MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Doris Sommer, "Welcome Back, to the Humanities as Civic Engagement"
2014-10-16 17:00 (America/New_York) | 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).

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

Alexandre Goncalves '14: Thesis Presentation
2014-06-05 15:00 - 17:00 | MIT Building E14, Room 244, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Please join Alex Gonçalves as he presents his thesis “The Brazilian Networked Public Sphere: the Online Debate on the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet” to the public.

Scientists, Bottle Tops, and Robot Guinea Pigs: Inside the Creative Industries Prototyping Lab
2014-05-15 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building E14, Room 244, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hear what happened when six Comparative Media Studies graduate students went to Lima in April to work with some of Peru’s most promising entrepreneurs in the creative industries.
Rodrigo Davies, Erica Deahl, Julie Fischer, Jason Lipshin, Eduardo Marisca, and Lingyuxiu Zhong facilitated a series of collaborative and interdisciplinary lectures, workshops and design sessions, leading participants through the potentials and challenges of working in the digital creative industries. Through a process of critical technology design, the workshop produced prototypes of tools, media and processes that allow groups and communities to share creative visions — and helped participants develop the knowledge and skills they need to build audiences, make an impact on social issues, and develop sustainable creative ventures.
The projects were presented at a public event at Peru’s Ministry of Culture, and the group hosted a panel at the HASTAC 2014 conference, which was held outside the US for the first time this year.
We’ll be sharing the projects, our insights on the process and plans for the future. Join us!

Philip Jones: "Gaming in Color"
2014-05-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Jones
Gaming in Color is a full length documentary of the story of the queer gaming community, gaymer culture and events, and the rise of LGBTQ themes in video games. A lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer gamer has a higher chance of being mistreated in an online social game. Diverse queer themes in storylines and characters are still mostly an anomaly in the mainstream video game industry. Gaming In Color explores how the community culture is shifting and the industry is diversifying, helping with queer visibility and acceptance of an LGBTQ presence.
Philip Jones is a queer youth and activist, who began in the games industry with journalism and podcasting. He is now best known for his work in directing the video games documentary Gaming in Color which focuses on queer gamers. He also has a hand in other MidBoss projects, currently head of the expo hall and vendor relations for the second GaymerX convention, as well as assistant writer for upcoming adventure game Read Only Memories. When not working on these projects, he studies and wears too much flannel at his home in Texas.

Screening of "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" with director Brian Knappenberger
2014-05-02 18:30 - 21:30 | MA
Tickets required, with limited availability:
The Internet’s Own Boy follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz’s help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz’s groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron’s story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.
The Internet’s Own Boy will be available in theaters and on Demand on July 27th.
Co-hosted by Participant Media, the MIT Center for Civic Media, MIT Open Doc Lab, and the Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Tarleton Gillespie: "Algorithms, and the Production of Calculated Publics"
2014-05-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Tarleton Gillespie, Dept. of Communication, Cornell University; Visiting Researcher, Microsoft Research New England
Algorithms may now be our most important knowledge technologies, “the scientific instruments of a society at large,” (Gitelman) and they are increasingly vital to how we organize human social interaction, produce authoritative knowledge, and choreograph our participation in public life. Search engines, recommendation systems, edge algorithms on social networking sites, and “trend” identification algorithms: these not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and to participate in social and political discourse. In this talk Tarleton Gillespie will highlight one particular dimension of these algorithms, their production of calculated publics: algorithmically produced snapshots of the “public” around us and what most concerns it. Understanding the calculations and motivations behind the production of these calculated publics helps highlight how these algorithms are relevant to our collective efforts to know and be known.
Tarleton Gillespie is an associate professor at Cornell University, in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science. This semester he is a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research, New England. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014), and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (2007), and the co-founder of the scholarly blog at culturedigitally.org.
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2014 Media Spectacle
2014-04-28 18:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Showcasing video projects created by MIT students, staff, faculty and affiliates.
Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction/Documentary, and Audience Favorite
Entry deadline: April 21
contact: bshep@mit.edu
Submit your entry and check out past winners.

