MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations
2015-04-03 09:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Student Center Mezzanine Lounge, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139
Watch live!

Thesis Presentations
of the

Comparative Media Studies Graduate Class of 2015
April 3, 2014
MIT Student Center Mezzanine Lounge
9:00 Coffee and Conversation

9:15 Presentations by:

Chelsea Barabas Mirror Mirror on the Wall: A Study of Bias and Perceptions of Merit in the High-tech Labor Market

Desiree Gonzalez Museum Making: Creating with Emerging Technologies in Art Museums

Liam Andrew The Missing Links: An Archaeology of Digital Journalism

Heather Craig Interactive Data Storytelling: Designing for Public Engagement

Jesse Sell E-sports Broadcasting Conventions

12:30 Lunch Break

1:30 Presentations by:

Sean Flynn Evaluating Interactive Documentaries: Audience, Impact, and Innovation in Public Interest Media

Wang Yu Heike, Jike, Chuangke: Creativity in Chinese Technology Communities

Suruchi Dumpawar Mediating Open Government Data: Using Data to Drive Changes in the Built Environment

Ainsley Sutherland Digital Art, Immersion and Empathy: Evaluating Games and Digital Media Art for Engendering Mutual Understanding

Erik Stayton Driverless Dreams: Narratives, Ideologies, and the Shape of the Automated Car
This event is free and open to the public. It will also be streamed live on Ustream.tv.

Thesis Presentations: Comparative Media Studies Graduate Class of 2015
2015-04-03 09:00 - 16:30 | MIT Student Center, Mezzanine Lounge, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, 02139, United States
This event is free and open to the public, and you may watch a live feed. You are welcome to attend as many or as few presentations as you wish.
9:00 Coffee and Conversation
9:15 Morning Presentations

Chelsea Barabas: “Mirror Mirror on the Wall: A Study of Bias and Perceptions of Merit in the High-tech Labor Market”
Desiree Gonzalez: “Museum Making: Creating with Emerging Technologies in Art Museums”
Liam Andrew: “The Missing Links: An Archaeology of Digital Journalism”
Heather Craig: “Interactive Data Storytelling: Designing for Public Engagement”
Jesse Sell: “E-sports Broadcasting Conventions”

12:30 Lunch Break
1:30 Afternoon Presentations

Sean Flynn: “Evaluating Interactive Documentaries: Audience, Impact, and Innovation in Public Interest Media”
Wang Yu: “Heike, Jike, Chuangke: Creativity in Chinese Technology Communities”
Suruchi Dumpawar: “Mediating Open Government Data: Using Data to Drive Changes in the Built Environment”
Ainsley Sutherland: “Digital Art, Immersion and Empathy: Evaluating Games and Digital Media Art for Engendering Mutual Understanding”
Erik Stayton: “Driverless Dreams: Narratives, Ideologies, and the Shape of the Automated Car”

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

Sandra Gaudenzi: "Digital Me Demo & Feedback Session"
2015-03-20 10:00 - 11:30 | MA
Imagine if the digital persona you have been creating all these years while socialising online wanted to speak to you. What could you discover about each other? Digital Me, an interactive documentary, is a private experience that uses personalization to make you reflect on your multiple and hybrid (digital/physical) personalities while guaranteeing you the ownership of the data that is retrieved about yourself.
Digital Me is a project by Sandra Gaudenzi and Helios Design Labs that is currently in concept development with BBC Learning.
Sandra Gaudenzi has started her career as a television producer. She then moved into interactive television, and has been teaching interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) from 1999 till 2013. She is now Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England. Her research interests include interactive documentary, participatory practices, UX in i-docs, transmedia storytelling, locative experiences and games for change. Sandra is one of the conveners of i-Docs, a conference totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, that she initiated in 2011 and she is a creative director of its website, http://i-docs.org/ and Facebook group. She currently blogs at www.interactivefactual.net and is the author of www.interactivedocumentary.net, a blog that she started in 2009 in order to document her own experience of doing a PhD at Goldsmiths (University of London).

