|
|
CMS News Archives
 Our thanks to Anne Khaminwa for conducting this great interview with Fox Harrell for the International Review of African American Art:
He occupies a charmed space in the academy, holding a joint appointment in the Comparative Media Studies Program, the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
One question underlies and unifies these pursuits. "How," Harrell wonders, "can I take advantage of what computers do well -- such as representing and transforming information -- to help us to better understand, and improve, the human condition?"
[...]
Harrell is interested in how computation can create powerful new forms of phantasmal media -- interactive narratives, computer games, social media, AI-based art, and "new forms unanticipated by any of those." He believes that digital media can transform users' ideas, improvise new aesthetic meanings, and critique society and culture.
Read more:
"How An Artist-Scientist Conjurer Thinks, Works and Lives" (PDF) -- Article from the Spring 2011 issue of the IRAAA, posted with permission
New technologies and media systems have been deployed for new distributions of power, knowledge and social organization. What do you see as the most compelling shifts in these sectors? What are the greatest dangers and opportunities, and with what implications?
Factors such as influence over regulatory process, ever-expanding proprietary claims to technology and code, and the control of information including personal data all constitute zones of contention in this time of transition. What techniques and strategies might we use to enhance public literacy and efficacy in these matters?
What role might best be taken up by educators and media specialists when the old certainties slip away? Developing new tools and methodologies to make sense of emerging behaviors? Recuperating lost literacy and cognitive skills? Deconstructing legal and regulatory structures, and pressing for new safeguards? Encouraging the production of new forms of content?
As new generations enter a digital culture that seems ever more taken for granted as a condition -- and ever more unfathomable as a technological practice -- how can we cultivate and empower a critical citizenry?
Networked digital technologies have been used to construct new collectivities and social formations. What are the most promising of these from your perspective, and what lessons can we take from them as we seek to enable individuals to engage with one another to form active and effective publics?
Transitional moments bring with them inadvertent opportunities, whether new forms of data (hyperlinks, tags, recommendation systems), new standardization paradigms, or new affordances for representation. Although these opportunities can be put to many ends, how might they serve the interests of illuminating shifts in power, improving social equity and enhancing civic engagement?
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: "Media in Transition 7: Power and Empowerment"" »
"Web 2.0" has been shaped by startup corporations and systems (such as Wikipedia) that employ large-scale collaboration and crowdsourcing. How do these two forces relate to the project of preserving our cultural memory?
A genuine anxiety of many computer users is that our collective memory will be too good: Old offhand blog comments, drunken photos on Facebook, and other communications may persist when we would rather they'd not. This concern does not contradict our need to preserve culturally important materials, but it suggests a related question: Do we need to consider how to be better as a culture at forgetting?
In the digital realm, does it still make sense to distinguish the roles of museums, galleries, and spaces for exhibition from those of archives and repositories?
Computers have proven to be a valuable tool for investigating our cultural heritage. From YouTube to the digital life of newspapers to video games, computers are also deeply connected to our culture and, in the past several decades, have been an important part of our culture heritage. Are there chances for a fruitful convergence between the project of computing on our past ("the digital humanities") and the project of understanding the culture relevance of computing ("digital media")?
A tremendous amount of important information is now being generated in digital form -- but this is not all of the material we want to preserve. How will the abundance of important digital material affect the preservation of traditional archival materials?
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: "Media in Transition 7: Archives and Cultural Memory"" »
The fate of narrative. What is happening to our culture's stories and story-tellers? What has been the impact, what is the future import of the proliferation of audiences, creators and of ways to communicate on unstable platforms?
Public spheres. How are new technologies transforming our public discourse? Are newspapers dead or merely reinventing themselves digitally? What skills will be essential for journalists of the digital age? Who will be the journalists of the digital age? What hybrid forms are already emerging?
Visions, Nightmares. What concrete emerging practices or developments inspire optimism in you, what tendencies most trouble you?
Panelists
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: "Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms"" »
The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) at MIT is looking to hire a part-time Web Developer/Manager. The ICE Lab is situated jointly in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Programs and Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL).
Interested candidates should submit their applications online via MIT HR staffing site - http://sh.webhire.com/servlet/av/jd?ai=631&ji=2533792&sn=I.
Position Description - mit-00007633
Project Developer:
The ICE Lab develops new forms of gaming, interactive narrative/poetry, and social media.
We seek a part-time Web Developer/Manager. Will design, implement, and manage a website for ICE (Imagination, Computation, and Expression) Lab for public and internal group use. Will prepare existing and developing projects for public dissemination on the web and perform system/server administration and management. Will work closely with ICE director and graduate research assistants, developers and consultants. Directly report to the CMS/WHS/CSAIL Faculty member in charge of ICE Lab.
Requirements:
- A bachelor's degree and/or a minimum of 3 years' experience as project developer and web programmer.
- Experience with web programming languages/platforms including LISP, Flash, Python, Java/Processing, and/or iOS (Cocoa/Objective C), and/or ability to find developers to serve this role.
- 3+ years' experience building web sites and demonstrated experience in web programming and applications development; familiarity with university and research environments, knowledge of information technology and computing applications as implemented in scholarly research services, and knowledge of trends in the development of state-of-the art web-based technology.
- Seek an HR generalist with experience in employee relations, recruitment and performance management.
- Excellent interpersonal, written/verbal and communication skills.
- Professional game development and/or AI development experience desirable.
- Potential future duties include assisting with grant-writing and application (interactive narrative, gaming, and social networking) development.
This is a renewable one-year position, May 2011 to April 2012, with the possibility of extension.
Download!
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.
Continue reading "Podcast: Race and Representation after 9/11" »
 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.
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: Richard Rogers, "The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods"" »
|
Our thanks to Anne Khaminwa for conducting this great interview with Fox Harrell for the International Review of African American Art: