MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Studying Media and Making Media

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A Digital Assemblage: Diagramming the Social Realities of the Stikine River Watershed

Candis Callison photo

Candis Callison
Candis Callison
This study examines the landscape of the Stikine River Watershed through varied perspectives and heterogeneous data sets following a mode of inquiry that uses landscape as a condition for relating factors of knowledge, discourse, and power. Working with the premise that each piece of data represents a fragment of information, the digital assemblage was conceived, built, and examined as a possible solution for reflecting the underlying rhizomatic structure of social realities. At the heart of this study and experimentation is a question of how to represent the complexity of social realities through the limitations and capacities of various forms of media and digital space.

This thesis is comprised of two parts: a written analysis, and a built prototype of the digital assemblage on CD ROM. The written analysis provides a kind of designer’s manual for understanding the ways in which theory, history, and practice interact to create a conceptual foundation for the built digital assemblage. The built assemblage experiments with diagramming and representing geographic topography, social and capital institutions governing land use, aspects of cultural history, economic and community land and resource developments, areas of conflict therein, and the resulting social conceptions about the geographic space of the Stikine Watershed.

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About Candis Callison

Candis Callison is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She is the author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) and the co-author of Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford University Press, 2020). Candis is a citizen of the Tahltan Nation (an Indigenous people located in what is now known as Northern British Columbia), an award-winning former journalist, a Trudeau Foundation Fellow, a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a regular contributor to the podcast, Media Indigena. She holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. In 2018, Candis gave the keynote address for MIT's Investiture of Doctoral Hoods. You can find her on Twitter @candiscallison.

Thesis: A Digital Assemblage: Diagramming the Social Realities of the Stikine River Watershed