MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Push Button Game Jam
2014-01-11 10:00 - 2014-01-12 00:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 124, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: advance sign-up via mitgamelab-iap2014.eventbrite.com.
Full info at http://gamelab.mit.edu/event/push-button-game-jam/

Long-form Journalism: Inside The Atlantic
2013-12-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
September 2013 cover of The Atlantic
Some have called long-form journalism an endangered species. But ground-breaking articles requiring months of research and writing continue to appear. Why is such work important? How is it created? James Fallows and Corby Kummer of The Atlantic will chart the journey of a major feature story from conception to publication and speculate about the future of long-form writing in the digital age.
Tom Levenson, Professor of Writing at MIT, will moderate.

MIT Alumni in the Game Industry
2013-11-25 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT Students: Are you curious about how to get a job in the game industry as an MIT graduate? What kind of jobs can MIT prepare you for? What should you expect from your first job?
The MIT Game Lab has invited a number of local MIT alumni in the game industry to talk about their experiences entering the industry.
These alumni have experience working at large game studios (Harmonix, Blizzard, Bungie Studios), educational game studios (Muzzy Lane, Learning Games Network), and independent game studios (Fire Hose Games, MoonShot Games). Their jobs have included programming, level design, game design, sound design, music composition, and writing.
Panelists include:
Ethan Fenn
Fire Hose Games

Ethan graduated in 2004 with a double major in Courses 18 and 21M. Soon after graduating he joined the team at Harmonix, where he worked as a programmer with an audio focus on several titles, including Karaoke Revolution Party, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, and Rock Band. After a few years at Harmonix, he met Eitan Glinert, who had recently finished his graduate work at GAMBIT and was working on starting up a new game studio, Fire Hose Games. Ethan jumped right in at the start of the studio and has been with Fire Hose since. At Fire Hose he’s worn many hats, being responsible for the composition and sound design in Slam Bolt Scrappers and Go Home Dinosaurs, as well as plenty of programming and game design.

Naomi Hinchen
Flash Programmer, Learning Games Network

Naomi Hinchen graduated Course 6-3 in 2011 and finished her MEng in 2012. While at MIT, she was on the teams for Poikilia and The Snowfield at GAMBIT (now the MIT Game Lab). Until recently, she worked at Learning Games Network, primarily on the language learning game Xenos.

Damián Isla
President, co-founder, Moonshot Games

Damián has been working on and writing about game technology for over a decade. He is president and co-founder of Moonshot Games, purveyors of fun and innovative mobile gaming fare.
Before Moonshot, Damián was AI and Gameplay engineering lead at Bungie Studios, where he was responsible for the AI for the mega-hit first-person shooters Halo 2 and Halo 3.
A leading expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence for Games, Damián has spoken on games, AI and character technology at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), at the AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), and at Siggraph, and is a frequent speaker at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).
Before joining the industry, Damián earned a Masters Degree with the Synthetic Characters group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science, also from M.I.T.

Rob Stokes
Senior Level Designer, Harmonix Music Systems

Rob grew up in Marshfield, MA, before heading off to MIT for undergrad. While there, Rob earned a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, which has proven largely useless in his career, except when doing back-of-the-envelope terminal velocity calculations for space stations falling into the gravity wells of gas giants.
After MIT, Rob attended the American Film Institute in LA, while he earned his MFA in writing. He next worked at Bungie for five years, working as a mission designer on Halo 2 and one of the design leads on Halo 3. He also led up the story development process for Halo 3 and got to do most of the early writing for missions and cinema tics.
After Bungie, Rob co-founded a small startup called Moonshot Games, where he served as Creative Director. He currently works at Harmonix Music Systems in Cambridge, despite not being able to carry a tune, bust a move, or play chopsticks.

Patrick Rodriguez
Game Designer, Muzzy Lane Software

Patrick Rodriguez graduated from MIT in 2012 with a degree in Comparative Media Studies. He now works for Muzzy Lane Software in Newburyport, MA, making educational/serious games. His most recent project is a corporate training game for a retail chain in mexico that trains employees how to talk with customers to recommend the best product for them.

Mark Sullivan
Harmonix Music Systems

Mark Sullivan has been working in the games industry for just over two years, during which time he’s been working as a gameplay programmer at Harmonix Music Systems on the 2014 title Fantasia: Music Evolved. Prior to that, he completed his undergrad in course 6 at MIT in 2010, and then his MEng in 2011. He worked as a UROP and eventually a research assistant at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab for most of his time at MIT, from Summer 2007 to Summer 2011.

Presented by the MIT Game Lab and Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Mary Flanagan
2013-11-21 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan pushes the boundaries of medium and genre across writing, visual arts, and design to innovate in these fields with a critical play centered approach. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her collection of over 20 major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. 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.

Visualizing Information: ChartGirl on an Alternate Route to Understanding and Explaining Complicated Information
2013-11-14 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hilary Sargent, founder of ChartGirl.com
Hilary Sargent is the founder of ChartGirl.com, where she makes charts to describe complicated news stories. Her site was recently called one of the 50 Best Websites of 2013 by TIME Magazine and her charts have been featured by Reuters, AtlanticWire, BoingBoing, Business Insider, and others. Sargent has worked as an investigator for law firms, corporations, non-profit organizations and political campaigns.
View the MIT Campus Map for Building 4’s exact location.

