Video, "News or Entertainment? The Press in Modern Political Campaigns"
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon
In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future?
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson.
MOOCs and other forms of online learning have the potential to disrupt traditional classroom education -- or to help us better understand how to exploit the many learning spaces students now inhabit. This forum examines the ongoing migration of our analog practices into digital forms, looking at the ways in which digital technologies are transforming teaching and learning both on and off campus. What gaps in our curricula, or in our students' experience, can be filled through technology? What elements of teaching practice can be effectively translated into new media, and what aspects of "teaching" must be redefined?
Anant Agarwal the president of edX, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University, and a professor in MIT's electrical engineering and computer science department.
Alison Byerly holds an interdisciplinary appointment as College Professor at Middlebury College and, during 2012-2013, she is a visiting scholar in the Literature Section at MIT.
Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the computer science department at Stanford University. Koller will join the conversation live from the west coast.
The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver discusses his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps the most influential political blog in the world -- and the ways in which statistics are changing the face of journalism in a conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Video, Francis Steen: "The News as a Social Process for Improving Society"
Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)
Television news provides a window into the cognitive processes commonly deployed to frame, explain, and reason about events. What Hart & Honore (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.
Video, Communications Forum: "Convergence Journalism? Emerging Documentary and Multimedia Forms of News"
Co-sponsored by the MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Hybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are a notable feature of today's on-line journalism. How is this access to the power of the visual changing our journalism? What current projects are particularly significant? What will this convergence mean in the future?
Jason Spingarn-Koff is the series producer and curator of Op-Docs, a new initiative at the New York Times for short opinionated documentaries by independent filmmakers and artists. He directed the feature documentary "Life 2.0", which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network's Documentary Club, and his work has appeared on PBS, BBC, MSNBC, Time.com and Wired News. In 2010-2011, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.
Alexandra Garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education. Awarded an Edward R. Murrow award, eight regional Emmy awards and named 2011 Video Editor of the Year by the White House News Photographers Association, Garcia is currently a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Moderator: Sarah Wolozin, director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, has produced documentaries and educational media for a variety of media outlets including PBS, History Channel, Learning Channel and NPR.
The life and work of Junot Díaz contains many worlds -- and that makes him all the more worth listening to. His books, including National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her and Pulitzer Prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, journey between the old and the new, and between the America that was and the America we're becoming. Born in the Dominican Republic, but raised in New Jersey and American to the core, Junot Díaz is a spotter of the future, a curator of the past, a man of the here-and-now.
Díaz joins Bill to discuss the evolution of the great American story. Along the way he offers funny and perceptive insights into his own work, as well as Star Wars, Moby Dick, and America's inevitable shift to a majority minority country.
"There is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself, and the reality of this country," Díaz tells Bill. "Whether we're talking about the Latino community in North Carolina, a whole new progressive generation of Cuban Americans in Florida, a very out queer community across the United States, or an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or pandered to, I think we're having a new country emerging that's been in the making for a long time, and that I think for the first time is revealing itself more fully to the entire country."
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December 17, 2012
Video, Andrew Silver: "New Forms, New Markets for Independent Film"
Independent film-maker Andrew Silver will discuss emerging forms of hybrid media, some promising new pathways for distributing films and his career as a director and producer in this colloquium, which will include clips from his most recent film, Second Wind. Debra Wise of MIT's Central Square Theater will join the discussion. Andrew and Debra played husband and wife in Radio Cape Cod, a Silver production shot in Woods Hole. Andrew Silver is a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School, co-author of a chapter in the HBS anthology Breakthrough Thinking, and a long-time member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. His films are distributed by Tesco, the second largest global retail chain.
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?
Derrick N. Ashong leads the band Soulfège, a group that produces an eclectic blend of hip-hop, reggae, funk, world beat and West African highlife music and has been featured in such major media as MTV Africa and NPR. Also known as DNA, which is the name of his blog, Ashong hosted Oprah Radio's The Derrick Ashong Experience and Al-Jazeera English's social media TV show The Stream.
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.
Fadzi Makanda is a business development manager in the New York office of 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.
Moderator:
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.
Video, Robert Darnton and Susan Flannery: "Digitizing the Culture of Print: The Digital Public Library of America and Other Urgent Projects"
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.
Video, William Uricchio: "We've Digitized The Archive...Now What?"
CMS Professor William Uricchio: "Things are changing radically in the university...it's a moment of great terror." But fear not, as you learn more from him in his keynote address at Kennisland's event on Sustainable Futures for Digital Archives...
Linda Gregerson discusses 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.
DDOS as a tool cannot be wholly condemn or lauded without its surrounding context.
In this talk, I'll be examining those previous characterizations, and at different DDOS campaigns that do and do not fit those models. Next I'll be outlining the current state of play of activist DDOS. Finally I'll be presenting a new analytical model for looking at activist DDOS campaigns, and presenting an analysis of the December 2010 Operation PayBack DDOS campaign against PayPal.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:54 AM in , |Permalink
March 27, 2012
Video: Communications Forum, "Documentary Film and New Technologies"
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 are central to this discussion. Panelists 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.
This talk explores 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.
Thanks to Generoso Fierro for producing the videos and James Barrille for editing.
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.
We're so proud to share the news that Education Arcade research director Scot Osterweil was recently presented with an MIT Excellence Award.
Scot received an award in the "Bringing Out the Best" category. His CMS colleagues were there to cheer him on (see the video below):
Bringing Out the Best
Scot Osterweil
Research Director
Department of Urban Studies, School of Architecture & Planning
"Well-known in his field for helping to create the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, our next awardee is an inspiration to game developers everywhere. But for those who work in MIT's Education Arcade, he is also a selfless mentor--the go-to guy for assistance of all kinds. He remains close enough to projects to provide influence, while giving others space to grow. As one nominator said, 'His faith in my abilities as a manager... have enabled me to tackle tasks and produce results I wouldn't have dreamed of under other leadership.'
"While exceptionally busy, he always makes time to help others--even assisting one staffer with design work to ensure her project met deadline. He has a wealth of experience, a brilliant mind, and a generous character.
"This award for Bringing out the Best goes to Scot Osterweil."
Video: Communications Forum: "Online News: Public Sphere or Echo Chamber?"
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.
Video: From Cities, Code, and Civics, "Customizing tools from city to city?"
Nick Grossman of OpenPlans, Nigel Jacob of the City of Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, and Max Ogden of Code for America respond to questions about how civic tools do (or need to) vary from city to city.
Video: Civic Media Session, "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics"
Nick Grossman, Nigel Jacob, and Max Ogden
Moderator: Center director Chris Csikszentmihályi
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.
Civic Media Sessions
Hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, these open sessions highlight cutting-edge media research and tools for community and political engagement.
Download!
GAMBIT Game of the Week teaser...Phil Collins edition
If you haven't already experienced the thousand reasons why it's great to be a part of Comparative Media Studies, here's the latest, courtesy of Abe Stein:
Video: Rosalind Williams: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"
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 19th century.
About this Communications Forum
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?
Video: Abrahm Lustgarten: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"
Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter for ProPublica -- his 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.
About this Communications Forum
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?
Video: "Communications Forum: Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises"
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.
Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter for ProPublica -- his 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 19th 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.
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, Trace Beaulieu and Mary Jo Pehl, discussed their thoughts on producing Cinematic Titanic which came to Boston on October 29th at the Wilbur Theater.
They spoke with Generoso Fierro and Jason Begy, both of CMS's GAMBIT Game Lab.
Video: "Communications Forum: Civic Media and the Law"
David Ardia, Daniel Schuman, and Micah Sifry
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.
Center for Future Civic Media hosts announcement of 2010 Knight News Challenge winners
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation--sponsor of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media--in June 2010 announced their 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. Together, these winners form another ground-breaking, visionary class of civic media developers, inventors, and entrepreneurs.
This is video of the announcement by Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen, as introduced by the Center's director Chris Csikszentmihalyi.
Please join us in congratulating the winners:
CityTracking, by Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen Design $400,000
To make municipal data easy to understand, CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos.
The Cartoonist, by Ian Bogost and Michael Mateas, Georgia Tech $378,000
To engage readers in the news, this project will create a free tool that produces cartoon-like current event games -- the game equivalent of editorial cartoons.
Local Wiki, by Philip Newstrom and Mike Ivanov $350,000
Based on the successful DavisWiki.org in Davis, Calif., this project will create enhanced tools for local wikis, a new form of media that makes it easy for people to learn and share their own unique community knowledge.
WindyCitizen's Real Time Ads, by Brad Flora, WindyCitizen.com $250,000
As a way to help online startups become sustainable, this project will develop an improved software interface to help sites create and sell what are known as real-time ads.
GoMap Riga, by Marcis Rubenis and Kristofs Blaus, GoMap
Riga $250,000
To inspire people to get involved in their community, this project will create a live, online map with local news and activities.
Order in the Court 2.0, by John Davidow, WBUR $250,000
To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage
that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation.
Front Porch Forum, by Michael Wood-Lewis, Front Porch Forum $220,000
To help residents connect with others and their community, this grant will help rebuild and enhance a successful community news site, expand it to more towns and release the software so other organizations, anywhere can use it.
One-Eight, by Teru Kuwayama $202,000
Broadening the perspectives that surround U.S . military operations in Afghanistan,
this project will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines themselves.
Stroome, by Nonny de la Peña and Tom Grasty, Stroome $200,000
To simplify the production of news video, Stroome will create a virtual video-editing
studio.
CitySeed, by Retha Hill and Cody Shotwell, Arizona State University $90,000
To inform and engage communities, CitySeed will be a mobile application that allows users to plant the "seed" of an idea and share it with others.
PRX StoryMarket, by Jake Shapiro, PRX $75,000
Building on the software created by 2008 challenge winner Spot.us, this project will allow anyone to pitch and help pay to produce a story for a local public radio station.
Tilemapping, by Eric Gundersen, Development Seed $74,000
To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs.
Video: Participatory Culture: International Media Flows: Global Media and Culture, moderated by Ian Condry
The fourth panel from the Comparative Media Studies 10th anniversary symposium.
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.
Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:47 AM in |Permalink
May 26, 2010
Video: Participatory Culture: The Culture of Democracy and Education in a Hypermediated Society, moderated by Henry Jenkins
The third panel from the Comparative Media Studies 10th anniversary symposium.
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.
Video: Creativity and Collaboration in the Digital Age, moderated by Jim Paradis
The second panel from the Comparative Media Studies 10th anniversary symposium.
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.
Brett Camper is a 2005 graduate of the CMS master's program, where he conducted research in part with The Education Arcade. He now works at Kickstarter, a website for social fundraising of creative ideas.
Ivan Askwith is a CMS grad working in New York City as Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, a digital creative agency.
Clara Fernández-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a graduate of the CMS master's program.
Video: Applied Humanities: Transforming Humanities Education, moderated by William Uricchio
The first panel from the Comparative Media Studies 10th anniversary symposium.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Video: Gambit Game Lab infects thousands with the dreaded PAX POX
This report just in from attendees of the Penny Arcade Expo:
From March 26th to 28th, the PAX POX virus infects over 1,000 people at the 2010 PAX EAST Conference. The virus started at the GAMBIT Island # 1119 is spreading fast but will be cured soon! Today's video is from the first day of the epidemic!!! Video produced by Generoso Fierro
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March 12, 2010
GAMBIT staff video podcasts from GDC
The GAMBIT Game Lab is closed this week as the staff attends the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--but they haven't been out of touch with MIT, as events coordinator Generoso Fierro keeps uploading great conversations by Gambit staff about the topics coming up at GDC.
GAMBIT launches new completely awesome video podcast
From GAMBIT Outreach Coordinator Generoso Fierro and Audio Director Abe Stein:
These video podcasts serve to showcase our unique mission to the games industry and to those who still remain unclear as to the nature of video game studies. Our unique methodology is centered around creating video games in a lab setting, to demonstrate our research as a complement to traditional academic publishing. Our hope is for these video podcasts to provide a rarely seen transparency of the research process here at GAMBIT.
This is a monthly series with each episode divided into four parts and released on the last week of every month.
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December 17, 2009
Video: Comparative Media Insights: "Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures"
From Nintendo's first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnation fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogames players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.
