studies and the Director of New Media Action Lab. She is a CMS-affiliated faculty currently working on a project (NGO2.0) that brings together social media and nonprofit organizations in China.
Erin Reilly is Research Director for Project New Media Literacies, a past CMS project now housed at the University of Southern California.
Karen Schrier, a CMS grad, is the Director of Interactive Media and Technology at ESI Design and a part-time doctoral student at Columbia University in games and learning.
Sangita Shresthova is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer, who currently manages Henry Jenkins new project on participatory culture and civic engagement at USC.
Pilar Lacasa is a researcher at Alcalá University in Spain. She also works on a project for Electronic Arts in Spain about how to use commercial games in education.
Mitch Resnick is Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory. He develops new technologies that engage children in creative learning experiences and is a principal investigator with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a CMS-partnered project.
Podcast: CMS 10th Anniversary: "Creativity and Collaboration in the Digital Age"
Panelists: Beth Coleman, Philip Tan, Ivan Askwith, Clara Fernandez-Vara
Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. Her fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory.
Philip Tan is a CMS grad who now directs the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a partnership between MIT/CMS and the government of Singapore to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium.
Ivan Askwith is a CMS grad working in New York City as Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, a digital creative agency.
Clara Fernandez-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a graduate of the CMS master's program.
Panelists: Pete Donaldson, Kurt Fendt, Scot Osterweil, Rekha Murthy, Matthew Weise
Pete Donaldson is a Professor in the MIT Literature section, which he headed from 1990 until 2005.
Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program and directs the HyperStudio, a CMS research project.
Scot Osterweil leads several Education Arcade projects promoting learning in math, literacy, history, science and foreign language.
Rekha Murthy, CMS '05, works at the intersection of public radio and digital media, currently overseeing distribution and content strategy initiatives for PRX, an online distributor of audio programs to public radio networks, stations, and audio platforms including mobile, internet, and satellite radio.
Matthew Weise, CMS '04, is Lead Game Designer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.
CMS director William Uricchio discusses the history of the program, some of the challenges it has faced, as well as the unique role it has assumed at MIT and within higher education when it comes to a new vision of the humanities.
Deborah Fitzgerald, Dean of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, opens the CMS 10th Anniversary symposium with her remarks on the role of CMS at MIT and the essence of applied humanities education within the MIT mission.
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.
Chris Csikszentmihalyi at Cambridge Public TV on "Using the Web to Connect Your Community and Encourage Civic Engagement"
Recorded by Cambridge Community Television...
NeighborMedia Presents: From the Net to Your Neighborhood Panel Discussion
Whether you want to raise awareness about an important local issue or gather people for a community event, you can make use of web tools that are inexpensive and often easy to use, to organize those in your community. We'll cover strategic uses of blogging, web video, social networking, web sites, and more. Come learn how six Cambridge individuals have used these tools for positive change in their communities and organizations, and how you can too!
Panelists Include:
Moderator: Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media
Garrett Anderson, Cambridge Energy Alliance, Director of Efficiency Projects & Energy Advisor, on CEA's use of Twitter and other social networking tools
Toni Bee, Area 4 correspondent for NeighborMedia, presents "Digital without a Dime," discussing options for inexpensive web tools
D.C. Denison, Boston Globe technology writer and Porter Square Neighborhood Association webmaster, on creating an effective community/neighborhood website
Anita Harris, Author of the New Cambridge Observer blog, President of the Harris Communications Group, and former PBS journalist on how to write a successful blog and encourage people to engage with it
Mark Jaquith, East Cambridge correspondent for NeighborMedia, on how NeighborMedia has helped him further the mission of Cambridge causes, organizations, and projects
Karin Koch, NeighborMedia correspondent and host of Vida Latina, on her integration of blogging, video, and social networking for the Latino community in Cambridge
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April 16, 2010
Podcast: Communications Forum: "Civics in Difficult Places"
This global call-in show, hosted by MIT Center for Future Civic Media fellow Ethan Zuckerman, featured a number of journalists, advocates and programmers who utilize new technologies to gather information in contentious geographic regions:
Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies"
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 join Thomas Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.