Coming of Age in Dystopia: The Darkness of Young Adult Fiction
2015-03-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Why are brutal dystopias, devastating apocalyptic visions, and tales of personal trauma such a staple of young adult literature? Kristin Cashore, author of the award-winning Graceling Realm trilogy, and the University of Florida’s Kenneth Kidd will explore the history and current preoccupations of one of the most popular forms of fiction today. Marah Gubar, an associate professor in MIT’s Literature department, will moderate.

Sandra Gaudenzi: "From Interaction to Personalization: What Happens When We Become Part of the Story"
2015-03-19 14:00 - 15:30 | MA
It took about 15 years to accept that the documentaries of the 21st century might be “interactive”. Moving from a linear media to a non linear one has challenged the role of the author in the creative treatment of actuality – as subjects and the users are now directly involved in such creation. But a new shift is about to disturb our idea of what a narrative is: the oculus rift places us in a world that composes itself in real time while we are exploring it, and data mining allows us to personalise stories to their final users. What happens to our understanding of reality when we become the protagonists of hypothetical worlds?
Sandra Gaudenzi has started her career as a television producer. She then moved into interactive television, and has been teaching interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) from 1999 till 2013. She is now Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England. Her research interests include interactive documentary, participatory practices, UX in i-docs, transmedia storytelling, locative experiences and games for change. Sandra is one of the conveners of i-Docs, a conference totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, that she initiated in 2011 and she is a creative director of its website, http://i-docs.org/ and Facebook group. She currently blogs at www.interactivefactual.net and is the author of www.interactivedocumentary.net, a blog that she started in 2009 in order to document her own experience of doing a PhD at Goldsmiths (University of London).

The Art, Ethics and Technology of Documentary Co-Creation
2015-03-18 17:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
With the Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology:

Katerina Cizek, Documentary Director, National Film Board of Canada, and MIT Visiting Artist
Andrew Lowenthal, Open Documentary Lab Fellow and Co-Founder of EngageMedia
Mandy Rose, Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of West England, Bristol UK
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media and principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab

As new forms of media, networks and devices emerge throughout history, documentarians are always at the forefront of discovering how to tell stories with them. From the first newsreels, to the latest Virtual Reality installations, non-fiction creators are the first to introduce their audiences and users to novel ways of interacting, immersing and collaborating in new environments while interpreting reality. How can these new technologies change the documentary creator’s relationship to the “people formerly known as subjects”? How can new models of co-creation redefine not just the form of the story itself but the methods by which we create them? How can documentaries be made “with” people instead of “about” them? This panel examines the history and potential for documentarians to co-create with citizens, social scientists, technologists and performing artists, with the aim to both create artful meaning and foster concrete political action.

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

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

Women in Science
2015-02-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and energy studies expert Jessika Trancik will discuss their careers and the outlook for women in science in the 21st century. Sabeti, an associate professor at Harvard and a senior associate member of the Broad Institute, and Trancik, an assistant professor in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, are both rising stars in the research world. They will be in discussion with Rosalind Williams, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT.

Gonzalo Frasca: “Play, Videogames and Education Reform”
2015-02-23 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
No, videogames are not going to change the school system. Unfortunately, the majority of educational games cater to the fears of parents and administrators rather than to the children’s needs. How should we create games that are both useful and effective inside and outside the classroom?
Gonzalo Frasca
Gonzalo Frasca is now making math games at okidOkO. A while ago, he sort of invented newsgames, wrote videogame and play theory, made tons of webgames for Hollywood animation studios, got Ph.D. in videogames and even co-created the first official videogame for a US Presidential election. He calls Uruguay home and teaches game development to a bunch of merry kids at ORT University and Liceo Jubilar.

