Film Preservation in the Age of Digitality
2013-04-25 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Chris Horak
We now live in a digital age, seemingly guaranteeing instant accessibility. Much of the general public in fact believes that every film and television program ever made has already been digitized and is now available in Netflix’s catalog. That is hardly the case, because digitization is still massively expensive, there is no such thing as a digital preservation medium, and even the migration of digital films is fraught with technical difficulties.
Chris Horak is Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
2013-05-09 17:00 - 18:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The MIT Press book we affectionately call 10 PRINT — actually 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 — was an unusual project in several respects. The book focuses on a single line of now-unfamiliar code, code of the sort that millions typed in and modified in the 1970s and 1980s. The book contributes to several threads of contemporary digital media scholarship, including critical code studies, software studies, and platform studies. Also somewhat oddly, the book was written in a single voice by ten people: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.
At this CMS colloquium, co-authors will discuss the nature of their collaboration, which was organized by Montfort, designed as a book by Reas, and facilitated by structured conversations and writing done online (using a mailing list and a wiki) as well as (in a few cases) in person. The writing of 10 PRINT is offered as a new mode of scholarship, very suitable in digital media but capable of being applied throughout the humanities. It brings some of the benefits of laboratory work and collaborative design practice to the traditionally individual mode of scholarly research and argument.

Hong Qu: "Keepr: Algorithm for Extracting Entities, Eyewitnesses and Amplifiers"
2013-09-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hong Qu
When a big news story breaks, Twitter goes crazy. Keepr tries to make sense of these periodic bursts by implementing natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms to surface topics, eyewitnesses, and amplifiers. A live demo will be followed by a discussion of the capabilities and limitations of computational newsgathering, along with reports of how it is being used in newsrooms.
Hong Qu is a digital toolmaker. He has led teams at YouTube and Upworthy. He enjoys building social media tools that help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

Ethan Zuckerman: "Digital Cosmopolitanism and Cognitive Diversity"
2013-09-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
New media technologies have sharply increased the number of people who are able to create and disseminate content. But they may not be leading to a more diverse media environment, as tools that allow us to tailor what content we see and what we ignore are becoming more powerful and more personal. The framework of cosmopolitanism suggests a way through this challenge – by examining perspectives we are exposed to and insulated from, we may be able to design tools and approaches that help readers increase their cognitive diversity and prepare themselves to tackle transnational challenges.
Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.
Moderated by Associate Professor Ian Condry.

Zeynep Tufekci: "The Boom-Bust Cycle of Social Media-Fueled Protests"
2013-10-17 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Zeynep Tufekci
Social media-fueled protests in many countries have surprised observers with their seemingly spontaneous, combustible power. Yet, many have fizzled out without having a strong impact on policy at the electoral and legislative levels. In this talk, Tufekci will discuss some features of such protests that may be leading to this boom and bust cycle drawing upon primary research in Gezi protests in Turkey as well as “Arab Spring”, Occupy and M15 movements.
Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Moderated by Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Head of MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Ian Condry and Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

Coco Fusco: "A Performance Approach to Primate Politics"
2013-10-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Coco Fusco
New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco will consider the critical responses to the original Planet of the Apes films, focusing in particular on the interpretation of the films as critiques of American race relations during the 1960’s and ’70’s.
She will also discuss her interest in exploring the strategies used in early sci-fi cinema, the ways that films such as Planet of the Apes employed speculative fiction to generate social critique.
Moderated by Professor of Writing Junot Díaz and Associate Professor Ian Condry.

Todd Harper: "Fight Like Gentlemen: The Culture of Fighting Games"
2013-10-31 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Todd Harper, Postdoctoral Associate with the MIT Game Lab
The culture of fighting games — digital games of competitive martial arts-style combat—is one of the most interesting and contentious of gamer subcultures. This talk examines the influences and norms of that community, including its spiritual and physical roots in the arcade, common gameplay practices, and how issues of ethnicity and gender collide with gamer identity in the ‘FGC’.
Todd Harper is a researcher at the MIT Game Lab with a background in mass communication and cultural studies. His current research focuses on both competitive communities and their cultural norms, as well as queer and gender representation and issues in gaming culture.

