MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

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

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

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

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

Hacking VR Speaker Series: Jessica Brillhart, "VR in Science"
2017-05-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Open Doc Lab: MIT Building E15, Room 318, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

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

Poetry Across Borders
2017-04-18 16:00 - 18:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
As part of MIT’s Day of Action/Day of Engagement, come share poems from cultures beyond the US. We welcome participants who will read or recite poems from other cultures, in the original language and in translation. You do not need to be a poet or translator to take part. We only ask that you share a poem you love. You can email us beforehand or sign up to read at the event (poetryacross@mit.edu) or sign up at the event.
Current readers include…

Stephen Tapscott
Andres Rios Tascon
Valentina Chamorro
Ed Barrett
Nick Montfort
Patsy Baudoin
Sofian Audry
Diego Cornejo Barra
Michel DeGraff
Cynthia Yang
Jing Wang and Hongliang Wang
Yusef Audeh
Margery Resnick

An Evening with Aparna Nancherla
2017-04-13 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Comedian Aparna Nancherla

CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations
2017-04-07 10:00 - 17:00 | Cambridge Residence Inn, Doc Edgerton Room, 6 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142, United States
You are cordially invited to attend the thesis presentations of the Class of 2017 in Comparative Media Studies. The event will be held in the Doc Edgerton room, on the first floor of the Cambridge Residence Inn at 6 Cambridge Center. Coffee and conversation at 9:30, presentations begin at 10:00 am. Open to the public.

For those unable to attend, the presentations will be live streamed via our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MITComparativeMediaStudiesWriting

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

Hacking VR Speaker Series: Masterclass with Vincent Morisset
2017-04-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Open Doc Lab: MIT Building E15, Room 318, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

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

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

Hacking VR Speaker Series: Eloi Champagne, "Leading Innovation at the NFB"
2017-03-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Open Doc Lab: MIT Building E15, Room 318, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Hacking VR Speaker Series: Masterclass with Arnaud Colinart
2017-03-10 11:00 - 13:00 | Open Doc Lab: MIT Building E15, Room 318, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Sexual Harassment and Gender Equity in Science
2017-03-09 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
In October, 2015, BuzzFeed News reporter Azeen Ghorayshi broke an investigative story detailing astronomer Geoffrey Marcy’s long history of sexual harassment. Since then, more female scientists have come forward about their experiences with harassment. Ghorayshi, MIT astronomer Sarah Ballard, and Harvard history of science professor Evelynn M. Hammonds join science journalist and MIT Communications Forum coordinator Christina Couch to discuss barriers to gender equality in the sciences and steps to over come them.
Speakers
Azeen Ghorayshi is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and recipient of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists. She frequently covers gender and equality issues in the sciences.
Sarah Ballard is an astronomer and a Torres Fellow for Exoplanetary Research at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. She frequently writes about the culture of science and equity issues therein.
Evelynn M. Hammonds is a professor of the history of science and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the former dean of Harvard College and the first woman and first African-American to hold that position.
Moderator: Christina Couch is a science journalist and coordinator for the MIT Communications Forum. Her work explores the intersections of technology and psychology.

This event is sponsored by Radius at MIT and is free for the MIT community and the general public.

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

Hacking VR Speaker Series: Brian Chirls, "WebVR"
2017-02-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Open Doc Lab: MIT Building E15, Room 318, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Race and Racism in the 2016 Presidential Election
2017-02-23 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Jamelle Bouie
The 2016 Presidential election brought issues of race and racism to the forefront of American politics and forced journalists to confront how to cover these topics without providing a platform for hate groups. Slate chief political correspondent and CBS News political analyst Jamelle Bouie joins MIT Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin to explore how race and ethnicity framed the election and how journalists and content creators can improve coverage of these issues moving forward.
Speakers
Jamelle Bouie’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and The Nation. He is a former a staff writer at The Daily Beast and currently serves as a political analyst for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the MIT Communications Forum and director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the “Science in Society” award from the National Association of Science Writers.
This event is sponsored by Radius at MIT.

