MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Michael Taussig: "Mooning Texas"
2016-04-07 16:30 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“Mooning Texas” – an adventure story involving social energy + art + Emile Durkheim’s “take” on Mauss + Hubert’s “take” on mana + the creativity of gossip.
Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, was dubbed by the New York Times as “Anthropology’s Alternative Radical.” Taussig has been doing fieldwork since 1969. He has written on the commercialization of peasant agriculture; slavery; hunger; the working of commodity fetishism; colonialism on “shamanism” and folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; the making, talking, and writing of terror; and mimesis. He has also written “a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia.”
Introduced by Prof. Ian Condry, Global Studies and Languages, MIT.
Presented by the Dissolve Inequality series and the Latin American Studies Forum of MIT Global Studies and Languages.
gsl-events@mit.edu • mitgsl.mit.edu

Nick Seaver: "What Do People Do All Day?"
2016-04-14 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Seaver, CMS ’10, and Assistant Professor at Tufts University
The algorithmic infrastructures of the internet are made by a weird cast of characters: rock stars, gurus, ninjas, wizards, alchemists, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors can all be found sitting at computers in otherwise unremarkable offices, typing. These job titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries. They mark jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. But is that all they do? In this talk, drawing on several years of fieldwork with the developers of algorithmic music recommenders, Seaver describes how these terms help people make sense of new kinds of jobs and their positions within new infrastructures. They draw analogies that fit into existing prestige hierarchies (rockstars and janitors) or relationships to craft and technique (gardeners and alchemists). They aspire to particular imaginations of mastery (gurus and ninjas). Critics of big data have drawn attention to the importance of metaphors in framing public and commercial understandings of data, its biases and origins. The metaphorical borrowings of role terms serve a similar function, highlighting some features at the expense of others and shaping emerging professions in their image. If we want to make sense of new algorithmic industries, we’ll need to understand how they make sense of themselves.
Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. His current research examines the cultural life of algorithms for understanding and recommending music. He received a masters from CMS in 2010 for research on the history of the player piano.

CMS/W Town Hall
2016-04-21 17:00
Closed to the public.

Fox Harrell: "Reflections on Advanced Identity Representation"
2016-04-28 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Fox HarrellPhoto by Bryce Vickmark
Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles these technologies play in society and how to design them to better suit diverse social needs. In this talk, Harrell presents some of the outcomes from his 5-year National Science Foundation-supported research initiative called the Advanced Identity Representation project. Namely, applying approaches from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and sociology to technologies such as videogames and social media, his research both reveals social biases in existing systems and implements systems to respond to those biases with greater nuance and expressive power.
D. Fox Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab). He was a 2014-15 recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Virtual Reality Meets Documentary: A Deeper Look
2016-05-05 17:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(Note updated location: Stata Center, Room 123)
“In this case [of virtual reality], we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.” – Werner Herzog
When Time Magazine graced its cover with Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey’s awkward pose, it effectively proclaimed that VR was “the next big thing” that didn’t have any place in our lives yet. Google, Facebook, The New York Times, PBS Frontline, Sundance Film Institute and many others are investing heavily in virtual reality as a powerful new storytelling medium. It’s capturing the imagination of documentary storytellers all over the world yet for all its enthusiasts, virtual reality has its skeptics. For all virtual reality is talked about, it can be deeply misunderstood.
Virtual reality means many things to many people: an immersive experience, a new tool for storytelling, a cluster of quite different technologies and techniques, and even an epistemological claim. Little wonder that we lack consensus about “how to fill it with content.”
The goal of this panel is to talk with some of the leading creators in the VR space and better understand VR’s potentials and implications for documentary and journalism. This will help us to disambiguate some of the major strands of VR and in so doing consider the inherent tensions in VR between documentation and simulation, the challenges of spatial storytelling and new narrative structures, the ethics and cognitive neuroscience of immersion, interaction, and affect; and VR’s past and future.
Speakers
Raney Aronson-Rath runs FRONTLINE, PBS’s flagship investigative journalism series, and is a leading voice on the future of journalism. She has been internationally recognized for her work to expand FRONTLINE’s reporting capacity and reimagine the documentary form across multiple platforms. From the emergence of ISIS in Syria to the hidden history of the NFL and concussions to the secret reality of rape on the job for immigrant women, Aronson-Rath oversees FRONTLINE’s acclaimed reporting and directs the series’ evolution and editorial vision. She has developed and managed nearly 30 in-depth, cross-platform journalism partnerships with outlets including ProPublica, The New York Times, and Univision. Under her leadership, FRONTLINE has won every major award in broadcast journalism and dramatically expanded its digital footprint. Prior to FRONTLINE, Aronson-Rath worked at ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and her master’s from Columbia Journalism School.
Katy Morrison is co-Founder and producer at Virtual Reality studio VRTOV and makes virtual reality and immersive story experiences for non-fiction stories. Shaped by her experience working as a documentary maker, Katy’s interest is in subjectivity, identity and spatiality in an increasingly virtual and interconnected world. Previously Katy worked in documentary television as a researcher, writer and producer and has made over fifty hours of internationally broadcast documentary television as well as augmented reality apps, virtual reality experiences and immersive story installations. In addition to producing Virtual Reality, VRTOV regularly run workshops, speak at festivals and facilitate hands-on engagement with VR production techniques for broadcasters and media companies.
Nonny de la Peña was selected by Wired Magazine as a #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change and has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget and The Guardian. Additionally, Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative.” for her pioneering work in immersive storytelling. As CEO of Emblematic Group, she uses cutting edge technologies to tell important stories—both fictional and news-based—that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers. A Yale Poynter Media Fellow and a former correspondent for Newsweek, de la Peña has more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print, film and TV. De la Peña is widely credited with helping create the genre of immersive journalism and her virtual reality work has been featured by the BBC, Mashable, Vice, Wired and many others. Showcases around the globe include the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, The World Economic Forum in Davos, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Games For Change.
Caspar Sonnen is a festival organiser and curator specialised in independent cinema and digital media art. As New Media Coordinator of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, he has successfully developed digital festival strategies and online initiatives. In 2008, Sonnen launched IDFA DocLab, a pioneering platform for digital documentary storytelling and media art. IDFA DocLab is also one of the organising partners of PhotoStories. Besides his work at IDFA, Sonnen is co-founder and programmer of the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam.