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

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

Collaborative Insights through Digital Annotation: A Workshop
2015-01-23 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Rethinking the Connections between Annotation, Reading, & Writing
To register, please sign up here.
Instructors and students in the humanities and the liberal arts increasingly work in an electronically supported and extended world of multimedia texts. Digital archives, online media repositories, and new tools for creating digital content have not only changed the way students interact with cultural content, they have also radically changed the landscape within which learning can take place. Digital content has broken down the barriers separating traditional learning environments such as the solitary scholar, the library, and the classroom. Access to digitally based knowledge and cultural content with opportunities for new learning environments requires instructors to reevaluate their existing pedagogical methods and their roles in the classroom. Instructors are faced with the challenge of how to respond to this shift, how to innovate and redesign their roles and curricula.
In this workshop, we investigate one possible solution to this challenge: digital annotation. Digital annotation brings the long humanistic tradition of annotation, one of John Unsworth’s “scholarly primitives,” into contemporary electronic media. Within a digital learning environment, annotation allows for a new form of interactive reading, one that can seamlessly transition between traditional forms of solitary highlighting or note taking to collaborative close reading or shared discussions about particular passages. Participants in this workshop will discuss the opportunities digital annotation tools create for new forms of social engagement with the text, for students to share ideas, interpretations, references, sources, adaptations, or other related media with peers and other readers that significantly change the way students acquire and produce knowledge.
The keynote speaker will be John Bryant, Professor of English at Hofstra University. Professor Bryant received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of several books and over 60 articles on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, scholarly editing, and digital scholarship. The former Editor of the Melville Society (1990-2013), he created and edited Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, which was designated CELJ’s Best New Journal of 2000 (runner up). His book Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008) draws upon his online fluid-text edition, titled Herman Melville’s Typee, appearing in the Rotunda electronic imprint (University of Virginia, 2006), which was the second electronic edition to be awarded the MLA-CSE seal of approval. His other books include A Companion to Melville Studies, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (Oxford 1993), and The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Michigan, 2002). He has published several editions of Melville works, including Typee (Penguin), The Confidence-Man (Random House), Melville’s Tales, Poems, and Other Writings (Modern Library), and the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. He is currently working on a critical biography titled Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and on the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online critical archive designated as a “We the People” project. In 2013, he was appointed Director of Hofstra’s new Digital Research Center. In 2014, he taught America literature during the spring semester at the University of Rome (Sapienza) on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he sailed on the restored 19th-century whaling craft Charles W. Morgan as part of his Melville biography research.
Program (preliminary)
Friday, January 23, 2015
MIT, Building 66, Room 110
8:30 am Coffee
9:00 am Introduction by Kurt Fendt, Executive Director of HyperStudio, MIT
9:15 am Keynote Address by John Bryant, Professor of English, Hofstra University
10:15 am Panel #1 Digital Annotation and the Writing Process

Suzanne Lane, Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric and Communication, and Director of the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program, MIT
Mary Isbell, Assistant Professor of English & Director of First-Year Writing Program, University of New Haven
Alex Mueller, Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston

11:15 am Breakout Sessions
12:30 pm Lunch
Lunch will be provided (Swissbäkers)
1:30 pm Future Directions of Annotation Studio with Jamie Folsom, Leader Developer at HyperStudio, MIT
1:45 pm Panel #2 Digital Annotation and the Reading Process

Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature, MIT
Ina Lipkowitz, Lecturer in Literature, MIT
Roberto Rey Agudo, Lecturer in Global Studies and Languages, MIT
Ethna D. Lay, Assistant Professor, Hofstra University

2:45 pm Breakout Sessions
4:00 pm Andreas Karastolis, Associate Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, MIT
4:30 pm Conclusion
To register, please sign up here.

Knitting for Programmers
2015-01-20 - 2015-01-21 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Image by Flickr user anna banana
Jan/20 Tue 01:00PM-04:00PM
Jan/21 Wed 01:00PM-04:00PM
Enrollment: Advance sign-up appreciated but not required
If you ever wanted to know the link between knitting and programming this is the workshop for you. A knitting pattern is actually a more or less complex algorithm with the difference being that the output is directly wearable like 3D printing. The 1st day we will review fundamentals, learn basics and start a small project (hat, scarf or bag depending on skills), and the 2nd day we will work on the project. Students will have to get their own supplies but can contact the instructor for help in type/quantities of wool and needles.
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Marie-Jose Montpetit, mariejo@mit.edu