Online Reading and the Future of Annotation
2014-04-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Using the tools of online textual annotation — the platform Rap Genius, its spinoff site Poetry Genius, or MIT’s own Annotation Studio — readers can collaborate on annotating or interpreting a work, make their annotations public, and respond to interpretations by others. We will be joined by creators, facilitators, and users of these sites to discuss how online annotation is changing practices of reading, enriching practices of teaching and learning, and making newly public a previously private encounter with the written word. MIT’s Noel Jackson will moderate.
Wyn Kelley is a senior lecturer in Literature. She has worked for many years with the MIT’s digital humanities lab, HyperStudio, and is the author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) among other works.
Kurt Fendt is Director of HyperStudio, MIT’s Center for Digital Humanities. HyperStudio explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of research and education.
Jeremy Dean, AKA Lucky_Desperado, is the "Education Czar" at Rap Genius, an online database of song lyrics (and poetry on the spinoff site Poetry Genius) that users can annotate freely.
Noel Jackson is a Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008).

New Histories of the South Asian Diaspora
2014-04-16 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 325, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT-India & the Harvard South Asia Institute present the inaugural event of a new series, “South Asia and Its Diasporas”
Coolie Woman/Bengali Harlem: New Histories of the South Asian Diaspora
A Reading and Discussion with authors Gaiutra Bahadur & Vivek Bald
Moderated by Walter Johnson
In 1903, a young woman named Sujaria and a young man named Abdul Aziz left the port of Calcutta in separate ships, sailing westward. Sujaria was pregnant and alone; she and the others on her ship were indentured laborers, headed to sugar plantations in the British colony of Guiana. Abdul Aziz was a peddler of chikon embroidery from a village in Hooghly; he traveled with three other young men, all headed for the beach boardwalks of New Jersey, and ultimately, the neighborhood of Tremé in New Orleans, aiming to sell goods and send money home. What happened to Sujaria and Abdul? What kind of lives did they lead after emigrating from colonial India? And what other experiences, like theirs, have been “lost” in previous accounts of South Asia and its diasporas?
In this special joint reading and conversation, Gaiutra Bahadur, author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013, University of Chicago Press) and Vivek Bald, author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013, Harvard University Press) will present excerpts from their work and discuss their common experiences excavating and bringing to life the stories of previously unacknowledged South Asian migrants from the early 20th century. The conversation will be moderated by Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and author, most recently, of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian AmericaVivek BaldHarvard University Press, 2013
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of IndentureGaiutra BahadurUniversity of Chicago Press, 2013
Gaiutra Bahadur is a journalist, book critic, and recent Harvard Neiman Fellow whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Ms., and the Nation, among other publications. In Coolie Woman, she embarks on a journey into the past to find the story of her great-grandmother, Sujaria. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other “coolie women”, shining a light on their complex lives. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora–from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next–that is at once a search for one’s roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Vivek Bald is a writer, scholar, filmmaker, and Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Writing at MIT. In Bengali Harlem, he pieces together fragments of archival evidence to uncover the histories of two populations of South Asian Muslim migrants who lived, settled, and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican communities from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. The first, a group of “Oriental goods” peddlers from West Bengal, established a peddling network in the 1890s, that spread throughout the Jim Crow South and into the Caribbean. The second consisted of hundreds of steamship workers who, beginning in the 1910s, escaped British ships in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and established clandestine networks to access restaurant and factory jobs and build new lives in the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws.
Walter Johnson is a distinguished historian whose work focuses on slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the nineteenth century United States. His award-winning first book, Soul by Soul (1999) used the slave market as a way to think about the fantasies, fears, negotiations, and violence that characterized American slavery. His second book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley (2013), embeds the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism – the cotton trade and the Atlantic money market – and U.S. imperialism – the Louisiana Purchase, the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, and the effort to reopen the Atlantic Slave trade on the eve of the Civil War.
Additional support for this event provided by MIT’s programs in Comparative Media Studies/Writing; History; Women’s and Gender Studies; Literature; and the Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies.