“Innovation” and “Engagement”: Experiments with What Industry Buzzwords Can Mean in Practice
2016-09-08 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
CMS/W alum Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, ’07) has spent most of the last decade exploring points of connection and contention between the media and marketing industries and media studies. Starting last year, that work has taken him to Univision’s Fusion Media Group (a portfolio of media companies which includes Fusion, Univision Digital, Univision Music, The Root, Flama, The Onion, A.V. Club, Clickhole, Starwipe, and El Rey), leading a team that has been building the conglomerate’s approach to experimentation outside of the company’s core day-to-day operations.
In this colloquium, Sam will be joined by his colleague Federico Rodriguez Tarditi to discuss what they have learned thus far from Fusion Media Group’s experiments with exploring new ways of telling stories, new approaches to building relationships with key publics important to our portfolio, new ways of working internally, and new types of roles/positions in the company. They will also talk about what they have learned while working with internal teams, academic groups, non-profits, other companies, startups, foundations, and other groups and the challenges of measuring success for experimentation that often exist outside day-to-day media company operations…and some of which may speak more to the company’s larger mission than direct paths to profitability.
Sam Ford is a Vice President at Fusion and Head of Fusion Media Group’s Center for Innovation and Engagement. Federico Rodriguez Tarditi serves as Project Manager for the Center for Innovation and Engagement.

Knowledge’s Allure: Surveillance and Uncertainty
2016-09-15 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sun-ha HongMellon Postdoctoral Fellow
The present age is one of growing faith in machinic knowledge. From state surveillance to self-tracking technologies, we find lofty promises about the power of “raw” data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making. But new claims to knowledge invariably entail a redistribution of uncertainty, of those in the know and those left ignorant, of proofs “good enough” and “negligible” risks. Today, the U.S. government struggles to “prove” the efficacy of its own surveillance programs. The calculability of terrorist threat becomes profoundly indeterminable, exemplified by the figure of the “lone wolf”. Meanwhile, the self-tracking industry promises unerringly objective self-knowledge through machines that know you better than you know yourself. The present struggles with “big” data and surveillance are not just a question of privacy and security, but how promises of knowledge and its bounty enact a redistribution of authority, credibility and responsibility. In short, it is a question of how human individuals become the ingredient for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves.
Sun-ha Hong is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at CMS/W @ MIT, and has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His writing examines the collective fantasies invested in technology, media and communication.