A Conversation about Digital Humanities: What's It All About?
2015-01-14 15:00 - 16:30 | MIT Building 14N, Room 217, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Wondering what the chatter is about digital humanities (DH)? Come ask questions and share what you know. Let’s talk about the impact of computation on the humanities, about where it can takes us, and about what it means to use this lens on our scholarship. And who’s doing what where in DH at MIT?
Contact: Patsy Baudoin, 14S-140M, 617 253-4979, PATSY@MIT.EDU

Disney Fairies Film Series
2015-01-07 - 2015-01-16 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Tan, Research Scientist
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Prereq: None
The “Disney Fairies” series launched in 2005 with new novels based on the tales of Peter Pan. From the novels and plays of J.M. Barrie and the animated films by Walt Disney Productions, Newbery Honor author Gail Carson Levine developed an elaborate mythology for the fairies of Neverland. The lead character, Tinker Bell, moved from “Disney Princess” marketing efforts into a separate franchise of chapter books, comics, and merchandise. Following Disney’s purchase of Pixar, direct-to-DVD productions of Disney Fairies were restarted and debuted with the 3D computer-animated film “Tinker Bell” in 2008.
While visually consistent with Disney’s earlier interpretations of Neverland, some may find the characterization and the tone of the films surprising. Barrie’s century-old “common pots-and-pans fairy” is reinterpreted as a titular heroine with a unique talent for invention and engineering. Most of the films revolve around Tinker Bell’s ability to construct incredible machines and her irrepressible drive to find and fix “lost things.” The mostly-female cast is generally portrayed as being extremely competent and working collectively to solve problems, even as the films fall back on formulaic personality conflicts.
Children with adult supervision are welcome. Each screening will be followed by an optional, moderated discussion with participants, which may venture into playful, activist, academic or headcanon topics.
This event aims to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone.
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Philip Tan, 26-149, 617 324-9129, PHILIP@MIT.EDU

Screening times

Jan/07
Wed
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Tinker Bell

Jan/09
Fri
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure

Jan/12
Mon
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue

Jan/14
Wed
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Pixie Hollow Games & Secret of the Wings

Jan/16
Fri
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, The Pirate Fairy

Children are welcome to the screenings (with adult supervision, please!)

Optional Discussion

Jan/07
Wed
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/09
Fri
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/12
Mon
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/14
Wed
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/16
Fri
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

A moderated discussion and critique of the themes, representation, development, marketing, problems and solutions presented by the Tinker Bell films and media franchise. The session will start after a 10-minute intermission after the screening. Participation in the discussion is completely optional.

Documentaries, Journalism, and the Future of Reality-Based Storytelling
2014-12-05 08:00 - 17:00 | MA
Documentary and journalism have a complicated relationship. They share commitments to reality-based storytelling, yet have distinctive legacies and institutional histories. They share technologies, vocabularies and modes of address, yet have different notions of time, from the ‘now’ of breaking news to the ‘timeless’ status of classic documentaries. At a moment when the Internet has emerged as a platform common to print and broadcast journalism as well as new forms of interactive and participatory documentary, complication seems more like confusion. One might try to clarify the situation by disambiguating these genres, solidifying their boundaries. We seek instead to make productive use of the situation by taking advantage of their commonalities, finding ways to re-invent and re-invigorate both documentary and journalism, in the process expanding their audiences and enhancing their relevance. Documentaries have demonstrated the advantages of synergistic thinking, finding a new place and new publics through digital journalism portals. But what can new forms of documentary contribute back to journalism? To answer that question, we have to think critically and creatively about the affordances of these different traditions in light of their new ecosystem.

Raney Aronson – Executive Producer, FRONTLINE
Francesca Panetta – The Guardian Multimedia Special Projects Editor
Katerina Cizek – National Film Board of Canada, documentary director
Jason Spingarn-Kopf – New York Times Op-Docs Editor
Moderator: William Uricchio – MIT

Making Computing Strange: Cultural Analytics and Phantasmal Media
2014-12-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lev Manovich, the author of the seminal The Language of New Media, MIT’s Fox Harrell, who recently published Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, and MIT’s Nick Montfort will examine the ways in which computational models can be used in cultural contexts for everything from analyzing media to imagining new ways to represent ourselves.

