Danielle Keats Citron: "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace"
2015-05-07 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Danielle Keats Citron
Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims.
Persistent online attacks disproportionately target women and frequently include detailed fantasies of rape as well as reputation-ruining lies and sexually explicit photographs. And if dealing with a single attacker’s “revenge porn” were not enough, harassing posts that make their way onto social media sites often feed on one another, turning lone instigators into cyber-mobs.
Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Danielle Keats Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.
Citron is Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

On the Politics of Punk Media and Peru
2015-09-17 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
L. Shane GreeneIndiana University
This talk, with L. Shane Greene, presents a theoretical overview of various situations – particularly their political, aesthetic, and media dimensions – that arose in the production of a book about the history of anarchism and punk rock during Peru’s war with the Maoist-inspired armed group known as the Shining Path. Specifically, Greene is interested in how recounting the role of “underground rock” musicians and artists during the war – and from within the aesthetics of punk media – complicates the dominant narratives that describe Peru’s period of political violence and those that drive the story of globalization. The talk will draw from both primary examples from the historical period in question and contemporary ones that emerged from the book project.
Greene is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, where he also serves as director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
This event is co-hosted with MIT Global Studies and Languages.

Hierarchy and Democracy in Modern Japan’s Mass Media Revolution
2015-10-01 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hiromu Nagahara, Associate Professor of History and Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor
Modern Japan experienced what could be described as its first wave of “mass media revolution” in the period stretching from the mid-1920s into the 1930s, when new forms of media industry as well as technology vastly expanded the number of potential consumers of media products. This talk, with Hiromu Nagahara, explores the political implications of this development, especially as it relates to how the rise of mass media reshaped existing social and cultural hierarchies in Japan (and how, in some cases, it didn’t). Based on his current book project, Japan’s Pop Era: Music in the Making of Middle-Class Society, this talk will focus on the life and career of Horiuchi Keizō (M.S. 1923), an MIT grad who found himself in the center of all of this as a prominent composer, critic, radio broadcaster, and publisher.

The Adventures of Ms. Meta: Celebrating the Female Superhero Through Digital Gaming
2015-10-15 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sarah Zaidan
The importance of female superheroes in Western culture cannot be ignored. From Wonder Woman in the 1940s to Captain Marvel in the 2010s, the inspiration and cultural impact these representations of heroism provide fans regardless of gender are undeniable. While there is a wealth of research examining the representation of the female superhero and how this speaks to perceptions of femininity across the past eighty years, its focus is often the prevalence of stereotypical over authentic depictions, and the harmful effects of this on society.
Sarah Zaidan‘s research combines the platforms of video games with the artistic styles and narrative themes of comics and historical fact, culminating in an original game that celebrates the power of the female superhero, and her cultural importance. The game tells the story of Ms. Meta, a contemporary superhero created by the player. As she journeys through time to stop her nemesis’ plans, she will encounter characters drawn from the stories of women and fans from each era, opportunities to challenge preconceived notions of female superheroes, and the ability to change the course of history. The gameplay will be grounded in problem-solving and collaboration, and will incorporate player choices to create ownership and personal relevance.
Dr. Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist and researcher whose work explores how video games and comic books can engage in a dialogue with identity, gender and civic awareness. She is Kingston University London’s first recipient of a Ph.D. by practice in superhero art and history with research findings presented in the form of an award winning video game, The Adventures of MetaMan: The Male Superhero as a Representation of Modern Western Masculinity (1940-2010). She is one of the creators and illustrators of the feminist superhero comic series My So-Called Secret Identity, in collaboration with Batman scholar Dr. Will Brooker and animation artist Susan Shore. Dr. Zaidan teaches video game design at Emerson College and is a research fellow with the Engagement Lab. Her work is characterized by rapid prototyping, iterative design processes and by discovering game systems in everyday life.

From Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor
2015-10-22 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Heather Hendershot
William F. Buckley’s public affairs program Firing Line (PBS, 1966–1999) offered a space for no-holds-barred, honest intellectual combat at its finest. The conservative Buckley hoped to convert viewers, but there was more to it than that. You could actually learn about other points of view, and thereby become a better liberal or a better conservative from watching the show. There is simply no equivalent on TV today. Conservatives have Fox News, liberals have MSNBC, and in more neutral territory we find C-SPAN. Overall, politically oriented broadcasting has become a vast echo chamber (especially on talk radio), with many tuning in largely to have their views confirmed—and to hear the other side vilified. What happened? How did we get from Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor? And how can we possibly fix things? Hendershot’s talk will provide the historical, regulatory, and political context we need in order to begin to address these very difficult questions.
Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media in CMS/W. Her book on Firing Line is forthcoming in the summer of 2016.