The Exit Zero Project: A Transmedia Exploration of Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
2016-09-22 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Christine Walley Professor of Anthropology andDirector of Graduate Studies, HASTS
The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) is a transmedia exploration of the traumatic effects of the loss of the steel industry in Southeast Chicago, the impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States more broadly, and how Americans talk – and fail to talk – about social class. The project includes an award-winning book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) authored by Christine Walley, as well as a documentary film, entitled Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2016) made in conjunction with director and filmmaker Chris Boebel. The book and film use first person narration to trace the stories of multiple generations of writer/producer Walley’s family in this once-thriving steel mill community. From the turn-of-the-century experience of immigrants who worked in Chicago’s mammoth industries to the labor struggles of the 1930s to the seemingly unfathomable closure of the steel mills in the 1980s and 90s, these family stories convey a history that serves as a microcosm of the broader national experience of deindustrialization and its economic and environmental aftermath. The project also includes an interactive documentary website with both a storytelling and archival component that is being made in collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. In this talk, Professor Walley will talk about her research into this topic and how it found expression in a book, website, and documentary film.
Walley received a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her first book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), was based on field research exploring environmental conflict in rural Tanzania. Chris Walley and Chris Boebel are also the co-creators and co-instructors of the documentary film production and theory class DV Lab: Documenting Science Through Video and New Media.

Next Stage Planning for the Digital Humanities at MIT
2016-09-29 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Douglas O’ReaganDigital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT, Douglas O’Reagan will study how the digital humanities can best aid the specific strengths, mission, and broader community around MIT. In this talk, O’Reagan will update the audience on his efforts and invite suggestions and ideas concerning the future of digital humanities at MIT.
O’Reagan completed his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. His dissertation was a comparative history of the Allied powers’ attempts to study and copy German science and technology during and after the Second World War. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership in UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering from 2014-2015, where he worked with an interdisciplinary team on applying data science, econometric analysis, and historical research in studying the origins and impacts of specific breakthrough technologies. In 2015 he became a visiting assistant professor at Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus, where he taught history and served as Lead Archivist and Director of the Oral History Program for the Hanford History Project, which manages the US Department of Energy’s collections related to the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project.

This Land Is Our Land: Mobile Media, Protest, and Debate in Maasai and Mongolian Land Disputes
2016-10-06 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Allison HahnAssistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College
How has mobile media changed the ways that nomadic communities receive and send information, engage state actors, and participate in international deliberations? Allison Hahn examines the ways that two pastoral-nomadic communities, Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and Mongolians of Mongolia and China, are utilizing new media and social media platforms to challenge power hierarchies and deliberative norms. Many governmental policy makers presume that this technological adaptation indicates a determination amongst nomadic communities to integrate and settle. This presentation asks if nomadic communities might instead be incorporating new media technologies as a method to preserve their traditional lifestyles while engaging in national and international deliberations about land policy. Hahn draws from evidence of this engagement found in Maasai and Mongolian use of YouTube, RenRen, Twitter and Facebook as well as in-person protests and her decade of fieldwork amongst pastoral-nomadic communities. In this talk, Hahn focuses on specific examples from Maasai and Mongolian communities, as well as addresses the broader questions of how academics might engage once-distant communities and better understand the complexity of mobile media and nomadic deliberation.
Allison Hahn (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College. Her current book project, Nomads, New Media, and the State (in progress) explores the ways pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East are utilizing new and mobile technologies to participate in conservation policy and negotiate land rights.

How Did the Computer Learn to See?
2016-10-13 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alexander GallowayPhoto by Ivan Brodey
How did the computer learn to see? A common response to the question is that the computer learned to see from cinema and photography, that is, from modernity’s most highly evolved technologies of vision. In this talk we will explore a different response to the question, that the computer learned to see not from cinema but from sculpture. With reference to the work of artists Sarah Oppenheimer and Zach Blas, along with techniques for digital image compression, we will explore the uniquely computational mode of vision.
Alexander Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books, most recently a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, and is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

Illuminating 2016: Using Social Listening Tools to Understand the Presidential Campaign
2016-11-03 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jennifer Stromer-GalleySyracuse University
The 2016 presidential election has been historic for the ways that social media has been used to drive the news agenda and rally supporters to the cause. Jennifer Stromer-Galley will describe the large scale collection and machine learning techniques she and her team have used for the Illuminating 2016 project to study the ways the presidential candidates and the public have used social media. She will provide some of the major trends they’ve seen this election cycle, and talk about why this matters for journalism and for social media practitioners more broadly.
Stromer-Galley is a professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and Director for the Center for Computational and Data Sciences, and she is President of the Association of Internet Researchers. She has been studying “social media” since before it was called social media, studying online interaction and influence in a variety of contexts, including political forums and online games. Her award-winning book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age provides a history of presidential campaigns as they have adopted and adapted to digital communication technologies.

