CMS/W Town Hall
2016-04-21 17:00 (America/New_York)
Closed to the public.

MIT Open House, with CMS/W Events
2016-04-23
This year MIT celebrates 100 years in Cambridge! On April 23, it hosts a campus-wide open house, welcoming the public into every department to check out the coolest of the Institute’s work. We’ll have five spots of our own where you can stop. (And check out the full list of Open House activities.) See you there:

Once More, With Feelies: Video Game Materials (an exhibition)
11:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Rotch Library, Building 7 – Room 238
Exploring the Potential of Play
11:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Wiesner Building, Building E15 – Room 320
Designing Digital Humanities
12:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Building 16 – Room 635
Playful, Powerful Learning
10:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Wiesner Building, Building E15 – Room 301
Computer-Generated Poetry
10:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Wiesner Building, Building E15 – Room 318

17th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2016-04-25 18:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(Submissions are now closed.)
Submission deadline is April 20.
The CMS Media Spectacle showcases video projects of all genres created by MIT students, staff, faculty and affiliates. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction/Documentary, and Audience Favorite. To submit an entry, send your video to:
Becky Shepardson
14N-336
77 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
bshep@mit.edu
(if the video is online, please make sure it’s downloadable)
Please include with your submission: contact email, video title, brief description, and running time. The maximum running time is 15 minutes. The deadline for submissions is April 20. Contact bshep@mit.edu with any questions.

Fox Harrell: "Reflections on Advanced Identity Representation"
2016-04-28 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Fox HarrellPhoto by Bryce Vickmark
Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles these technologies play in society and how to design them to better suit diverse social needs. In this talk, Harrell presents some of the outcomes from his 5-year National Science Foundation-supported research initiative called the Advanced Identity Representation project. Namely, applying approaches from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and sociology to technologies such as videogames and social media, his research both reveals social biases in existing systems and implements systems to respond to those biases with greater nuance and expressive power.
D. Fox Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab). He was a 2014-15 recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Virtual Reality Meets Documentary: A Deeper Look
2016-05-05 17:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(Note updated location: Stata Center, Room 123)
“In this case [of virtual reality], we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.” – Werner Herzog
When Time Magazine graced its cover with Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey’s awkward pose, it effectively proclaimed that VR was “the next big thing” that didn’t have any place in our lives yet. Google, Facebook, The New York Times, PBS Frontline, Sundance Film Institute and many others are investing heavily in virtual reality as a powerful new storytelling medium. It’s capturing the imagination of documentary storytellers all over the world yet for all its enthusiasts, virtual reality has its skeptics. For all virtual reality is talked about, it can be deeply misunderstood.
Virtual reality means many things to many people: an immersive experience, a new tool for storytelling, a cluster of quite different technologies and techniques, and even an epistemological claim. Little wonder that we lack consensus about “how to fill it with content.”
The goal of this panel is to talk with some of the leading creators in the VR space and better understand VR’s potentials and implications for documentary and journalism. This will help us to disambiguate some of the major strands of VR and in so doing consider the inherent tensions in VR between documentation and simulation, the challenges of spatial storytelling and new narrative structures, the ethics and cognitive neuroscience of immersion, interaction, and affect; and VR’s past and future.
Speakers
Raney Aronson-Rath runs FRONTLINE, PBS’s flagship investigative journalism series, and is a leading voice on the future of journalism. She has been internationally recognized for her work to expand FRONTLINE’s reporting capacity and reimagine the documentary form across multiple platforms. From the emergence of ISIS in Syria to the hidden history of the NFL and concussions to the secret reality of rape on the job for immigrant women, Aronson-Rath oversees FRONTLINE’s acclaimed reporting and directs the series’ evolution and editorial vision. She has developed and managed nearly 30 in-depth, cross-platform journalism partnerships with outlets including ProPublica, The New York Times, and Univision. Under her leadership, FRONTLINE has won every major award in broadcast journalism and dramatically expanded its digital footprint. Prior to FRONTLINE, Aronson-Rath worked at ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and her master’s from Columbia Journalism School.
Katy Morrison is co-Founder and producer at Virtual Reality studio VRTOV and makes virtual reality and immersive story experiences for non-fiction stories. Shaped by her experience working as a documentary maker, Katy’s interest is in subjectivity, identity and spatiality in an increasingly virtual and interconnected world. Previously Katy worked in documentary television as a researcher, writer and producer and has made over fifty hours of internationally broadcast documentary television as well as augmented reality apps, virtual reality experiences and immersive story installations. In addition to producing Virtual Reality, VRTOV regularly run workshops, speak at festivals and facilitate hands-on engagement with VR production techniques for broadcasters and media companies.
Nonny de la Peña was selected by Wired Magazine as a #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change and has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget and The Guardian. Additionally, Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative.” for her pioneering work in immersive storytelling. As CEO of Emblematic Group, she uses cutting edge technologies to tell important stories—both fictional and news-based—that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers. A Yale Poynter Media Fellow and a former correspondent for Newsweek, de la Peña has more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print, film and TV. De la Peña is widely credited with helping create the genre of immersive journalism and her virtual reality work has been featured by the BBC, Mashable, Vice, Wired and many others. Showcases around the globe include the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, The World Economic Forum in Davos, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Games For Change.
Caspar Sonnen is a festival organiser and curator specialised in independent cinema and digital media art. As New Media Coordinator of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, he has successfully developed digital festival strategies and online initiatives. In 2008, Sonnen launched IDFA DocLab, a pioneering platform for digital documentary storytelling and media art. IDFA DocLab is also one of the organising partners of PhotoStories. Besides his work at IDFA, Sonnen is co-founder and programmer of the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam.