Sonia Livingstone: "The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age"
2013-11-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science
Sonia Livingstone is a full professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is seconded to Microsoft Social Research for fall 2013 as well as being a faculty fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her talk will be based on her current book project, “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age”, based on her ethnographic research with the MacArthur Foundation-funded Connected Learning Research Network. With a focus on young teenagers, Sonia will examine how powerful forces of social reproduction result in missed opportunities for many youth in the risk society.

Visualizing Information: ChartGirl on an Alternate Route to Understanding and Explaining Complicated Information
2013-11-14 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hilary Sargent, founder of ChartGirl.com
Hilary Sargent is the founder of ChartGirl.com, where she makes charts to describe complicated news stories. Her site was recently called one of the 50 Best Websites of 2013 by TIME Magazine and her charts have been featured by Reuters, AtlanticWire, BoingBoing, Business Insider, and others. Sargent has worked as an investigator for law firms, corporations, non-profit organizations and political campaigns.
View the MIT Campus Map for Building 4’s exact location.

Mary Flanagan
2013-11-21 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan pushes the boundaries of medium and genre across writing, visual arts, and design to innovate in these fields with a critical play centered approach. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her collection of over 20 major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. Flanagan’s work has been supported by grants and commissions including The British Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation. Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Miguel Sicart: "Play in the Age of Computing Machinery"
2014-02-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Miguel Sicart
We live in the era of computation and play. Everywhere we look, there is a computer, translating the world around us into patterns for production of labor or consumption of entertainment. And now more than ever, we play everywhere: our work should be playful, as it should be our dieting, our love life, and even our leisure. We play as much as we can, in this world of computers.
In this talk Sicart will look at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computers. He will propose a theory of play that includes the materiality of computation in its definition of the activity, and will suggest that our forms of playing with machines are both forms of surrendering to the pleasures of computation, and forms of creative resistance to the reduction of our worlds to computable events.
Miguel Sicart is a games scholar based at the IT University of Copenhagen. For the last decade his research has focused on ethics and computer games, from a philosophical and design theory perspective. He has two books published: The Ethics of Computer Games; and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (MIT Press 2009, 2013). His current work focuses on playful design, and will be the subject of a new book called Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014). Miguel teaches game and play design, and his research is now focused on toys, materiality, and play.

Jonathan Sterne, "Who Tunes Whom?: Auto-Tune, the Earth, and the Politics of Frequency"
2014-02-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jonathan Sterne, McGill University
Auto-tune is a ubiquitous vocal effect in popular music and the best-selling software plug-in in the short history of commercial digital audio software. When used with subtlety, auto-tune fixes slight errors or variances in pitch (usually of singers); when used more drastically, it produces a very recognizable vocal effect, “locking” a voice to a scale, or drastically altering it.
Auto-tune was developed out of reflection seismology technology, which uses sound for locating natural resources underground and beneath the ocean floor. In this paper, Sterne gives a cultural history of auto-tune as a form of signal processing, drawing on patent documents, interviews, operational protocols, tuning standards and competing acoustemologies. Auto-tune effects a resource management of the voice. The obvious artifice in its most extreme forms points us back to a centuries-long project to technologize human voices through standards and tuning. While journalists and music fans may argue over auto-tune’s relationship to the authenticity of the voice, Sterne shows that it is embedded in a much broader politics of frequency.
Jonathan Sterne is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and for January-May 2014 a visiting researcher in social media at Microsoft Research New England. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. Visit his website at sterneworks.org.

Meredith Schweig and Rebecca Dirksen: "Taiwanese Rap and Haitian Music and Reconstruction"
2014-02-27 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Meredith Schweig
In this presentation, Meredith Schweig explores the gender politics and practices of the Taiwan rap scene. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the island’s hip-hop community and invoking emergent scholarly discourses on East Asian and global masculinities, she argues that rap’s identity as men’s music renders it a productive site for exploring, unsettling, and transforming prevailing models of Taiwanese manhood. In the context of shifting gender roles driven by dramatic social, political, and economic change over the course of the last three decades in Taiwan, Schweig considers how rap has created new spaces for male sociality, avenues for male self-empowerment, and opportunities for the articulation of multiple masculine identities not otherwise audible in the island’s popular music.
Schweig is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century music of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on popular song, narrativity, and cultural politics in Taiwan and China. She has received fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, Whiting Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.