Fall 2016 Alumni Panel: Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Colleen Kaman, Abe Stein, and Lily Bui
2016-11-17 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join us for this year’s alumni panel, when we hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for. As in past years, we’ve scheduled the panel for the same day as the graduate program information session.
Panelists this time around include:
Andres Lombana-Bermudez, ’08, a researcher and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, youth, and learning. Andres holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from UT-Austin, an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Literature from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a Research Associate with the Connected Learning Research Network.
Colleen Kaman, ’10, is a user experience/experience design strategist and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, persuasive design, and content. Colleen holds an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology from Bates College. She is a senior managing consultant at IBMiX, where she focuses on user-centric healthcare solutions and designing for aging users and helps lead the IBMiX department’s Accessibility practice area.
Abe Stein, ’13, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kill Screen Media
Lily Bui, ’16, is currently a PhD student at MIT’s School of Architecture & Planning in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning. Her masters research focused on using sensors to support environmental monitoring, and communicating sensor-based data to different stakeholders.

Black + Twitter: A Cultural Informatics Approach
2016-12-01 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
André Brock, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan
Chris Sacca, activist investor, recently argued that Black Twitter IS Twitter. For example, African American usage of the service often dominates user metrics in the United States, despite their minority demographic numbers as computer users. This talk by André Brock unpacks Black Twitter use from two perspectives: analysis of the interface and associated practice alongside discourse analysis of Twitter’s utility and audience. Using examples of Black Twitter practice, Brock offers that Twitter’s feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity. Thus, Twitter’s outsized function as mechanism for cultural critique and political activism can be understood as the awakening of Black digital practice and an abridging of a digital divide.
André Brock is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Brock is one of the preeminent scholars of Black cyberculture. His work bridges Science and Technology Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, showing how the communicative affordances of online media align with those of Black communication practices. Through December 2016, he is a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.

#Misogynoir, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and other forms of Black Digital Feminisms
2016-12-08 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kishonna GrayMLK Visiting Scholar
Women of color have a variety of responses when employing digital technologies for empowerment. New communication technologies have expanded the opportunities and potential for marginalized communities to mobilize in this context counter to the dominant, mainstream media. This growth reflects the mobilization of marginalized communities within virtual and real spaces reflecting a systematic change in who controls the narrative. No longer are mainstream media the only disseminators of messages or producers of content. Women, in particular, are employing social media to highlight issues that are often ignored in dominant discourse. However, access itself neither ensures power nor guarantees a shift in the dominant ideology (as the use of #Misogynoir by Katy Perry reveals among other examples). Operating under the oppressive structures of masculinity, heterosexuality, and Whiteness that are sustained in digital spaces, marginalized women persevere and resist such hegemonic realities. Yet the conceptual frameworks intended to capture the digital lives of women cannot deconstruct the structural inequalities of these spaces.
Kishonna L. Gray (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is currently a MLK Visiting Scholar in Women & Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She is also the Founder of the Critical Gaming Lab at Eastern Kentucky University. She is expanding on the work created here to develop new initiatives surrounding Equity in Gaming (www.equityingaming.com). Her work broadly intersects identity and new media although she has a particular focus on gaming. Her most recent book, Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within that virtual gaming community.

Authoritarian and Democratic Data Science in an Experimenting Society
2017-02-16 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
J. Nathan MatiasPh.D. student, MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media
How will the role of data science in democracy be transformed as software expands the public’s ability to conduct our own experiments at scale? In the 1940s-70s, debates over authoritarian uses of statistics led to new paradigms in social psychology, management theory, and policy evaluation. Today, large-scale social experiments and predictive modeling are reviving these debates. Technology platforms now conduct hundreds of undisclosed experiments per day on pricing and advertising, and the algorithms that shape our social lives remain opaque to to the public. Democratic methods for data science may offer an alternative to this corporate libertarian paternalism.
In this talk, hear about the history and future of democratic social experimentation, from Kurt Lewin and Karl Popper to Donald Campbell. You’ll also hear about CivilServant, software that supports communities to conduct their own experiments on algorithms and social behavior online.
J. Nathan Matias is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media, an affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard, and founder of CivilServant. He conducts independent, public interest research on flourishing, fair, and safe participation online. These include research on harassment reporting, volunteer moderation online (PDF), behavior change toward equality (PDF), social movements (PDF), and networks of gratitude.
Nathan has extensive experience in tech startups, nonprofits, and corporate research, including SwiftKey, Microsoft Research, and the Ministry of Stories. Nathan’s creative work and research have been covered extensively by international press, and he has published data journalism and intellectual history in the Atlantic, Guardian, PBS, and Boston Magazine.

