MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

18th Annual Salute to Dr. Seuss
2008-01-21 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | MA
Gather around, boys and girls of all ages, for a celebration of the sublime and wacky world of Doctor Seuss. You will hear Prof. Henry Jenkins read from his works and talk about Seuss’s relationship to Modern Art and popular culture. We will also screen his remarkable live action feature film, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. An MIT Tradition marches forward.

GAMBIT Game Lab Tour
2008-01-18 17:30 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This event is a guided tour of the new MIT-GAMBIT videogame laboratory. Interested participants are asked to gather in the lobby of 5 Cambridge Center at 3:30PM on Friday January 18th 2008 when they will be escorted to the 3rd floor. The tour concludes with our weekly Friday Games at GAMBIT where you will have a chance to play some of the newest videogames available and meet GAMBIT staff and students. Refreshments will be served.

Qualitative Research Workshop
2008-01-16 18:00 - 2008-01-31 18:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 135, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Joshua Green and Grant McCracken
This course will provide students with an introduction to qualitative research. Working in small teams, students will design and conduct a qualitative project designed to propose strategy for media and cultural organizations – an indicative project would look at ways to revitalize PBS to keep pace with participatory culture. Students will receive an intensive introduction to planning and conducting qualitative research including ethnographic and participant observation methods based on real world case studies.

Jaroslav Švelch: "Czech Underground Rock Music: Forbidden Fandom"
2008-01-14 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 132, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jaroslav Švelch
Account of Czech underground rock music of the 60s, 70s and 80s when rock music was considered suspicious and counterrevolutionary by the communist government. The bands and fans were operating illegally or semi-illegally which gave rise to specific models of fan communities. Features rare audio and historical documentation to show the cultural context of media during that period.

GAMBIT Videogame Lecture Series
2008-01-14 - 2008-01-18 | MIT Building 2, Room 151, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Members of Comparative Media Studies’ GAMBIT Research Staff will deliver from 2-3PM each day a different videogame-based lecture.
Monday 14 Jan Storytelling in Games: The Adventure Game Genre
Tuesday 15 Jan Once More With Meaning: Expanding the Emotional and Thematic Scope of Digital Games
Wednesday 16 Jan Bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms
Thursday 17 What is the Casual in Casual Games?
Friday 18 Jan We’re Swimming in Blood and We Feel Fine: Czech Gaming Culture of the Early 90’s
Contact: Philip Tan, NE25-367, x4-9129, philip@mit.edu
Clara Fernandez-Vara
Storytelling in Games: The Adventure Game Genre
Mon Jan 14, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Doris Rusch
Once More With Meaning: Expanding the Emotional and Thematic Scope of
Digital Games
Tue Jan 15, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Pilar Lacasa
Bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms
Wed Jan 16, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Jesper Juul
What is the Casual in Casual Games?
Thu Jan 17, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Jaroslav Svelch
We’re Swimming in Blood and We Feel Fine: Czech Gaming Culture of the Early 90’s
Fri Jan 18, 02-03:00pm, 2-151

Futures of Entertainment 2
2007-11-16 - 2007-11-17 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment 2
The logics of convergence culture are quickly becoming ubiquitous within the media world. Audiences are being encouraged to participate in a wider range of sites. Transmedia principles are being adopted by content producers in a broad range of fields. ‘Engagement’ is being discussed as crucial to measurements of success. Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations.

Moby-Dick Performance and Conference
2007-05-10 | Mixed Magic Theatre, 500 Mineral Spring Avenue, Pawtucket, RI, United States

Love May Not Be in the Afternoon Anymore: A Q&A with Soap Opera Writer Kay Alden About How the Genre Is (and/or Should Be) Changing with the Times
2007-05-02 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 146, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kay Alden
Longtime soap opera writer Kay Alden will talk with about her decades in the industry with CMS graduate student Sam Ford ’07 who is writing his thesis about soap operas. Alden worked for more than 30 years on The Young and the Restless, the top-rated daytime drama that she served as head writer for from 1998 to 2006. Recently, she took on a consulting position with ABC Daytime and continues working with the genre during what is seen as a period of substantial change for the daytime television industry. Ford’s thesis, “As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment,” focuses on the shifting technologies and cultural patterns that are affecting daytime television.

Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age
2007-04-27 - 2007-04-29 | MA
Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age
Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Of course, the idea that artists build on earlier traditions or that new texts speak to and about earlier texts is scarcely a new idea. This fifth Media in Transition conference aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices.

CMS Media Spectacle
2007-04-23 19:00 | MIT Stata Center, Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In honor of Chris Pomiecko, the former program administrator of Comparative Media Studies.
The event showcases films, videos, video podcasts, and mobisodes produced by MIT (and Wellesley) affiliates, staff, students and faculty. In a multitude of styles, subjects, and duration.
At the end of the evening the best undergraduate submission will receive the Chris Pomiecko prize.
Free and open to the general public!
PUNCH AND PIE!
For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617 53 5038
generoso AT mit DOT edu

Michael Cuthbert: "Ambiguity, Process, and Information Content in Minimal Music"
2007-04-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Cuthbert
Recent trends in music composition push bounds by creating pieces which are either more complex or simpler than works of the past. And yet, our ability to understand and be interested in the compositions at these extremes has kept pace. In this talk, Michael Cuthbert will show how simple minimalist processes give rise to highly ambiguous structures, while many of the most complex moments are reducible to easier to comprehend processes. The effect of potentially endless works–including sections of Beethoven symphonies–will generalize the talk to other musical styles and other media. Cuthbert, visiting assistant professor of music at MIT, has worked extensively on fourteenth-century music and on music of the past 40 years. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy, Cuthbert earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.

10 Things You Won't Like About Professional Game Development
2007-04-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Weise is an MIT/Comparative Media Studies alum who has been working since his 2004 graduation in the mobile games industry.
There will be a Q & A Session with Matt Weise after the lecture.

MIT European Short Film Festival 2007
2007-04-13 - 2007-04-15 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s Third European Short Film Festival offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe. This year’s topics are:

New Identities/Social Realities
Transformations
Mitteleuropa/Central Europe

The festival is co-sponsored by Foreign Languages and Literatures, Comparative Media Studies, and several European cultural institutions. The films for the festival are selected by a group of humanities faculty and CMS graduate students.
All films will be shown in Room 10-250, the programs start at 7:00 pm.
Free Admission – All films with English subtitles.
We look forward to seeing you at the festival.
For further information please see the festival website or contact the festival organizer, Kurt Fendt.

Evangelicals and the Media
2007-04-05 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. In this Forum, our speakers discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement’s use of media technologies. Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to James Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family (www.family.org). Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. The Forum will be moderated by the Rev. Amy McCreath, MIT’s Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT (web.mit.edu/tac).

"This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker": A Q&A with WWE's "Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross
2007-03-22 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 370, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
“Good Ol’ J.R.” Jim Ross
Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.
NOTE: This is the first of two colloquia about American professional wrestling being organized this term by Sam Ford ’07. Ford is teaching a spring class on the pro wrestling industry and is a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He is a weekly columnist for the Ohio County Times-News in Hartford, Ky., and performs in pro wrestling events on occasion. A third colloquium on April 26 with Sharon Mazer will also examine aspects of wrestling.

Old World, New World: How Communities, Culture, Connectivity, and Commerce are Changing How We Create Culture, Media, Education and Politics
2007-03-15 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alan Moore
Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing.