Rebecca Dirksen
In Haiti from the colonial period to the present, music has been a critical means for public dialogue when other avenues have not been possible. Mizik angaje, literally, “engaged music,” a genre-crossing expressive form featuring pointed lyrical commentary on political and social issues, has accompanied key moments in Haitian history, from the Haitian Revolution to the downfall of the Duvalier regime and subsequent rise of Aristide to power. Increasingly in recent years, mizik angaje has been re-imagined to reflect current realities: any understanding of this musical phenomenon must now go beyondexamining how ordinary Haitian citizens use musical dialogue to critique infrastructural weaknesses and abuses of authority to demonstrating how a growing number of social groups employ music as an explicit and fundamental tool for strengthening their local communities. Independent of state or NGO support, these groups are tackling non-musical neighborhood concerns by promoting social programs that simultaneously entertain music-making and community service. This leads us to ask, what happens when Haitian musicians implicate themselves in the processes of development?
Rebecca Dirksen, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at UCLA in 2012. Her primary research concerns music and grassroots development in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. Concurrent projects revolve around creative responses to crisis and disaster, intangible cultural heritage protection, cultural policy, and Haitian classical music.
This event is co-sponsored with MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Cool Japan Project.

Kate Crawford, "Squeaky Dolphin to Normcore: Anxiety and Big Data Culture"
2014-03-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kate Crawford
Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective), a Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU, and an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. She researches how people engage with networked technologies, and analyze the political, cultural, legal, philosophical and policy-making implications. She has done interview-based studies in Australia, India and the US, in big cities and in very small towns. Crawford is interested in how networked data becomes part of our understanding of knowledge, privacy, democracy, intimacy and subjectivity. Her first book Adult Themes was through Pan Macmillan, and she is currently working on a new book.

Barry Werth and The Antidote: Reporting from Inside the World of Big Pharma
2014-03-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Journalist and author Barry Werth has been writing about the business and practice of the pharmaceutical industry for more than two decades. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his 1995 book on Vertex Pharmaceuticals, was named one the “75 Smartest Books We Know” by Fortune. His sixth and most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big Pharma, revisits Vertex, offering unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to a company that that went from cash-starved startup to a triumph of American bio-tech innovation. Werth has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Technology Review, among many others publications.

Susan Murray, "'Natural Vision vs. Tele-Vision’: Defining and Managing Electronic Color in the Post-War Era"
2014-04-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Susan Murray
The standardization of color television in the US during the postwar era was, in large part, discussed and determined in relation to historical developments in color theory (philosophical, psychological, and physical), colorimetry, color design and industry, psychophysics, psychology and, of course, what had already been established industrially, culturally, and technically for monochrome television. In this presentation, Susan Murray explores how these various threads of scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, and industrial knowledge were built into the standards, processes, and procedures for and around the technology and use of color television from the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. This presentation will be less about color programming itself, and more about the discourses that framed and managed color use and reception not only in the standardization period, but also during RCA and NBC’s early attempts to sell color to consumers, sponsors, and critics.
Susan Murray is associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She is the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars! Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005) and the coeditor (with Laurie Ouellette) of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2004, 2009). She has received fellowships from the ACLS and NYU’s Humanities Initiative for 2013-14 and is currently writing a history of color television from 1929-1970, which is under contract with Duke University Press.
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Tarleton Gillespie: "Algorithms, and the Production of Calculated Publics"
2014-05-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Tarleton Gillespie, Dept. of Communication, Cornell University; Visiting Researcher, Microsoft Research New England
Algorithms may now be our most important knowledge technologies, “the scientific instruments of a society at large,” (Gitelman) and they are increasingly vital to how we organize human social interaction, produce authoritative knowledge, and choreograph our participation in public life. Search engines, recommendation systems, edge algorithms on social networking sites, and “trend” identification algorithms: these not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and to participate in social and political discourse. In this talk Tarleton Gillespie will highlight one particular dimension of these algorithms, their production of calculated publics: algorithmically produced snapshots of the “public” around us and what most concerns it. Understanding the calculations and motivations behind the production of these calculated publics helps highlight how these algorithms are relevant to our collective efforts to know and be known.
Tarleton Gillespie is an associate professor at Cornell University, in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science. This semester he is a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research, New England. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014), and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (2007), and the co-founder of the scholarly blog at culturedigitally.org.
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Philip Jones: "Gaming in Color"
2014-05-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Jones
Gaming in Color is a full length documentary of the story of the queer gaming community, gaymer culture and events, and the rise of LGBTQ themes in video games. A lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer gamer has a higher chance of being mistreated in an online social game. Diverse queer themes in storylines and characters are still mostly an anomaly in the mainstream video game industry. Gaming In Color explores how the community culture is shifting and the industry is diversifying, helping with queer visibility and acceptance of an LGBTQ presence.
Philip Jones is a queer youth and activist, who began in the games industry with journalism and podcasting. He is now best known for his work in directing the video games documentary Gaming in Color which focuses on queer gamers. He also has a hand in other MidBoss projects, currently head of the expo hall and vendor relations for the second GaymerX convention, as well as assistant writer for upcoming adventure game Read Only Memories. When not working on these projects, he studies and wears too much flannel at his home in Texas.