Desktop Reveries: Hand, Software, and the Space of Japanese Artist Animation
2017-03-02 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Paul RoquetMIT Global Studies and Languages, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies
Independent animators often pride themselves on an intimate, hand-drawn aesthetic. But they increasingly rely on computer software not only to accelerate their workflow, but to manipulate the look and feel of their drawings. Compositing software enables subtle but decisive shifts in the spaces portrayed, through manipulations of color, texture, line, and movement. Seeking to unravel the analytical split between the “drawn” and the “digital” in animation and media studies more broadly, Roquet’s project moves back and forth between two desktops: the hard surface of the drawing table and the pixelated surface of the screen. This talk focuses on how the physical and perceptual affordances of both interfaces appear reimagined in the textures, movements, and tactility present in the animations themselves. Through a phenomenology of the contemporary desktop, Roquet seeks to ground the contemporary audiovisual imagination in the materiality of the tools and techniques at hand.
Paul Roquet is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies in the Global Studies and Languages Section at MIT. He is the author of Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minnesota 2016) as well as numerous essays on Japanese audiovisual and literary aesthetics.

From Stereopticon to Telephone: The Selling of the President in the Gilded Age
2017-03-16 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Charles Musser, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University.
Contrary to our received notions on the newness of new media, the presidential campaigns of the late nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of media forms as advisers and technicians exploited a variety of forms promote their candidates and platforms, including the stereopticon (a modernized magic lantern), the phonograph, and the telephone. In the process, they set in motion not only a new way of imagining how to market national campaigns and candidates; they also helped to usher in novel forms of mass spectatorship. Analogies to presidential campaigns in the 21st century are inevitable—and will not be avoided. The presentation comes out of Charlie Musser’s new book, Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s (University of California Press).
Charles Musser is professor of Film & Media Studies, American Studies and Theater Studies at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including the now-classic The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. His most recent documentary is Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014).

The Networked Sensory Landscape Meets the Future of Documentary
2017-03-23 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Glorianna Davenport, co-founder and current visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab
At its heart, documentary cinema has always been an experimental medium. Its evolution has been driven on the one hand by the creativity and interests of the media maker and on the other by technological invention and the evolution of particular sensing, imaging and display technologies.
Some insight into the experimental trajectory of the documentary approach can be found in definitions and naming conventions that emerged. Where as John Grierson’s famous definition, the “creative treatment of actuality”, speaks to the object, Richard Leacock’s, “the feeling of being there”, emphasizes the audience’ experience, which strongly parallels the filmmaker’s in the task of making. The difference lies not only in the sensibility of the maker but also in the technological breakthrough that allowed Leacock to marry the motion image to synchronous sound, thus vastly expanding the horizon of what stories could be told.
For the past two decades, the story experience was expanded as media makers incorporated computational “interactive” interfaces into their work, inviting the audience to re-order the presentation on the fly as they explored an archive of short segments. In this phase, however, the documentary impulse continued to be defined by the primary sensors of the past: motion images and (synchronous) sound.
Today, the arrival of expanded sensing technologies is reshaping the documentary opportunity. In a new work-in-progress, DoppelMarsh, developed in the Responsive Environment Group at the Media Lab, data from a dense network of diverse environmental sensors are mapped to deliver “a sense of being there” in a re-synthesized, ever-changing landscape.
Glorianna Davenport is a co-founder of the Media Lab where she directed the Interactive Cinema Group (1987-2004) and the Media Fabrics Group (2004-2008). In 2008, she turned her attention to transitioning a 600 acre cranberry farm in Plymouth Massachusetts into restored wetlands and conservation property. In 2011 she founded Living Observatory, a collaborative of research partners including the Responsive Environments Group at the Media Lab to develop a long-term study of this property and create experiences that invite the public to witness ecological change across this landscape in transition. Davenport is a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