CMS and MIT commemorate program's 10th anniversary with publication and symposium on April 23
In just over a week, on Friday, April 23rd, Comparative Media Studies will officially celebrate its 10th anniversary with a day-long symposium on the history and future of the program and field.
To commemorate the anniversary, CMS has produced a beautiful 60-page booklet on Comparative Media Studies at MIT, featuring pieces by Dean Deborah Fitzgerald of the MIT School for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; by CMS Director William Uricchio; and by research directors, alumni, and staff.
Print copies will be available at the anniversary celebration, and a PDF is now posted here at cms.mit.edu and on Scribd.com...
MIT is famous for its "hacks"--its harmless pranks. And today the latest was set up right outside the CMS offices, a full living room--curled up cat 'n all--suspended upsidedown from a bit of art/architecture adjacent to the Media Lab.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:45 AM in |Permalink
April 7, 2010
"Towards an Aesthetic of Presence in 3D Avatar-driven Computer Games": The latest GAMBIT video podcast
Via GAMBIT outreach coordinator Generoso Fierro:
Just produced the new episode of the GAMBIT video podcast series featuring Teun Dubbelman from Utrecht University, who visited our GAMBIT Game Lab back in February. The topic "Towards an Aesthetic of Presence in 3D Avatar-driven
Computer Games". Thanks to Garrett Beazley for the editing and to Abe Stein for
the original music!
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is one of CMS's research groups. You can see all of GAMBIT's video podcasts at MIT TechTV.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:07 AM in |Permalink
Video: Thesis Presentations 2010. Sheila Seles: "Audience Research for Fun and Profit: Rediscovering the value of television audiences"
Sheila Seles' work for CMS and the Convergence Culture Consortium examines the television industry with a special focus on the changing business of television research.
Many thanks to Philip Tan for recording this presentation. You can see all of the CMS 2010 graduate student thesis presentations on Ustream.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:07 AM in |Permalink
Video: Thesis Presentations 2010. Florence Gallez: "Open Park Online News Production: A Proposal for a Code of Ethics for Collaborative Journalism in the Digital Age"
Florence Gallez develops a secure online space for media professionals and their audience to collaborate on news stories' reporting and writing, which could be replicated in a variety of offline spaces in order to optimize flexibility and interference-free access.
Many thanks to Philip Tan for recording this presentation. You can see all of the CMS 2010 graduate student thesis presentations on Ustream.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:07 AM in |Permalink
Video: Thesis Presentations 2010. Audubon Dougherty: "New Medium, New Practice: Civic production in live-streaming mobile video"
Audubon Dougherty explores the ways grassroots organizations can use accessible media tools to expand their online outreach, harness advocacy capabilities and communicate more effectively with their constituencies. Her website is at tapioca.tv.
Many thanks to Philip Tan for recording this presentation. You can see all of the CMS 2010 graduate student thesis presentations on Ustream.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:06 AM in |Permalink
Video: Thesis Presentations 2010. Nick Seaver: "A Brief History of Re-performance"
Nick Seaver studies the history of automatic musical instruments, as well as indeterminacy and control in sound transmission and the role of "skill" in aesthetic judgments.
Many thanks to Philip Tan for recording this presentation. You can see all of the CMS 2010 graduate student thesis presentations on Ustream.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:06 AM in |Permalink
Video: Thesis Presentations 2010. Madeleine Elish: "The Evolution of the Companion Species: Creating Realms of Possibility for the Personal Computer"
Madeleine Elish looks at the marketing of objects such as computers from something meant strictly for business into something accessible to the average consumer.
Many thanks to Philip Tan for recording this presentation. You can see all of the CMS 2010 graduate student thesis presentations on Ustream.
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.
This global call-in show, hosted by MIT Center for Future Civic Media fellow Ethan Zuckerman, featured a number of journalists, advocates and programmers who utilize new technologies to gather information in contentious geographic regions:
In just over a week, on Friday, April 23rd, Comparative Media Studies will officially celebrate its 10th anniversary with