Mia Consalvo is a visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.
"What Is Transmedia?" A great vid from Futures of Entertainment volunteer
Many thanks to FOE4 volunteer Kevin Lim, a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Buffalo, for these video interviews with CMS's Xiaochang Li, Sheila Seles, and William Uricchio--asking the question, "What is transmedia?"
Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization - The Making of Purefold
Session 3: Transmedia for Social Change
Session 4: The ROI of ROFL: Why Understanding Popular Culture Should Matter to the C-Suite
Session 5: Producing Transmedia Experiences: Participation & Play
Session 6: Unboxing the Medium
Session 7: Free? Contemporary Media Business Models
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April 24, 2009
Video: Media in Transition 6: "Archives and History"
Scholars of "dead tree technologies" feel increasingly uneasy in a culture overwhelmingly consumed with innovation. Although we may "live in a condition of perpetual flux," David Thorburn hopes that "we won't allow utopians and futurists to intimidate us." Moderator Peter Walsh poses a series of questions to the archivists and historians on this panel, who reflect the anxiety and exhilaration of a digital age that is constantly transforming their disciplines.
After a thousand years and the extinction of many written literatures, John Miles Foley views the oral tradition (OT) as "alive and well in highly literate societies, even in the wired West, and multifunctional: it does many more things for societies than literature is able to do." It has survived through its "ability to morph in support of morphing societies," such as in South Africa as it dissolved apartheid. And OT and IT (Internet technology) are quite alike: both performer driven, involved in emergent activities, partaking in distributed authorship. Indeed, OT may find robust expression on the Internet, with new journals and multimedia e-companions encouraging wider audiences and interactive users for performances and events.
A switch from physical to digital archives "will change historical knowledge," Lisa Gitelman says, because it means a change in the systems governing those archives. Whenever you open a Gmail account, says Gitelman, you're urged not to delete: "new media have always prompted new archival sensibilities." But, she warns, the emerging archive system "depends almost wholly on the alphanumeric character of objects and the metadata that describe them." A historian searching through archives is like a miner whose helmet light can only illuminate narrowly defined areas.
Rick Prelinger views archives as "culturally emergent. ...They're going retail." Once used mainly by specialists to produce books, TV shows, and exhibits, archives now attract ordinary users with home-based projects. YouTube -- which only resembles an archive -- has created unrealistic expectations of 24/7 archival access. But if archives rebuff users, "the social-cultural consensus that supports us and keeps archives open may fail." Prelinger sees possibilities for changing the perception of archives "as the place where documents go to molder and die." Archives could be "a point of departure ... for historical intervention," generating "opportunities for mainstreaming history and re-anchoring in the public sphere."
"Stewardship responsibility in a digital environment is essential," says Ann Wolpert, who believes "the odds that bits will survive in a shoebox in the attic are pretty small." She also points to a "yawning gap emerging between institutional archives and records ... and those archives (that are) a byproduct of normal human activities." She shows an MIT photo of a 1935 drama club performance, where the "winsome damsel" would one day become the president's wife. It's the "incidental archives that create the flavor, richness and texture of life at a point in time." What scrapbook items will people hold onto for future generations, as we record more and more "in media so ephemeral that we run the serious risk of losing ...these experiences"?
This panel explored theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding the study of media circulation in an age of increasing global connectivity. "Global media" often serves as a placeholder for media outside Anglo-American academic settings, with "global" gesturing towards "Other" media ecologies. This panel brought together scholars and practitioners who wrestle with the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of Anglo-American paradigms - both for media practitioners and scholars - in Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. In what ways can we move away from the "national" as the pre-eminent analytic frame? How do media producers in the global south grapple with the challenges and opportunities of globalization? What role are audiences playing in shaping media circuits? In tackling these and other questions, panelists Jonathan Gray, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako; and CMS alum Aswin Punathambekar SM '03, Communication Studies, University of Michigan explored ways in which recent developments in diverse settings worldwide might inform and revitalize our understanding of how media circulates. Henry Jenkins moderated this forum which kicked off the sixth Media in Transition conference at MIT.
We're so proud to share the news that Education Arcade research director 