Barbie and Mortal Kombat 20 Years Later
2017-04-06 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat, the third edited volume in the series that includes From Barbie to Mortal Kombat and Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, the authors and contributors expand the discussions on gender, race, and sexuality in gaming. They include intersectional perspectives on the experiences of diverse players, non-players and designers and promote inclusive designs for broadening access and participation in gaming, design and development. Contributors from media studies, gender studies, game studies, educational design, learning sciences, computer science, and game development examine who plays, how they play, where and what they play, why they play (or choose not to play), and with whom they play. This volume further explores how the culture can diversify access, participation and design for more inclusive play and learning.
Yasmin Kafai, Professor of Learning Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Yasmin Kafai is Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a researcher and developer of tools, communities, and materials to promote computational participation, crafting, and creativity across K-16. Her recent books include “Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” and “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming,” and edited volumes such as “Textile Messages: Dispatches from the World of Electronic Textiles and Education” and “Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs for Gaming.” She coauthored the 2010 National Educational Technology Plan for the US Department of Education. Kafai earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University while working with Seymour Papert at the MIT Media Lab. She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and past President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. Justice Walker and Emma Anderson are doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gabriela Richard, Assistant Professor of Learning, Design and Technology, Pennsylvania State University
Gabriela Richard is an Assistant Professor of Learning, Design and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on understanding the intersections between culture, experience, media, and learning, particularly in the areas of online and emerging technologies, including gaming. Her work has focused on understanding the ways that gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality are defined and experienced in game culture and online gaming in order to inform inclusive and equitable designs for learning with serious games, as well as play and participation with gaming and emerging technology more broadly. She has written extensively about games and learning, as well as youth learning, engagement, and computational thinking with electronic textiles, game design, and online communities. She was an NSF graduate research fellow, an AAUW dissertation fellow, and a Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Lee: "The Conservative Canon Before and After Trump"
2017-04-27 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael LeeAssociate Professor, Department of Communication at the College of Charleston
Michael J. Lee charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States. Dedicated conservatives have argued for decades that the conservative movement was a product of print, rather than a march, a protest, or a pivotal moment of persecution. The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Witness, The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, The Conscience of a Conservative, and other mid-century texts became influential not only among conservative office-holders, office-seekers, and well-heeled donors but also at dinner tables, school board meetings, and neighborhood reading groups. Taking an expansive approach, he shows the wide influence of the conservative canon on traditionalist, libertarian, and other types of conservatives. By exploring the varied uses to which each founding text has been put from the Cold War to the culture wars, he aims to highlight the struggle over what it means to think and speak conservatively in America.
Lee teaches and researches political communication and rhetoric at the College of Charleston. His book, Creating Conservatism, won five national book awards in his field. He is also the co-founder of With Purpose, a non-profit organization that raises money and awareness to fight childhood cancer.

The Contingencies of Comparison: Rethinking Comparative Media
2017-05-04 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Brian Larkin, Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia UniversityStefan Andriopoulos, Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University
Brian Larkin and Stefan Andriopoulos draw on the concept of comparison to examine how the same technologies work in radically different ways across the globe, juxtaposing media practices in Africa, Latin America, and Asia as well as in Western centers. There is an assumption that media, whether print, cinema, or digital media, were developed in the West and later exported to other places which were then in the place of ‘catching up’ with a media history that had already been established. But we know that cinema arrived in Shanghai and Calcutta at the same time as it did in London and evolved in those locations to produce different institutional and aesthetic forms. We also know that currently Seoul is far more ‘wired’ than New York and that Lagos is developing a film industry that is rapidly becoming dominant in all of Africa. It is clear that future media centers will emerge in places far outside their traditional Western centers.
Media emerge from a reciprocal exchange between technical forms and cultural religious, political, and economic domains. When these formations shift, features we have seen as core to media, sometimes part of their very ontology, turn out to be contingent rather than necessary. Exploring the concept of comparison opens up new questions for media studies by highlighting the contingencies of media and the specificity of historical and geographical formations.
Brian Larkin is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria and writes on issues of media, religion, infrastructure and urban studies in Nigeria.
Stefan Andriopoulos is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books, 2013), which was named “book of the year” in Times Literary Supplement. His previous book Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema won the SLSA Michelle Kendrick award for best academic book on literature, science, and the arts.