Sinan Aral, "Social Influence and The Dynamics of Online Reputation"
2014-09-11 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sinan Aral
Identity and reputation drive some of the most important decisions we make online: Who to follow or link to, whose information to trust, whose opinion to rely on when choosing a product or service, whose content to consume and share. Yet, we know very little about the dynamics of online reputation and how it affects our decision making.
The MIT Sloan School of Management’s Sinan Aral will describe a series of randomized experiments that explore the population level behavioral dynamics catalyzed by identity and reputation online. He will explore some of the implications for bias in online ratings, the foundations of social advertising and the ability to generate cascades of behavior through peer to peer social influence in networks. The coming decades will likely see an emphasis on verified identities online. Aral will argue that a new science of online identity could help guide our business, platform design and social policy decisions in light of the rising importance of online reputation and social influence.

Philip Napoli, "Media Impact Assessment and Beyond: Thoughts on the Treacherous Task of Quantifying Journalistic Performance"
2014-09-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Napoli, Rutgers University
In recent years, a variety of funders have begun to invest substantially in efforts to assess the impact of media initiatives such as documentary films and journalism ventures. These efforts reflect a fundamental shift in how media performance is assessed (and whose assessments matter) in an environment of extreme audience fragmentation and increased challenges to monetizing media content. This presentation will focus on ongoing research that seeks to define and assess the field of media impact assessment. In addressing these issues, this analysis seeks to:

identify important points of distinction between contemporary notions of media impact and more traditional notions of media effects;
assess the methods and metrics being employed to assess media impact;
identify the key challenges and tensions inherent in such efforts.

This presentation also will illustrate that impact represents only one of a number of aspects of journalistic performance that are being converted to quantitative performance metrics. Related areas of ongoing research include efforts to assess the health of local media ecosystems and the quality of journalistic content. The broader implications of this wide-ranging transformation in how journalistic performance may be assessed will be considered.
Philip M. Napoli (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University, where he leads the Media and the Public Interest Initiative. His current research projects include an analysis of the functioning of the New York City information ecosystem during and after Hurricane Sandy (funded by Internews) and the News Measures Research Project (funded by the Democracy Fund and the Dodge Foundation).