“Innovation” and “Engagement”: Experiments with What Industry Buzzwords Can Mean in Practice
2016-09-08 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
CMS/W alum Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, ’07) has spent most of the last decade exploring points of connection and contention between the media and marketing industries and media studies. Starting last year, that work has taken him to Univision’s Fusion Media Group (a portfolio of media companies which includes Fusion, Univision Digital, Univision Music, The Root, Flama, The Onion, A.V. Club, Clickhole, Starwipe, and El Rey), leading a team that has been building the conglomerate’s approach to experimentation outside of the company’s core day-to-day operations.
In this colloquium, Sam will be joined by his colleague Federico Rodriguez Tarditi to discuss what they have learned thus far from Fusion Media Group’s experiments with exploring new ways of telling stories, new approaches to building relationships with key publics important to our portfolio, new ways of working internally, and new types of roles/positions in the company. They will also talk about what they have learned while working with internal teams, academic groups, non-profits, other companies, startups, foundations, and other groups and the challenges of measuring success for experimentation that often exist outside day-to-day media company operations…and some of which may speak more to the company’s larger mission than direct paths to profitability.
Sam Ford is a Vice President at Fusion and Head of Fusion Media Group’s Center for Innovation and Engagement. Federico Rodriguez Tarditi serves as Project Manager for the Center for Innovation and Engagement.

Knowledge’s Allure: Surveillance and Uncertainty
2016-09-15 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sun-ha HongMellon Postdoctoral Fellow
The present age is one of growing faith in machinic knowledge. From state surveillance to self-tracking technologies, we find lofty promises about the power of “raw” data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making. But new claims to knowledge invariably entail a redistribution of uncertainty, of those in the know and those left ignorant, of proofs “good enough” and “negligible” risks. Today, the U.S. government struggles to “prove” the efficacy of its own surveillance programs. The calculability of terrorist threat becomes profoundly indeterminable, exemplified by the figure of the “lone wolf”. Meanwhile, the self-tracking industry promises unerringly objective self-knowledge through machines that know you better than you know yourself. The present struggles with “big” data and surveillance are not just a question of privacy and security, but how promises of knowledge and its bounty enact a redistribution of authority, credibility and responsibility. In short, it is a question of how human individuals become the ingredient for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves.
Sun-ha Hong is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at CMS/W @ MIT, and has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His writing examines the collective fantasies invested in technology, media and communication.

The Exit Zero Project: A Transmedia Exploration of Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
2016-09-22 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Christine Walley Professor of Anthropology andDirector of Graduate Studies, HASTS
The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) is a transmedia exploration of the traumatic effects of the loss of the steel industry in Southeast Chicago, the impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States more broadly, and how Americans talk – and fail to talk – about social class. The project includes an award-winning book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) authored by Christine Walley, as well as a documentary film, entitled Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2016) made in conjunction with director and filmmaker Chris Boebel. The book and film use first person narration to trace the stories of multiple generations of writer/producer Walley’s family in this once-thriving steel mill community. From the turn-of-the-century experience of immigrants who worked in Chicago’s mammoth industries to the labor struggles of the 1930s to the seemingly unfathomable closure of the steel mills in the 1980s and 90s, these family stories convey a history that serves as a microcosm of the broader national experience of deindustrialization and its economic and environmental aftermath. The project also includes an interactive documentary website with both a storytelling and archival component that is being made in collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. In this talk, Professor Walley will talk about her research into this topic and how it found expression in a book, website, and documentary film.
Walley received a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her first book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), was based on field research exploring environmental conflict in rural Tanzania. Chris Walley and Chris Boebel are also the co-creators and co-instructors of the documentary film production and theory class DV Lab: Documenting Science Through Video and New Media.