Nelly Rosario: "Noble Strains: Thoughts on a Hybridized Identity"
2013-11-13 16:30 - 17:30 | Boston College, Devlin Hall, Room 101, Boston College Campus, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, United States
Nelly Rosario’s hybrid talk presents a mash-up of genres to explore the benefits and pitfalls of hybridity as identity in these “post-racial” times. Also read Noble Strains, Rosario’s recent blog post for the PBS Latino Americans series.

Sonia Livingstone: "The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age"
2013-11-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science
Sonia Livingstone is a full professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is seconded to Microsoft Social Research for fall 2013 as well as being a faculty fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her talk will be based on her current book project, “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age”, based on her ethnographic research with the MacArthur Foundation-funded Connected Learning Research Network. With a focus on young teenagers, Sonia will examine how powerful forces of social reproduction result in missed opportunities for many youth in the risk society.

Todd Harper: "Fight Like Gentlemen: The Culture of Fighting Games"
2013-10-31 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Todd Harper, Postdoctoral Associate with the MIT Game Lab
The culture of fighting games — digital games of competitive martial arts-style combat—is one of the most interesting and contentious of gamer subcultures. This talk examines the influences and norms of that community, including its spiritual and physical roots in the arcade, common gameplay practices, and how issues of ethnicity and gender collide with gamer identity in the ‘FGC’.
Todd Harper is a researcher at the MIT Game Lab with a background in mass communication and cultural studies. His current research focuses on both competitive communities and their cultural norms, as well as queer and gender representation and issues in gaming culture.

Online Information Session
2013-10-31 14:00 - 16:00, 2013-10-03 08:00 - 10:00 | cms.mit.edu

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2013-10-31 14:00 - 16:00 | http://irc.lc/freenode/cmsinfo
Join us at 2pm on the 31st! (What time is that where you live?)
JOIN NOW!
RSVP is not required for online information sessions.
It may help to prepare some questions ahead of time. It’s as simple as scanning through the basic info about the graduate program: cmsw.mit.edu/education/comparative-media-studies/masters.

Coco Fusco: "A Performance Approach to Primate Politics"
2013-10-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Coco Fusco
New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco will consider the critical responses to the original Planet of the Apes films, focusing in particular on the interpretation of the films as critiques of American race relations during the 1960’s and ’70’s.
She will also discuss her interest in exploring the strategies used in early sci-fi cinema, the ways that films such as Planet of the Apes employed speculative fiction to generate social critique.
Moderated by Professor of Writing Junot Díaz and Associate Professor Ian Condry.

On-campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2013-10-24 10:00 - 15:00, 2013-09-19 10:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
If you would like to attend an on-campus information session, please RSVP to cms-admissions@mit.edu.

Zeynep Tufekci: "The Boom-Bust Cycle of Social Media-Fueled Protests"
2013-10-17 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Zeynep Tufekci
Social media-fueled protests in many countries have surprised observers with their seemingly spontaneous, combustible power. Yet, many have fizzled out without having a strong impact on policy at the electoral and legislative levels. In this talk, Tufekci will discuss some features of such protests that may be leading to this boom and bust cycle drawing upon primary research in Gezi protests in Turkey as well as “Arab Spring”, Occupy and M15 movements.
Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Moderated by Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Head of MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Ian Condry and Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

Born Digital
2013-10-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
How is the generation born in the digital age different from its analog ancestors? Are those born digital likely to have different notions of privacy, community, identity itself? How do educators approach this generation to help prepare them for scholarship and for citizenship?
Speakers: John Palfrey, Head of School at Phillips Academy and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives; and Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2013-10-03 08:00 - 10:00 | http://irc.lc/freenode/cmsinfo
RSVP not required for online information sessions.

Ethan Zuckerman: "Digital Cosmopolitanism and Cognitive Diversity"
2013-09-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
New media technologies have sharply increased the number of people who are able to create and disseminate content. But they may not be leading to a more diverse media environment, as tools that allow us to tailor what content we see and what we ignore are becoming more powerful and more personal. The framework of cosmopolitanism suggests a way through this challenge – by examining perspectives we are exposed to and insulated from, we may be able to design tools and approaches that help readers increase their cognitive diversity and prepare themselves to tackle transnational challenges.
Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.
Moderated by Associate Professor Ian Condry.