Caetlin Benson-Allott, "By Design: Or, What Remote Controls Can Teach Us about the Nature of Control"
2014-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caetlin Benson-Allott
Co-sponsored with MIT Literature.
How does an object set the limits for human experiences of will and subjecthood? How does an interface temper our desires for interactivity or intervention? A remote control appears to exert its user’s will over distant objects, yet the design and function of the device itself instill in its subject a vexed relationship to his or her own agency. Analyzing the technical and design evolution of these devices reveals how the seemingly most inconsequential of media devices have shaped the way users cohabit with mass media, consumer electronics, and each other.
Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and Remote Control (New York: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2015). Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Film Criticism, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video as well as multiple anthologies.
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Helen Nissenbaum, "Resisting Data’s Tyranny with Obfuscation"
2014-10-02 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Helen Nissenbaum
Against inexorable machinations of data surveillance, analysis, and profiling, data obfuscation holds promise of relief. Whether it can withstand countervailing analytics is an intriguing question; whether it is unethical, illegitimate, or, at best, ungenerous cuts close to the bone. Yet, as NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum will argue in this talk, obfuscation is a compelling “weapon-of-the-weak,” which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges countered and mitigated.
Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her work spans social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology and digital media. She has written and edited five books, including Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2014) and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press, 2010) and her research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.
Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Doris Sommer, "Welcome Back, to the Humanities as Civic Engagement"
2014-10-16 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Doris Sommer. Staff Photo, Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University News Office
Doris Sommer’s new book, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, revives the collaboration between aesthetic philosophy and democratic development. From the top and from below, creative projects and their interpretation fuel positive change and renew humanists’ opportunities to make civic contributions.
Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative.

CMS Alumni Panel
2014-10-23 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Three Comparative Media Studies alums return to discuss their post-graduate lives.
Sam Ford, S.M., ’07
Sam Ford is Director of Audience Engagement at strategic communication and marketing firm Peppercomm. He is co-author of the 2013 book Spreadable Media and co-editor of the 2011 book The Survival of Soap Opera. Sam is a contributing author to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Inc.; a research affiliate with MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing; and an instructor with Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program. Sam currently serves as Co-Chair of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Committee. He has recently published work with The Journal of Fandom Studies, Panorama Social, Cinema Journal, The Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Advertising Age, PRWeek, PR News, O’Dwyer PR, IABC Communication World, The Public Relations Strategist, PropertyCasualty360, Oxford University Press Bibliographies, and the NYU Press book, Making Media Work, among other outlets. He’s based in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Rekha Murthy, S.M., ’05
Rekha Murthy is Director of Projects + Partnerships at PRX, where she finds innovative ways for public media stations and producers to reach audiences and earn revenue. Rekha runs PRX’s digital distribution program, where she forges new, non-broadcast pathways for audio works. These range from established channels like iTunes and Amazon, to aggregators like TuneIn and Stitcher, to entertainment and education services large and small.
As part of PRX’s award-winning Apps team, Rekha has set new standards for public media’s mobile strategy and adoption with apps including the Public Radio Player, This American Life, and for major stations. She launched PRX’s iTunes distribution service, making independent productions and major national programs available for sale in the iTunes Store.
Rekha advises various transmedia initiatives for public media and served on the board of the Integrated Media Association (now part of Greater Public).
Before PRX, Rekha was a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered and an editor of NPR.org. She’s been a project manager and user experience designer for web and mobile clients.
Parmesh Shahani, S.M., ’05
Parmesh Shahani, listed in 2012 as one of 25 Indians to watch out for by Financial Times, is the head of the Godrej India Culture Lab — an experimental idea-space that cross-pollinates the best ideas and people working on India from across the academic, creative and corporate worlds to explore what it means to be modern and Indian. In addition, Parmesh also serves as the Editor-at-large for Verve magazine, India. He is a Yale World Fellow, currently spending a semester in New Haven. He is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, TED Fellow, and a Utrecht University-Impakt Fellow. Parmesh’s masters’ thesis at CMS was released as a book “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India” by Sage Publications in 2008. You can follow Parmesh on Twitter at @parmeshs.

Town Meeting
2014-11-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Open to the CMS/W family only, the annual town meeting is a discussion among the program’s community members and directors.

Bobbie Chase and Marjorie Liu on the State of the Comic Book Medium
2015-02-12 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Join Bobbie Chase, Editorial Director of DC Comics, and comic book writer, Marjorie Liu (Monstress, Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow), as they discuss the current and future state of the comic book medium, including DC and Marvel’s place in the industry, and how creator owned projects are helping to evolve the face of publishing.