Susan Murray, "'Natural Vision vs. Tele-Vision’: Defining and Managing Electronic Color in the Post-War Era"
2014-04-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Susan Murray
The standardization of color television in the US during the postwar era was, in large part, discussed and determined in relation to historical developments in color theory (philosophical, psychological, and physical), colorimetry, color design and industry, psychophysics, psychology and, of course, what had already been established industrially, culturally, and technically for monochrome television. In this presentation, Susan Murray explores how these various threads of scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, and industrial knowledge were built into the standards, processes, and procedures for and around the technology and use of color television from the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. This presentation will be less about color programming itself, and more about the discourses that framed and managed color use and reception not only in the standardization period, but also during RCA and NBC’s early attempts to sell color to consumers, sponsors, and critics.
Susan Murray is associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She is the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars! Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005) and the coeditor (with Laurie Ouellette) of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2004, 2009). She has received fellowships from the ACLS and NYU’s Humanities Initiative for 2013-14 and is currently writing a history of color television from 1929-1970, which is under contract with Duke University Press.
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Comparative Media Studies Thesis Day
2014-04-04 10:00 - 17:00 | MIT Student Center Room 407, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join CMS/W for thesis presentations by students in the Comparative Media Studies masters program. Free and open to the public.

10:00-10:30 Coffee and Conversation

10:30 Presentations by:

Lingyuxiu Zhong “My Pins are My Dreams: Pinterest, Collective Daydreams, and the Aspirational Gap”
Eduardo Marisca Alvarez “Playful Ventures: Technology Entrepreneurship and Peripheral Innovation in the Peruvian Game Industry”
Julie Fischer “Creat[e L]ive Treatment of Actuality: Live Documentary Practices for the Rise of Real Time”

12:30 Lunch Break

1:30 Presentations by:

Rodrigo Davies “Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place”
Denise Cheng “The Future of Work: Blueprints for a Worker Support Infrastructure in the Peer Economy”
Erica Deahl “Better the Data You Know: Developing Youth Data Literacy in Schools and Informal Learning Environments”
Jason Lipshin “Network Design: A Theory of Scale for Ubiquitous Computing”

Science in Fiction
2014-04-03 17:15 - 19:15 | MIT Stata Center, Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hanya Yanagihara’s first book, the widely celebrated The People In The Trees, is loosely based on the life and work of Nobel Prize-winner physician and researcher D. Carleton Gajdusek. She’ll join author and physicist Alan Lightman, who was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities, to discuss the unique challenges of respecting the exacting standards of science in fictional texts. Forum Co-Director Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus, will moderate.
Hanya Yanagihara is an Editor-At-Large at Conde Nast Traveler and author of The People In The Trees, a novel the New York Times called "suspenseful" and "exhaustingly inventive."
Alan Lightman is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams. His most recent novel, Mr g, was published in January 2012.
Seth Mnookin is Co-Director of the Communications Forum and Associate Director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book is The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.
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Barry Werth and The Antidote: Reporting from Inside the World of Big Pharma
2014-03-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Journalist and author Barry Werth has been writing about the business and practice of the pharmaceutical industry for more than two decades. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his 1995 book on Vertex Pharmaceuticals, was named one the “75 Smartest Books We Know” by Fortune. His sixth and most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big Pharma, revisits Vertex, offering unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to a company that that went from cash-starved startup to a triumph of American bio-tech innovation. Werth has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Technology Review, among many others publications.

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

Henry Jenkins Returns
2014-03-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 370, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Legendary former MIT professor and housemaster Henry Jenkins, now the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, returns to the Forum for a conversation about his time at the Institute and the founding of CMS as well as his path-breaking scholarship on contemporary media. Forum Director David Thorburn, Jenkins’ longtime friend and colleague, will moderate the discussion.
Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He taught at MIT from 1990-2009 and was the founding director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Institute. He has written many books on film, popular culture and media, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008).
David Thorburn is a professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. He is the author of a critical study of the novelist Joseph Conrad and many essays on literature and media. Among his publications: Rethinking Media Change (2007), co-edited with Henry Jenkins.