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-11-21 15:00 - 17:00 | MA
Join us at 3pm on November 21, here at cmsw.mit.edu! (What time is that where you live?)
JOIN NOW!
It may help to prepare some questions ahead of time. It’s as simple as scanning through the basic info about the graduate program: cmsw.mit.edu/education/comparative-media-studies/masters.

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

On-campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-11-20 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Registration required at Eventbrite.
We will be experimenting with livestreaming this event via Ustream.tv. Tune in to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cms-graduate-information-session at 1:00 pm! We’ll have the comments open so that remote “attendees” can send in questions as we go along.
This event will have ASL translators present, so will be accessible to the Deaf community.

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-10-24 09:00 - 11:00 | MA
Join us at 9am on October 24th, here at cmsw.mit.edu! (What time is that where you live?)
JOIN NOW!
RSVP is not required for online information sessions, though you can sign up for a reminder below.
It may help to prepare some questions ahead of time. It’s as simple as scanning through the basic info about the graduate program: cmsw.mit.edu/education/comparative-media-studies/masters.

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

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

On-campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-10-23 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Registration required at Eventbrite.

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

Documentaries, Journalism, and the Future of Reality-Based Storytelling
2014-10-09 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Documentary and journalism have a complicated relationship. They share commitments to reality-based storytelling, yet have distinctive legacies and institutional histories. They share technologies, vocabularies and modes of address, yet have different notions of time, from the ‘now’ of breaking news to the ‘timeless’ status of classic documentaries. At a moment when the Internet has emerged as a platform common to print and broadcast journalism as well as new forms of interactive and participatory documentary, complication seems more like confusion. One might try to clarify the situation by disambiguating these genres, solidifying their boundaries. We seek instead to make productive use of the situation by taking advantage of their commonalities, finding ways to re-invent and re-invigorate both documentary and journalism, in the process expanding their audiences and enhancing their relevance. Documentaries have demonstrated the advantages of synergistic thinking, finding a new place and new publics through digital journalism portals. But what can new forms of documentary contribute back to journalism? To answer that question, we have to think critically and creatively about the affordances of these different traditions in light of their new ecosystem.

Raney Aronson, deputy executive producer, FRONTLINE
Katerina Cizek, documentary director, National Film Board of Canada
Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York Times Op-Docs editor
Francesca Panetta, Guardian multimedia special projects editor
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT

Helen Nissenbaum, "Resisting Data’s Tyranny with Obfuscation"
2014-10-02 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Helen Nissenbaum
Against inexorable machinations of data surveillance, analysis, and profiling, data obfuscation holds promise of relief. Whether it can withstand countervailing analytics is an intriguing question; whether it is unethical, illegitimate, or, at best, ungenerous cuts close to the bone. Yet, as NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum will argue in this talk, obfuscation is a compelling “weapon-of-the-weak,” which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges countered and mitigated.
Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her work spans social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology and digital media. She has written and edited five books, including Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2014) and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press, 2010) and her research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.
Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Caetlin Benson-Allott, "By Design: Or, What Remote Controls Can Teach Us about the Nature of Control"
2014-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caetlin Benson-Allott
Co-sponsored with MIT Literature.
How does an object set the limits for human experiences of will and subjecthood? How does an interface temper our desires for interactivity or intervention? A remote control appears to exert its user’s will over distant objects, yet the design and function of the device itself instill in its subject a vexed relationship to his or her own agency. Analyzing the technical and design evolution of these devices reveals how the seemingly most inconsequential of media devices have shaped the way users cohabit with mass media, consumer electronics, and each other.
Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and Remote Control (New York: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2015). Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Film Criticism, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video as well as multiple anthologies.
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Philip Napoli, "Media Impact Assessment and Beyond: Thoughts on the Treacherous Task of Quantifying Journalistic Performance"
2014-09-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Napoli, Rutgers University
In recent years, a variety of funders have begun to invest substantially in efforts to assess the impact of media initiatives such as documentary films and journalism ventures. These efforts reflect a fundamental shift in how media performance is assessed (and whose assessments matter) in an environment of extreme audience fragmentation and increased challenges to monetizing media content. This presentation will focus on ongoing research that seeks to define and assess the field of media impact assessment. In addressing these issues, this analysis seeks to:

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

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