From Taft to Trump: How Conservative Media Activists Won -- and Lost -- the GOP
2017-05-11 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nicole Hemmer, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and author of Messengers of the Right (2016)
As Donald Trump built his lead in the Republican primaries, the editors of National Review came out with an entire “Against Trump” issue, a full-throated — and ultimately ineffective — denunciation of the GOP nominee. Soon conservative media personalities were taking sides, culminating in the hiring of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon to run the Trump campaign.
But the centrality of conservative media to presidential politics is not a new development. As early as the 1950s, conservative media activists were organizing third-party tickets, promoting presidential candidates, and encouraging their audiences to cast votes based on ideology rather than party. In this talk, Nicole Hemmer will explain how conservative media activists won the GOP for the right — and how in the era of Trump, they lost it.
Nicole Hemmer is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and a research associate at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Her book, Messengers of the Right, a history of conservative media in the United States, was published in Penn Press in September 2016. She is a columnist for Vox, US News & World Report, and The Age in Melbourne, Australia. Her writing has also appeared in a number of national and international publications, including the New York Times, Atlantic, New Republic, Politico, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. She co-hosts and produces Past Present, a history podcast that launched in October 2015.

Playful Practice: Designing the Future of Teacher Learning
2017-09-07 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab and Assistant Professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
All across the world, educational systems are exploring new ways to encourage more ambitious teaching and learning in classrooms: shifting away from recitation and rote learning to more engaging forms of collaborative, active, problem-centered learning. For this shift in classrooms to occur, we need to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of learning opportunities available to educators in these systems, and new forms of blended and online learning experiences will be central to this growth. One crucial element in teacher learning is practice. For most teachers, opportunities for low-stakes, deliberate practice is quite limited–teachers either learn theory in graduate school of education seminar rooms or test ideas in real classrooms, with real students, with real and immediate learning needs. At the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, we are developing new forms of teacher practice spaces, technology platforms inspired by games and simulations that provide the opportunity for teachers to rehearse for and reflect on important decisions in teaching. In this participatory session, we’ll play samples of some of the practice spaces that we are developing, and discuss the theoretical foundations of our vision for the future of teacher learning.
Justin Reich is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department, and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. As a learning scientist, he investigates the complex, technology-rich classrooms of the future and the systems we need to prepare educators to thrive in those environments.

Engineering Virality: BuzzFeed's Scientific Approach To Creating Content
2017-09-14 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Walter Menendez, Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer at BuzzFeed
If you’ve heard of BuzzFeed, you probably think about our famous articles and quizzes, such as The Dress and Which State Are You Actually From?, as well as our video escapades, such as The Try Guys Try Sexy Halloween Costumes and our famous Watermelon Explosion experiment on Facebook Live. The success of our content might seem accidental, but as a result of BuzzFeed’s experimental approach to producing content, the virality of these posts is actually a very scientific and calculated effort. This talk will detail how BuzzFeed thinks about and creates content, highlighting our paradigms for the function and role of our content. We’ll also discuss the software stack that supports this experimental loop, as BuzzFeed also employs a variety of technologies to build an analytics layer. Included in that tech discussion will also be an overview of the metrics and signals BuzzFeed is interested in once content is live. Along the way, we’ll highlight some of the Comparative Media Studies learnings Walter employs on a daily basis to thrive in the BuzzFeed content ecosystem.
Walter Menendez is a Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer at BuzzFeed, based in New York. He is an MIT alum of the class of 2015, having majored in Computer Science and Engineering (Course 6-3). While at MIT, he concentrated in Comparative Media Studies, as well as having done undergraduate research in various Media Lab groups (Fluid Interfaces, Laboratory for Social Machines). At BuzzFeed, he is responsible for the development and maintanence of all of BuzzFeed’s data collection, from on-site impression collection to data warehousing solutions, empowering the analytical approach that BuzzFeed uses for the content creation cycle.