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

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

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

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

Vicki Mayer: "Where 'Home' Is: Film Production Economies and the Privatization of Space"
2014-02-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vicki Mayer
Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She has published widely on media production and producers. She is Editor of the journal Television & New Media, and she directs the digital humanities projects MediaNOLA and New Orleans Historical.
This talk will give an overview of her current research into the impacts of regional policies for film production on ordinary people’s understandings of time, space and place. This is a talk less about the economic impacts of the policies than on the social and subjective experiences of people who live in cities driven by media production economies. In particular, she will highlight the impacts of location-based film production on the ways residents in New Orleans, Louisiana, move through public space. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state has sponsored aggressive incentives policies that have transformed the region into the third largest film economy in the United States. Using GIS mapping software and personal photography, Mayer explores the ways this publicly financed economy privatizes public space by making the local into locations, by commodifying local culture, and by increasing the stratification of wealth in the post-Katrina landscape. These images provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geographically but also as part of the ordinary experience of everyday life in a city still and always posited as “recovering.” At the end of this talk, she presents an alternative way of mediating spatial experiences and histories through a digital humanities project that she has directed since 2008.

Jason Mittell: “Strategies of Storytelling in Transmedia Television”
2014-02-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
As television series have become more complex in their narrative strategies, television itself has expanded its storytelling scope across screens and platforms, complicating notions of medium-specificity at the very same time that television seems to have a more distinct narrative form. This presentation explores how television narratives have expanded and been complicated through transmedia extensions, including video games, novelizations, websites, online video, and alternate reality games. Through specific analyses of transmedia strategies for Lost, Breaking Bad, and The Simpsons, the lecture considers how transmedia storytelling grapples with issues of canonicity and audience segmentation, how transmedia reframes viewer expectations for the core television serial, and what transmedia possibilities might look like going forward.
Jason Mittell is Professor of American Studies and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2009), How to Watch Television (co-edited with Ethan Thompson, NYU Press, 2013), and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (forthcoming from New York University Press, online at MediaCommons Press). He maintains the blog Just TV.

Michael Curtin: “The Burdens of Official Aspiration: National Policy in the Age of Global Media”
2014-01-30 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Curtin
Since the 1990s, market liberalization and new technologies have accelerated the transnational flow of media imagery, much to the delight of Western conglomerates that have expanded their operations and exports around the globe. This has, of course, raised anxieties in countries that find themselves ever more vulnerable to a flood of foreign movies and television programming. Yet Hollywood is no longer the only major exporter of audiovisual media, having been joined by thriving competitors, such as Mumbai, Lagos, and Miami. Animated by the commercial logic of “media capital,” these cities are now challenging prior geographies of creativity and cultural influence, fostering tensions about the relative roles that cities and states play in local, regional, and global cultural economies.
As these transnational media capitals have prospered, some states have fought back with policies aimed at controlling imports and fostering the creative capacity of national media institutions. This remarkable turn in media policy over the past decade is largely premised on official suppositions that popular media have become elements of political and cultural leadership both at home and abroad. Yet the question remains: Can such policies produce truly popular cultural products or will they forever bear the burdens of official aspiration? This presentation explores the implications of national cultural policy within the broader context of media globalization, providing a framework for understanding the logics of media capital and the challenges confronting national governments. It furthermore compares media industries around the world, reflecting more generally on future prospects for creativity and cultural diversity in popular film and television.
Michael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also Director and co-founder of the Media Industries Project at the Carsey-Wolf Center. His books include Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV and Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Curtin is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization and is co-editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and the International Screen Industries book series of the British Film Institute.