Girls-Games-Japan: Why it is different to be a female gamer in Japan and how we can make a change in the West.
2007-03-13 17:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Barbara Lippe
Women’s culture has existed for centuries in Japan. Today, it extensively shapes Japan’s popular culture – even its game industry. Gender-blending, androgyny and the challenging of gender roles lie at the core of specific game genres produced by and for females in Japan. Whereas in the West most professional attempts to address a larger number of female gamers and to engage a greater female workforce in the game industry have failed, Avaloop – an independent game development studio in Austria – is about to change this profoundly. By taking the global de-disneyfication into account and employing female creative leads, its game Papermint has not only already gained a large fanbase of non-traditional gamers but even manages to blend games with the notion of bourgeois “high culture”. Papermint’s success is based on its practical realisation of Barbara’s research on Japanese gaming and girl culture, as well as the game’s wholly original artistic concept created by a diverse team.
About the Speaker
Dr. Barbara Lippe is the lead artist at the Vienna-based game development studio Avaloop Ltd, currently working on Austria's first virtual world. Barbara previously worked as a character artist at the Tokyo-based design company FuriFuri Co. Her unique characters were published in the character design encyclopedia Pictoplasma by Die Gestalten Verlag. Her art has been exhibited in London, Damascus, Budapest, Seoul, Singapore and San Francisco. She was a juror for the Golden Nica Award of the Ars Electronica Festival in 2002 and a columnist for CONSOL.AT, the leading Austrian video game magazine. Recently, she has been elected into the organising committee of the Nordic Game, the largest game developers' conference in Scandinavia. Barbara holds a Master’s degree in multimedia art and a PhD in cultural studies with a doctoral dissertation on girls, video games and Japan titled "Game Boys for Play Girls!". She hosts discussions and workshops in Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. Her academic and job-related interests include virtual characters, fan cultures, user-generated content, global youth scenes, leisure behaviour and gender, as well as game scenes and markets in Asia.

Many Eyes: A Site for Social Data Analysis
2007-03-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
While visualization is traditionally viewed as an efficient way of transferring a large amount of information from a database into an individual’s head, we believe that visualizations become far more powerful when multiple people access them for collaborative sense-making. To test this hypothesis, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab recently launched Many Eyes, a website devoted to a new social style of data analysis and visualization. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg will discuss the design goals behind the site and provide a preliminary report on the usage patterns we have seen. Viegas is a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab where her work focuses on social and collaborative aspects of data visualization. Previous projects explored e-mail archives, newsgroup conversations, chat-room interactions, and the editing history of wiki pages. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Wattenberg, also a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab, focuses on information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, and art. Wattenberg’s visualization artwork has been exhibited in venues ranging from Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Converging Media: Games, Literacy and Culture Research Fair
2007-02-22 17:00 | Stata Center, 1st Floor, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
What do Yahoo!, Shakespeare, GPS, Bullet time, Spacewar and MIT have in common?
CMS!
Yahoo! … along with MTV, GSDM, Turner Broadcasting and Fidelity with the Convergence Culture Consortium respond to the demands of a new media landscape and an empowered client base;
Shakespeare … early comics, modern dance and the citizens of Berlin are among the many topics explored in the rich multi-media data bases of MetaMedia and Repertory
GPS … is one of many technologies that we us in handheld gaming applications, all part of our exploration of computer games for education in the Education Arcade
Bullet time… and other special film effects, comic book production, dj-ing, graffiti, and other media expressions come into focus in Project New Media Literacies.
Spacewar … is where computer gaming all began at MIT, and now it moves into a new generation with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
Join us to explore the many facets of research on cutting-edge digital games, media literacy, innovative humanities databases, and redefined corporate/consumer relations now underway in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. Faculty, staff and students will be on hand to showcase their work and answer questions about their latest findings. Refreshments will be served.

Remixing Shakespeare
2007-02-15 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
New technologies are enabling forms of borrowing, appropriation and “remixing” of media materials in exciting, provocative ways. In this Forum, two MIT scholars who have studied and written about the remixing of Shakespeare will describe their research, show some salient audio-visual examples and discuss the implications of their work for contemporary culture. Literature Professor Peter Donaldson is director of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive which since 1992 has used computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production. Literature Professor Diana Henderson is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. She is an active participant in MIT’s partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The forum will be moderated by Mary Fuller of the Literature Faculty.