Global Internet Development Viewed Through the Net Vitality Lens
2015-10-29 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Stuart N. Brotman
Net Vitality is a new analytic approach to examine ways to sustain long-term Internet vibrancy, both in the United States and around the world, and helps inform future government policies that impact the deployment and adoption of broadband technologies. Unlike other comparative studies that rank countries quantitatively based on a simplistic assessment of broadband speeds, Stuart N. Brotman’s Net Vitality Index, released earlier this year, also measures countries qualitatively to determine how well they are performing in a global competitive environment, gauging the true vitality of a country’s Internet ecosystem.
Based on five years of research, the Net Vitality Index is the first holistic analysis of the global broadband Internet ecosystem, identifying the United States, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France as the top-tier leaders. Unlike the one-dimensional rankings that serve as the basis of most broadband comparative studies, Brotman’s composite metric takes into account 52 factors developed independently to evaluate countries on an apples-to-apples basis. Overarching categories assessed encompass applications, devices, networks, and macroeconomic factors.
Brotman is a faculty member at Harvard Law School and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

CMS Alumni Panel
2015-11-19 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.
Margaret Weigel, ’02
Dan Roy, ’07
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06

Erik Stayton, ’15
Chelsea Barabas, ’15
Here’s who we’ve lined up so far (subject to change as ever):

Margaret Weigel, ’02, who works in digital education: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretweigel/
Dan Roy, ’07, widely known for his games for learning projects: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2512953
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06, who does big data-driven consumer research: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3838774
Erik Stayton, ’15, now a Ph.D. student at MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society: http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/stayton.html
Chelsea Barabas, ’15, the newly minted advisor to the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75805502

The Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project: Documenting South Asian America's Interracial Past
2015-12-03 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor
Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, will discuss his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.
The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo will present a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.

Lisa Parks: "Drone Matters: Vertical Mediation in the Horn of Africa"
2016-02-11 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa ParksUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
Since 2002, the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and CIA have orchestrated a covert drone war from Camp Lemonier in the African country of Djibouti, monitoring and striking alleged al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab suspects in Yemen and Somalia. As a media scholar, UC Santa Barbara’s Lisa Parks is interested both in the discourses that have been used to expose covert US drone interventions and in the ways that drone operations themselves function as technologies of mediation. Drawing upon media such as training manual diagrams, infrared images, Google Earth interfaces, and drone crash scene photos, this talk explores the drone’s mediating work through three registers: the infrastructural, the perceptual, and the forensic. Focusing on maneuvers between the ground and sky, Parks suggest that military drone operations are irreducible to the screen’s display and should be understood as practices of vertical mediation–as practices of communication and materialization that occur dynamically through the vertical field, and, as such, have particular kinds of affects. The talk based on a chapter of her forthcoming book, Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror.
Lisa Parks is Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005) and Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and is co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003), and another in progress entitled Life in the Age of Drones (under contract, Duke UP). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a principal investigator on research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department.

Caroline Jack: "How Facts Survive in Public Service Media"
2016-02-18 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caroline Jack, CMS/W Exchange Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University
Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics.
Caroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.

Vincent Brown: "Designing Histories of Slavery for the Database Age"
2016-02-25 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vincent BrownCharles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University
Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.
Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

A Conversation with Guy Maddin
2016-03-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Installation artist, filmmaker, and director Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin will discuss why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form.
Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007).
In the winter of 2015/16 he and Evan Johnson will launch their major internet interactive work, Seances, which will enable anyone online to “hold séances with” movies fashioned out of fragments of long-lost films.

Ariane Labed From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Maria de Medeiros From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Clara Furey From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Thomas Elsaesser: "Media Archaeology as Symptom"
2016-03-17 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Thomas ElsaesserColumbia University
For nearly one hundred years, the moving image has been discussed primarily from the perspective of photography: organizing our questions and theories around cinema as an ocular dispositif, based on light, projection and transparency, or as a recording dispositif, based on index, imprint and trace. In the age of digital imaging technologies, some of which have little to do with optics, such a history of the moving image seems too narrowly conceived. The broadly based, if loosely defined research field calling itself “media archaeology” not only locates the cinema within more comprehensive media histories, it also investigates apparently obsolete, overlooked, or poorly understood past media practices. The expectation is that by once more “opening up” these pasts, one can enable or envisage a different future. The question then arises: is media archaeology a (viable) disciplinary subject or a (valuable) symptom also of changes in our ideas of history, causality and contingency?
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam and since 2013 has been teaching at Columbia University. Among his most recent books are: The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012) and Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2nd edition 2015, with Malte Hagener). Forthcoming is Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2016).

Lisa Glebatis Perks: "Media Marathoning and Affective Involvement"
2016-03-31 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa Perks, Merrimack College
Although the popular press primarily uses the negatively connoted phrase “binge-watching,” Lisa Glebatis Perks employs the label “media marathoning” to describe viewers’ rapid engagement with a story world. Rather than positioning these media experiences as mindless indulgences, the phrase media marathoning intimates engrossment, effort, and purpose. These media engagement efforts can be rewarded with pleasurable experiences, but they can also lead to feelings of disappointment. Perks draws from discourse gathered from over 100 marathoners to describe some of marathoners’ most common emotional experiences, including anger, empathy, parasocial mourning, nostalgia, and regret. The theme of the talk is that characters become the marathoners’ pseudo-avatars, gaining shape, texture, and life through viewers’ affective investments.
Lisa Glebatis Perks (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Merrimack College. She recently published Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality, which explores the ways readers and viewers become absorbed in a fictive text and dedicate many hours to exploring its narrative contours.

Michael Taussig: "Mooning Texas"
2016-04-07 16:30 | 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 | MA
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.