Illuminated Bodies: Kat Von D, LA Ink, and the Borderlands of Tattoo Culture
2015-02-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Theresa Rojas, SHASS Predoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
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The first episode of the series LA Ink in 2007 was the all-time highest rated season premiere for the TLC network’s 18-34 demographic. The second tattoo vehicle in a franchise that began with Miami Ink, the show continued its predecessor’s main format, with select artists facilitating the therapeutic tattoo narratives of clients. One significant difference is LA Ink’s central “character,” Kat Von D: shop owner, tattoo artist, and heavily tattooed Latina. Although women’s accumulation of tattoos has become more commonplace in the twenty-first century, heavily tattooed female bodies are far from the mainstream. Latina bodies in particular are often exoticized and subject to cultural gatekeeping. Theresa Rojas examines the prolific and heavily tattooed Katherine Von Drachenberg, popularly known as Kat Von D, who offers a fascinating aesthetic that challenges both tattoo culture and notions of the “monstrous body” in new and intriguing ways. A polemical and sometimes polarizing celebrity, Von D navigates the worlds of tattooing and popular culture in ways that are at once ground-breaking and problematic. Her formative role as the first heavily tattooed woman to have her own television show situates her as someone who has chosen to lead an exceptionally public life—telling her story in multi-mediated ways.
Rojas is a SHASS Predoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University. She received her MLA from Eastern Michigan University in Women’s and Gender Studies and her BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from San Francisco, Theresa is also a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and an artist who works primarily in acrylics, wood, and ink. Her specialties include life narrative, comics, and visual culture.

Media and Memory at the Vidéothèque de Paris
2015-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Catherine E. ClarkAssistant Professor, MIT Global Studies and Languages
The Vidéothèque de Paris, a moving image archive of the French capital, opened in 1988, during a period when French technological advances led the world in revolutionizing the circulation of people and information. Accordingly, the Vidéothèque would be no mere dusty archive but rather a high-tech institution of robots, computers, VCRs, and Minitels. Its organizers deployed the very latest technologies to place nearly a century of fiction films, documentaries, television programs, and advertising with Paris as their subject or setting at visitors’ disposal. Organizers promised that within a year or two the whole archive would be available in Parisian living rooms, as its collections became the basis of a Parisian on-demand cable channel.
Contemporaries imagined that these cutting-edge technologies would transform users’ very relationship to the past. They hoped to turn institutionalized history into memory, a flexible, customizable, and ultimately personal, experience of the past. The dream of an archive that replaced all others by providing constant access to cultural and social memory through cutting-edge technologies did not last more than a decade. But the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the Vidéothèque’s creation helps illuminate and call into question the utopian promises of the much more recent revolution in digital history.
MIT Global Studies and Languages assistant professor Catherine E. Clark is a cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture.
Her current book project, Paris and the Cliché of History, explores the intersection of the history of Paris and the history of photography. It tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past from the establishment of Paris’s municipal historical institutions (the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris) to the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” which created an archive of 100,000 pictures of the city. The project combines the history of collecting photographs with a consideration of the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use, alongside prints and paintings, in illustrated books, historical exhibitions, and commemorations.

Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba
2015-03-12 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco‘s Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba is a study of the role of corporeal expressivity in development of social criticism in Cuban art. Fusco explores the work of performance artists from the 1980s to the present and examines how the Cuban state has wielded influence over performance through a combination of politics and practices that enable cultural production on the one hand and discipline public behavior on the other.
The book will be published by Tate Publishing in the fall of 2015.
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and a MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT. She is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in numerous international biennials and festivals, as well as the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).

Cultural Studies and The Expediency of Culture, Rethought in Relation to Internet Platforms and Megadata
2015-04-02 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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George Yúdice, University of Miami
George Yúdice‘s The Expediency of Culture (2003) repositioned culture in connection with governmentality and biopower. The full force of social media, Internet platforms and megadata was not yet evident at the time. The argument that culture empties out as it becomes ever more pivotal in the creative economy has, Yúdice thinks, been borne out. Culture understood as the “terrain of struggle for interpretive power” needs to take into consideration its relocation and reconfiguration in new media and technologies. In that relocation key concepts of Cultural Studies need to be updated. This talk seeks to maps the requisite changes.
George Yúdice is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami.
This event is co-sponsored with MIT Global Studies and Languages.