International Blogging Breakfast
2007-02-02 19:00 | Tan Hall Lounge, 550 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join our discussion with Chinese Students through MSN IMS. Please email team researchers Jin Liwen or Shi Song if you would like to participate.
Goal:
Our goal is to get to know new friends and learn more about each other. Also we hope to study the media communication tools and the style of conversation on MSN IMS.
See Project GoodLuck for more information

Is This On? (Learn To Be a College DJ)
2007-01-31 18:00 | MIT Building 50, Room 030, 142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Checking levels, making a segue, cueing vinyl (vinyl-what’s that?)
Get to know your campus radio station (WMBR) as DJ Generoso teaches you various skills of doing a radio show. Then, learn some history of WMBR (the first punk rock radio show in the USA), have a tour of the station and obtain membership information.
Freshly baked cookies and milk will be provided because Andy would’ve wanted it that way.

Make Zombie Madness!
2007-01-23 18:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 246, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Grab your friends, practice your growling and prepare yourself for making ZOMBIE MADNESS. Join award-winning independent filmmakers Kristina Drzaic and Neal Grigsby as they lead you through scripting, makeup, learn how to make special f/x gore and shooting your very own zombie movie. This will be a hands-on make-a-film-in-a-day class.

PULSE: American Music and Poetry from 1950 to 1970
2007-01-22 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 246, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This is a two-hour single session designed to discuss the parallel relationships between the American music and poetry from the 1950s to 70s.
By the early fifties, as part of the postwar development of consumer society, a strange pulse had set in the music scene to bring about muzak or elevator music. As if to reflect this new trend, poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman started to write, almost on the same pulse, quasi-sonnet sequences.
In the late sixties, a more experimental type of pulse music was invented by such composers as Terry Riley and Steve Reich to be later labeled as minimalism. Again, the poetry caught up due to the efforts of John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons who wrote deliberately monotonous and distinctly open-ended sequences.
Some excerpts of poems will be read, some parts of music heard.

"Translation" in Transmediation: Exploring the Metaphor
2007-01-22 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 132, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Transferring narratives from one medium to another is often either likened to the process of translation or just plainly called translation, the latter being used as a synonym to “transmediation”. During this two-hour class with Ksenia Prassolova, we will concentrate on further exploring this metaphor; by looking at the key translation techniques we will try to understand how to better tell our stories across media.

Documentary Filmmaking: A One Day Survival Guide
2007-01-11 18:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 124, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Documentary filmmaker Generoso Fierro takes you through a one time class where you will learn the basics of shooting a documentary film on mini dv, editing and getting it seen. Learn how to navigate through the murky waters of copyright issues regarding still images and music to creating a release. Learn quick editing techniques, dvd mastering and an easy festival submission process so that your work can be seen.

Paper and panel proposal deadline for fifth Media in Transition conference!
2007-01-05 | MA
The fifth Media in Transition conference, MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital
age, will be held April 27-29, 2007 at MIT.
The deadline for submitting a paper or panel proposal is Jan. 5, 2007.
See the call for papers at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5.

CMS Online Information Session
2006-12-13 10:00 | MA
Fall 2006 CMS Information Sessions
Please contact the CMS office at cms@mit.edu or 617-253-3599 to reserve a space.
Frequently asked questions about CMS

Men Imagining a Girl Revolution
2006-11-29 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Men Imagining a Girl Revolution with Sharon Kinsella. At various points in the twentieth century, male novelists, journalists, intellectuals, artists, editors and cultured men have become fascinated by the lives and characters of single women and their potential for prostitution and revolution. In this presentation, Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player
2006-11-28 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 136, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.
Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.
This lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Project New Media Literacies.