Gregory Heyworth: "Textual Science and the Future of the Past"
2014-01-30 14:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Gregory Heyworth
Over the past decade, a quiet technological revolution has been occurring in the humanities. Great texts – the Archimedes palimpsest, the Dead Sea Scrolls among others – once largely illegible and lost to history, have been returned to us through spectral imaging. We stand now at the threshold of a renaissance of the past, but only if we can integrate science with the humanities in a new, hybrid discipline. Textual Science, as Gregory Heyworth argues, is poised to change the established order of things: the notion that the humanities is about husbanding the past with scholarship that adds to human insight in ever slenderer increments; that the canon is a coffin, the past irrevocably the past, and that scholars and students must behave as humble curators rather than archaeologists of an undiscovered country; that the artistic mind cannot, in any profound way, share neurons with the scientific. With images of recovered works, many previously unseen, this talk will chart the way ahead in theory and praxis.
Gregory Heyworth is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and the Director of the Lazarus Project, an initiative to recover damaged manuscripts using spectral imaging. A medievalist and expert in textual studies, he has authored several books, the most recent an edition of the second longest poem in French, the 14th century Eschéz d’Amours, a unique manuscript damaged in the bombing of Dresden and long deemed illegible. He is currently recovering and editing the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin and writing a book on Textual Science.

Aswin Punathambekar: “Media, Sociability, and Political Potentials in Contemporary India”
2014-01-28 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
To suggest that there is a strong relationship between participatory culture and civic/political engagement would not come as news to anyone in India. In fact, the past decade has been marked by a number of astonishing instances of participation surrounding entertainment media intersecting with and reshaping a wider political field. Academic discussions of these events have been focused on the question: what constitutes meaningful participation? Not surprisingly, these discussions have focused on the explicitly political dimensions of these moments of participation. Instead of this narrow emphasis on political effects, Aswin Punathambekar draws on a range of cases across India, China, and the Middle East to ask: what happens when such phases of participation fade away? What are the cultural and political implications of a zone of participation that lasts a few weeks or months at best? Tracing shifts in media industry logics as well as audience participation facilitated by mobile media technologies, this presentation foregrounds the sociable and everyday dimensions of media use. Punathambekar argues that it is only when we comprehend how participatory culture and everyday life are braided together that we can meaningfully pose questions about how media can be politically productive.
Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (NYU Press, 2013), and co-editor of Global Bollywood (NYU Press, 2008) and Television at Large in South Asia (Routledge, 2012). He has also published articles in various anthologies and journals including Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture. He is currently working on two books. The first is a historical account of the development of the Indian television industry. The second, provisionally titled Mobile Publics: Media, Participation and Political Culture in Digital South Asia, examines how convergence between television and mobile media technologies is reconfiguring the meanings and performance of citizenship.

Mary Flanagan, "Humanist Inquiry Through Critical Play: Designing and Enacting our Enduring Questions"
2014-01-27 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mary Flanagan
In this talk, Dr. Mary Flanagan reveals how games can be sources of deep human inquiry and introspection. Flanagan presents the interesting things scholars might discover by looking at games and why games can be useful tools for inquiry through a variety of methodological lenses. She will also share recent research on creating games that improve biases and stereotypes.
As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. Flanagan’s work has been supported by grants and commissions including The British Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation. Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Global Game Jam 2014 at MIT
2014-01-24 - 2014-01-26 | MA
View full tim and location information at:
http://gamelab.mit.edu/event/global-game-jam-2014-at-mit-in-cambridge-ma/

Enrollment: advance sign-up via http://mitgamelab-ggj2014.eventbrite.com
Limited to 50 participants
Attendance: Must attend entire event (not necessarily all hours)
Fee: $17.00 for non-MIT students, free for MIT

The Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam event taking place around the world at physical locations, a 48-hour a hackathon focused on game development. The weekend stirs a global creative buzz in games, while at the same time exploring the process of development, be it programming, iterative design, narrative exploration or artistic expression. People with all kinds of backgrounds are welcome to participate and contribute to this global spread of game development and creativity. Make games with us!