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

"Hands On" Workshop and Demo
2017-01-26 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 145, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/25
Limited to 15 participants
Fee: $10.00 for materials fee
Learn how to draw the hand and why you couldn’t do it before.
The hands represent unique challenges to both the beginning and intermediate artist. By approaching drawing and observation through a different lens, we will overcome many of these obstacles. This course focuses on underlying structure and the process of observation, rather than relying on anatomical instruction. Learn how to translate the hand that you see onto paper using pencil and graphite.
This workshop will meet once and consists of:
• Drawing demonstration with a step-by-step explanation
• Drawing tools and material demonstration
• Drawing the hand from observation
• Individual feedback from the instructor
Online payment of the enrollment fee reserves a spot: http://mauriciocordero.com/instruction/#pay
Contact: Mauricio Cordero, mcordero@mit.edu

IAP 2017: Global Game Jam
2017-01-20 - 2017-01-22 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/19
Limited to 85 participants
Attendance: Participants must attend all sessions
Register now at: http://gamelab.mit.edu/event/global-game-jam-2017-at-mit/
The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world’s largest game jam event taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development. It is the growth of an idea that in today’s heavily connected world, we could come together, be creative, share experiences and express ourselves in a multitude of ways using video games – it is very universal. 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. It is all condensed into a 48 hour development cycle. The GGJ encourages people with all kinds of backgrounds to participate and contribute to this global spread of game development and creativity.
We open our doors on Friday, January 20th at 5pm and run until midnight that day. Our site is open Saturday, January 21st from 9am until midnight, and Sunday, January 22nd from 9am until 6pm.
The Global Game Jam is a 3-day event, but our site closes at night so participants can go home and get rested for the next day. Participants should plan to attend the entire duration of the event as your team will need you to complete your game!
Participants must register to attend: http://gamelab.mit.edu/event/global-game-jam-2017-at-mit/

We have 30 free slots open for the MIT Community (must have an @mit.edu email address to register).
Contact: Richard Eberhardt, E15-329, 617 324-2173, REBERHAR@MIT.EDU

Keynote & Kickoff Presentations

Jan/20
Fri
05:00PM-08:00PM
32-123

The jam begins with a keynote, presentations about the Jam, and reveal of the Jam topic.
Teams will be formed by 8:00pm.

Game Jam

Jan/20
Fri
08:00PM-11:45PM
32-124 & 32-144

Jan/21
Sat
09:00AM-11:45PM
56-154, 56-169, and

Jan/22
Sun
09:00AM-03:00PM
32-124 & 32-144

Work days for the Jam. Participants will be working in teams to create their games.

Presentations & Postmortem

Jan/22
Sun
03:00PM-06:30PM
32-123

Game Jam participants will present the work they created over the weekend and postmortem their process.
This is open to the general public – no registration is required for this session.

IAP 2017: Women in Politics Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
2017-01-19 13:00 - 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 251, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Boston/Women_In_Politics_IAP_2017
The Wikipedia community, as a body, is well aware that it is missing the diversity of perspectives necessary to meet their mandate to curate and share the sum of all human knowledge with all people, the world over. In the last six years or so, a number of outreach initiatives and WikiProjects have emerged within the Wikipedia community to address this systemic problem. One such project is WikiProject Women in Red — an ongoing project dedicated to increasing articles about notable women from a wide range of professions.
Inspired both by this project and the tremendous strides women in politics have made this year (e.g., Hillary Clinton’s historic run for president, and Kamala Harris, Maggie Hassan, and Catherine Cortez Masto were newly elected to the U.S. Senate in November, 2016), MIT Libraries and CMS/W are sponsoring this Women in Politics edit-a-thon.
Sign up for the event via the Wikipedia Meetup page.
Sponsor(s): Libraries, Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Greta Suiter, 14N-118, 617 258-5533, GSUITER@MIT.EDU

IAP 2017: "Wikipedia 101: How to be a media literate citizen"
2017-01-17 - 2017-01-20 | MIT Building 4, Room 251, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/17
Limited to 20 participants
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Recent events have caused us to question, more than ever before, the validity of information gathered from the web. But Wikipedia, now in its 15th year, remains an online space where accuracy, neutrality, and fair representation matters. Growing the network of volunteer editors to contribute to Wikipedia (the largest collaborative writing project in history!) is one way to ensure that high quality information is freely available to all.
Students:
– Would you like to build solid research skills?
– Get practice communicating complex ideas to a broad audience?
– Improve access to quality information and knowledge?
Faculty & Instructors:
– Would you like to support knowledge transfer in your courses?
– Build students’ confidence in reading and analyzing complex texts?
– Increase students’ proficiency in communicating technical content?
This three-day workshop will train participants to become competent Wikipedia editors, and along the way they will cultivate a greater understanding of how to evaluate a range of sources, from the popular news media, to institutional archives, to peer reviewed journals.
Please bring your laptop!
To reserve your spot, please contact Amy Carleton (amymarie@mit.edu) and Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze (rtb@mit.edu).
Sponsor(s): Libraries, Writing and Communication Center, Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, E18-233, 617-253-3090, RTB@MIT.EDU