Hong Qu: "Keepr: Algorithm for Extracting Entities, Eyewitnesses and Amplifiers"
2013-09-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hong Qu
When a big news story breaks, Twitter goes crazy. Keepr tries to make sense of these periodic bursts by implementing natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms to surface topics, eyewitnesses, and amplifiers. A live demo will be followed by a discussion of the capabilities and limitations of computational newsgathering, along with reports of how it is being used in newsrooms.
Hong Qu is a digital toolmaker. He has led teams at YouTube and Upworthy. He enjoys building social media tools that help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

The Phoenix Burns Out: Remembering a Boston Institution
2013-09-12 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Featuring essayist Anita Diamant, former staff writing Charles Pierce, music critic Lloyd Schwartz, and Phoenix editor Carly Carioli.Moderated by Seth Mnookin.
A generation of great journalists cut their teeth at alt-weeklies, and The Boston Phoenix produced some of the best of them. When the Phoenix announced it was closing last March, the city lost a powerful cultural force and a vibrant source of information.
We’ll discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston.
Panelists will be author and essayist Anita Diamant, who started out answering the editor’s phone in the mid-1970s; Charles Pierce of Esquire and NPR, and a staff writer with the Phoenix in the 1980s and ’90s; poet and classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz, who won a Pulitzer Prize with the Phoenix; and Carly Carioli, who started as an intern and rose to become the paper’s editor.
Seth Mnookin will moderate.

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
2013-05-09 17:00 - 18:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The MIT Press book we affectionately call 10 PRINT — actually 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 — was an unusual project in several respects. The book focuses on a single line of now-unfamiliar code, code of the sort that millions typed in and modified in the 1970s and 1980s. The book contributes to several threads of contemporary digital media scholarship, including critical code studies, software studies, and platform studies. Also somewhat oddly, the book was written in a single voice by ten people: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.
At this CMS colloquium, co-authors will discuss the nature of their collaboration, which was organized by Montfort, designed as a book by Reas, and facilitated by structured conversations and writing done online (using a mailing list and a wiki) as well as (in a few cases) in person. The writing of 10 PRINT is offered as a new mode of scholarship, very suitable in digital media but capable of being applied throughout the humanities. It brings some of the benefits of laboratory work and collaborative design practice to the traditionally individual mode of scholarly research and argument.

Media in Transition 8: Public Media, Private Media
2013-05-03 - 2013-05-05
Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November). Please see the end of this call for papers for submission instructions.
The distinction between public and private — where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested — says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice. MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them. It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.
Read the full call for papers…

15th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2013-04-29 18:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The CMS Media Spectacle, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris’s sister.

Film Preservation in the Age of Digitality
2013-04-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Chris Horak
We now live in a digital age, seemingly guaranteeing instant accessibility. Much of the general public in fact believes that every film and television program ever made has already been digitized and is now available in Netflix’s catalog. That is hardly the case, because digitization is still massively expensive, there is no such thing as a digital preservation medium, and even the migration of digital films is fraught with technical difficulties.
Chris Horak is Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Size Is Only Half the Story:Valuing the Dimensionality of BIG DATA
2013-04-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mary L. Gray
Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of “big data” in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of “big data”.
Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of “big data”. She argues for attending to different dimensions rather than scales of data, more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the “snapshot” of quantitative work to the

The Future of Print in the Digital Age
2013-04-17 19:00 - 20:30 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Co-sponsored by Comparative Media Studies/Writing, its Graduate Program in Science Writing, and the MIT Program in Science Technology and Society.
David Carr writes the Media Equation column for the Monday Business section of the New York Times that focuses on media issues including print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter in the Culture section of The Times covering all aspects of popular culture. Carr blogs regularly at Media Decoder.
For the past 25 years, Carr has been writing about media as it intersects with business, culture and government.
Seth Mnookin is a former baseball and political writer who now co-directs MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a 2012-2013 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT and a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

News or Entertainment? The Press in Modern Political Campaigns
2013-04-11 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed “fact-checking” divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future?
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson.

The Cultural Feedback of Noise
2013-04-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, despite remaining deeply underground. How did the submergent circulations of Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization, intercultural exchange and participatory media at the turn of the millennium? In this talk, I trace the “cultural feedback” of noise through the productive distortions of its mediated networks: its recorded forms, technologies of live performance, and into the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners.
David Novak teaches in the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work deals with the globalization of popular music, media technologies, experimental culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of recent essays in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and Popular Music, as well as the book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press).

MOOCs and the Emerging Digital Classroom
2013-03-21 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MOOCs and other forms of online learning have the potential to disrupt traditional classroom education — or to help us better understand how to exploit the many learning spaces students now inhabit. This forum examines the ongoing migration of our analog practices into digital forms, looking at the ways in which digital technologies are transforming teaching and learning both on and off campus. What gaps in our curricula, or in our students’ experience, can be filled through technology? What elements of teaching practice can be effectively translated into new media, and what aspects of “teaching” must be redefined?
Anant Agarwal the president of edX, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University, and a professor in MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science department.
Alison Byerly holds an interdisciplinary appointment as College Professor at Middlebury College and, during 2012-2013, she is a visiting scholar in the Literature Section at MIT.
Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the computer science department at Stanford University. Koller will join the conversation live from the west coast.

Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle against Irony, Letterman and Leyner?
2013-03-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
D. T. Max
D.T. Max, staff writer at the New Yorker, will look at David Foster Wallace and irony, with an eye especially on his 1990’s attacks on David Letterman and the novelist Mark Leyner, both in publications and in private correspondence. When did David Foster Wallace become obsessed with irony and why? What made him so sure it was corrosive to civil culture or initiative? Or was the unease he felt in its presence really more the product of his own personal history?
Co-hosted with Literature at MIT.