Platforms in the Public Interest: Lessons from Minitel
2017-09-21 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Julien Mailland (Indiana University) and Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia)
Platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook dominate the internet today, providing private infrastructures for public culture. These systems are so massive that it’s easy to forget that the digital world was not always like this. More than two decades before widespread Internet access, millions of people in France were already online, chatting, gaming, buying, selling, searching, and flirting. This explosion of digital culture came via Minitel, a simple video terminal provided for free to anyone with a telephone line. After thirty years in service, Minitel offers a wealth of data for thinking about internet policy and an alternative model for the internet’s future: a public platform for private innovation.
Julien Mailland studies telecommunications networks design, law, and policy through the lens of history. He is an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University’s Media School, a research associate with the Computer History Museum Internet History Program, and a lawyer with the fintech industry.
Kevin Driscoll studies popular culture and computing. His research builds alternative models for platform governance and online community from the internet of the 1980s and 1990s. Recent projects examine dial-up BBSs in the US and Minitel in France. Kevin is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

The Mediated Construction of Reality: from Berger and Luckmann to Norbert Elias
2017-09-28 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick CouldryProfessor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science
In this talk Nick Couldry outlines the project of his recent book, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity October 2016, co-written with Andreas Hepp). The book offers a critical reevaluation and rearticulation of the social constructivist ambitions of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality while radically rethinking the implications of this for a world saturated not just with digital media, but with data processes. Couldry outlines how a materialist phenomenology can draw not just on traditional phenomenology, but on the social theory of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of figurations, to address the challenges of social analysis in the face of datafication. Elias, Couldry argues, is a particularly important theorist on whom to draw in making social constructivism ready to face the deep embedding of the social world with digital technologies, and more than that, to outline the challenges for social order of such a world. More broadly, Couldry will argue for a reengagement of media theory with the broader tradition of social theory in the era of Big Data, in the face of a radical expansion of what media are and how mediation is embedded in everyday social orders.
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab, and during 2017-2018 a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. He is the author or editor of twelve books including most recently The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Ethics of Media (2013 Palgrave, coedited with Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevski), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage 2010).

Ecological Criticism in the Age of the Database
2017-10-12 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London
The ecological principle that everything connects with everything else should be a perfect match for the network principle of contemporary digital communications. But there is a problem that comes with the arrival very large, proprietorial databases. This is partly to do with the sheer number of images and videos produced and circulated, partly to do with the form they are stored in, and partly because their dynamics share at least as much with contemporary capitalism as with the natural environment. New analytical tools for dealing with big data promise to reform classical humanities methods so we can conform our research to this new kind of object. In this paper Sean Cubitt asserts the value of anecdotal evidence against the rise of statistics, but at the same time wants to confront the difficulties in bringing about an encounter between readers (human or otherwise) and the mass image constructed by social media and search giants.
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications includeThe Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of Light: Genealogies of Visual Media and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology. Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his current research is on political aesthetics, media technologies, media art history and ecocriticism.

Mapping Climate Change: Contested Futures in New York City’s Flood Zone
2017-10-19 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Liz Koslov, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT
As seas rise, coasts erode, deserts spread, and permafrost melts, climate change is altering everyday life in many places. Even with immediate, drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, sufficient warming is already “baked in” to ensure ongoing disruption. What this disruption will look like, however, depends not only on the extent of global warming and its effects but also on the way these effects and their attendant risks are measured, mapped, and managed. In this talk, we will explore how certain places come to be seen as “at risk” in anticipation of climate change, and what this way of seeing means for their inhabitants. Drawing on fieldwork over four years in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the talk will focus on the fraught development and implementation of new FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) flood maps for New York City, where hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars in property now lie in the high-risk flood zone.
Liz Koslov is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT and holds a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU. Her research examines the cultural, political, and social dimensions of climate change adaptation. She is currently at work on her first book, Retreat: Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate-Changed City, under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Cloud Policy: Anatomy of a Regulatory Crisis
2017-10-26 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jennifer Holt, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jennifer Holt examines the legal and cultural crises surrounding the regulation of data in “the cloud.” The complex landscape of laws and policies governing digital data are currently rife with unresolvable conflicts. The challenges of distributing and protecting digital data in a policy landscape that is simultaneously local, national, and global have created problems that often defy legal paradigms, national boundaries, and traditional geographies of control. She examines these challenges with an eye towards their shared histories with obscene phone calls, wiretapping organized crime figures, the PATRIOT Act, Facebook, and the battles over net neutrality. Ultimately, these intertwined histories of policies related to privacy, data security, and digital freedoms become most instructive when they are brought to bear on the current regulatory crisis, revealing the growing stakes for the digital futures of culture, information, and citizenship.
Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Empires of Entertainment and co-editor of Distribution Revolution; Connected Viewing; and Media Industries: History, Theory, Method. She is currently writing a monograph about the history of US digital media policies. She is also a co-founder of the Media Industries journal.