Introduction to Wikipedia

Jan/17
Tue
10:00AM-12:00PM
4-251, Bring your laptop

Introduction to Wikipedia community philosophy and guidelines. Participants will learn about ways to contribute, including how to enhance diversity of content. Also, create user account, make your first edit, and begin brainstorming your first article.
Amy Carleton – Lecturer, CMS/W, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze – Lecturer, Writing and Communication Center & CMS/W

What makes a good Wikipedia article?

Jan/18
Wed
10:00AM-12:00PM
4-251, Bring your laptop

What makes a good Wikipedia article? Learn about best practices and common pitfalls. Get started on research and initial drafting of your first article.
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze – Lecturer, Writing and Communication Center & CMS/W, Amy Carleton – Lecturer, CMS/W

Wikipedia Editing Salon

Jan/19
Thu
01:00PM-05:00PM
4-251, Bring your laptop

Editing Salon with MIT Libraries and Archives — an in-person editing session focused on training new editors and improving Wikipedia articles. Continue working on your article or start a new one, and work with others to improve Wikipedia. Stop by anytime throughout the session.
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze – Lecturer, Writing and Communication Center & CMS/W, Amy Carleton – Lecturer, CMS/W, Phoebe Ayers – Librarian, Greta Suiter – Collections Archivist

What Playfulness Can Change
2017-01-12 - 2017-01-26 | Location To Be Determined
Check for locations at http://student.mit.edu/iap/ns85.html

Scot Osterweil, Creative director
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
This class is about exploring playfulness and its business applications.
Playfulness is a very human value proposition that empowers people doing all kind of things. In this class, I’m offering to discover the Playful and all its possibilities: From the empowerment of your employees, your processes or your learning, the Playful design methodology can be a real leverage of empowerment.
The class is open for all and divided in 3 workshops that are independent from each other but you are encouraged to follow all of them to have a better overview!
Contact: Laure Dousset, +33681756009, LDOUSSET@MIT.EDU

Serious games co-design

Jan/12
Thu
02:00PM-04:00PM
Location TBD

Serious games are games that have another purpose than just pure entertainment. In this class, we will test a serious game about Blockchain, and try to assess it and find guidelines for when you’re developing that kind of game. After that, I will share tips with you to design your serious game! Don’t hesitate to come with a topic in mind.
Scot Osterweil – Creative director, Laure Dousset

Playfulness and your project

Jan/19
Thu
02:00PM-04:00PM
Location TBD

When you’re designing something, it’s important to take the user experience into account. What I’m offering you in this class is to come with a project you have in mind (a technology, a product, a service) and to empower the experience with the playful methodology. You will see how you can use the playful value proposition, and if you don’t have an idea in mind, I have several interesting ones for you.
Scot Osterweil – Creative director, Laure Dousset

Playfulness and your team

Jan/26
Thu
02:00PM-04:00PM
Location TBD

We’ll see how to use playfulness in a team. How can you empower them using playful levers? Together, we’ll practice by taking examples and try to use the playful design methodology to do this. We’ll choose together practical use cases you can encounter in your daily routines at work and try to make a change in order to make them more playful!
Laure Dousset, Scot Osterweil – Creative director

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

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

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

Fall 2016 CMS Graduate Program Information Session
2016-11-17 10:00 - 12:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

An Evening with John Hodgman
2016-11-10 18:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 100, Access Via 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
[Note updated location: Now MIT Building 26, Room 100.]
John Hodgman
In 2005, a little-known author was invited on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his book, an almanac chronicling fake histories ranging from the story behind Theodore Roosevelt’s fictional lobster canal to the disappearing 51st US state Hohoq. Since then, humorist John Hodgman has parlayed his wit into New York Times best-selling books, a Daily Show correspondent position, a Netflix stand-up special, and his own podcast. Hodgman brings his razor-sharp wit to MIT for a moderated discussion on his career and the state of comedy today.
Speakers
John Hodgman is host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast and a former resident expert for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Moderator: Seth Mnookin is associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

This event is sponsored by the MIT de Florez Fund for Humor and is free for the MIT community and general public.