Next Stage Planning for the Digital Humanities at MIT
2016-09-29 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Douglas O’ReaganDigital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT, Douglas O’Reagan will study how the digital humanities can best aid the specific strengths, mission, and broader community around MIT. In this talk, O’Reagan will update the audience on his efforts and invite suggestions and ideas concerning the future of digital humanities at MIT.
O’Reagan completed his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. His dissertation was a comparative history of the Allied powers’ attempts to study and copy German science and technology during and after the Second World War. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership in UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering from 2014-2015, where he worked with an interdisciplinary team on applying data science, econometric analysis, and historical research in studying the origins and impacts of specific breakthrough technologies. In 2015 he became a visiting assistant professor at Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus, where he taught history and served as Lead Archivist and Director of the Oral History Program for the Hanford History Project, which manages the US Department of Energy’s collections related to the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project.

This Land Is Our Land: Mobile Media, Protest, and Debate in Maasai and Mongolian Land Disputes
2016-10-06 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Allison HahnAssistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College
How has mobile media changed the ways that nomadic communities receive and send information, engage state actors, and participate in international deliberations? Allison Hahn examines the ways that two pastoral-nomadic communities, Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and Mongolians of Mongolia and China, are utilizing new media and social media platforms to challenge power hierarchies and deliberative norms. Many governmental policy makers presume that this technological adaptation indicates a determination amongst nomadic communities to integrate and settle. This presentation asks if nomadic communities might instead be incorporating new media technologies as a method to preserve their traditional lifestyles while engaging in national and international deliberations about land policy. Hahn draws from evidence of this engagement found in Maasai and Mongolian use of YouTube, RenRen, Twitter and Facebook as well as in-person protests and her decade of fieldwork amongst pastoral-nomadic communities. In this talk, Hahn focuses on specific examples from Maasai and Mongolian communities, as well as addresses the broader questions of how academics might engage once-distant communities and better understand the complexity of mobile media and nomadic deliberation.
Allison Hahn (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College. Her current book project, Nomads, New Media, and the State (in progress) explores the ways pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East are utilizing new and mobile technologies to participate in conservation policy and negotiate land rights.

How Did the Computer Learn to See?
2016-10-13 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alexander GallowayPhoto by Ivan Brodey
How did the computer learn to see? A common response to the question is that the computer learned to see from cinema and photography, that is, from modernity’s most highly evolved technologies of vision. In this talk we will explore a different response to the question, that the computer learned to see not from cinema but from sculpture. With reference to the work of artists Sarah Oppenheimer and Zach Blas, along with techniques for digital image compression, we will explore the uniquely computational mode of vision.
Alexander Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books, most recently a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, and is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

Time Traveling with James Gleick
2016-10-17 18:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 190, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
James Gleick
International best-selling author and science historian James Gleick discusses his career, the state of science journalism, and his newest book Time Travel: A History, which delves into the evolution of time travel in literature and science and the thin line between pulp fiction and modern physics. This Communications Forum event will be moderated by author and physicist Alan Lightman, the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities.
Speakers
James Gleick, author of seven books, including Chaos, Genius, and Isaac Newton, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize
Moderator: Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of 15 books

The Turn to “Tween”: An Age Category and its Cultural Consequences
2016-10-20 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Even though people age nine through twelve have always been with us, the same cannot be said for the category “tween.” When did this category emerge and why? How are “tweens” represented in popular culture, including music, television, and YA literature? And how does this relatively new age category intersect with–or elide–issues pertaining to race, class, and gender identity?
Speakers
Tyler Bickford is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is completing two book projects on music and childhood.
Meryl Alper worked at Nickelodeon and Disney before becoming an Assistant Professor of Communication at Northeastern University and publishing Digital Youth with Disabilities.
Moderator: Marah Gubar is an Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009).

Illuminating 2016: Using Social Listening Tools to Understand the Presidential Campaign
2016-11-03 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jennifer Stromer-GalleySyracuse University
The 2016 presidential election has been historic for the ways that social media has been used to drive the news agenda and rally supporters to the cause. Jennifer Stromer-Galley will describe the large scale collection and machine learning techniques she and her team have used for the Illuminating 2016 project to study the ways the presidential candidates and the public have used social media. She will provide some of the major trends they’ve seen this election cycle, and talk about why this matters for journalism and for social media practitioners more broadly.
Stromer-Galley is a professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and Director for the Center for Computational and Data Sciences, and she is President of the Association of Internet Researchers. She has been studying “social media” since before it was called social media, studying online interaction and influence in a variety of contexts, including political forums and online games. Her award-winning book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age provides a history of presidential campaigns as they have adopted and adapted to digital communication technologies.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: 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.

"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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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
