MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Knowledge’s Allure: Surveillance and Uncertainty
2016-09-15 17:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

MIT Open House, with CMS/W Events
2016-04-23 | MA
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

CMS/W Town Hall
2016-04-21 17:00 | MA
Closed to the public.

Nick Seaver: "What Do People Do All Day?"
2016-04-14 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Seaver, CMS ’10, and Assistant Professor at Tufts University
The algorithmic infrastructures of the internet are made by a weird cast of characters: rock stars, gurus, ninjas, wizards, alchemists, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors can all be found sitting at computers in otherwise unremarkable offices, typing. These job titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries. They mark jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. But is that all they do? In this talk, drawing on several years of fieldwork with the developers of algorithmic music recommenders, Seaver describes how these terms help people make sense of new kinds of jobs and their positions within new infrastructures. They draw analogies that fit into existing prestige hierarchies (rockstars and janitors) or relationships to craft and technique (gardeners and alchemists). They aspire to particular imaginations of mastery (gurus and ninjas). Critics of big data have drawn attention to the importance of metaphors in framing public and commercial understandings of data, its biases and origins. The metaphorical borrowings of role terms serve a similar function, highlighting some features at the expense of others and shaping emerging professions in their image. If we want to make sense of new algorithmic industries, we’ll need to understand how they make sense of themselves.
Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. His current research examines the cultural life of algorithms for understanding and recommending music. He received a masters from CMS in 2010 for research on the history of the player piano.

CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations
2016-04-08 09:00 - 17:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
These students aim to misbehave.
Thesis presentations of the class of 2016.

9:00 am coffee and conversation

9:30 am presentations begin

Lily Bui, “Sense and the City: A Critical Look at Representations of Air Quality Data in the ‘Smart City'”
Lilia Kilburn, “The Ghost in the (Answering) Machine: Vocality, Technology, Temporality”
Anika Gupta, “Towards A Better Inclusivity: Online Comments and Community at News Organizations”
Andrew Stuhl, “Making Software with Sound: Process and Politics in Interactive Musical Works”

Lunch Break

Kyrie Caldwell, “That Momentary Glow: Gender and Systems of Warm Interaction in Digital Games”
Deniz Tortum, “Real-time 3D Documentary: Representation Through Reality Capture and Game Engines”
Beyza Boyacioglu, “Zeki Muren: A Prince from Space”
Gordon Mangum, “DeepStream.tv: Designing Informative and Engaging Live Streaming Video Experiences”
Lacey Lord, “Panels from Digits to Digital: The Evolution of Touch in Comics”

If you can’t make it to the presentation, follow the livestream here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cEyEXhb4ryX

Being Muslim in America (and MIT) in 2016
2016-04-07 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Last December, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. In March, he added that “I think Islam hates us.” Cambridge City Councilman Nadeem Mazen and Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley–both MIT alumni–join engineering masters student Abubakar Abid to explore how this type of hateful, discriminatory rhetoric influences public opinion, discuss its impact on the daily lives of Muslim-Americans, and examine strategies for combating it.
Nadeem Mazen is an MIT graduate, Cambridge’s first Muslim city councilman and CEO of the Cambridge makerspace danger!awesome.
Layle Shaikley is an MIT alum, co-founder of Wise Systems and co-founder of TEDxBaghdad. With her viral video sensation “Muslim Hipsters: #mipsterz,” she helped launch a national conversation about how Muslim women are represented.
Abubakar Abid is a engineering masters student at MIT and a member of the Muslim Student Association.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and director of the MIT Communications Forum.

Michael Taussig: "Mooning Texas"
2016-04-07 16:30 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“Mooning Texas” – an adventure story involving social energy + art + Emile Durkheim’s “take” on Mauss + Hubert’s “take” on mana + the creativity of gossip.
Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, was dubbed by the New York Times as “Anthropology’s Alternative Radical.” Taussig has been doing fieldwork since 1969. He has written on the commercialization of peasant agriculture; slavery; hunger; the working of commodity fetishism; colonialism on “shamanism” and folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; the making, talking, and writing of terror; and mimesis. He has also written “a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia.”
Introduced by Prof. Ian Condry, Global Studies and Languages, MIT.
Presented by the Dissolve Inequality series and the Latin American Studies Forum of MIT Global Studies and Languages.
gsl-events@mit.edu • mitgsl.mit.edu

Lisa Glebatis Perks: "Media Marathoning and Affective Involvement"
2016-03-31 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa Perks, Merrimack College
Although the popular press primarily uses the negatively connoted phrase “binge-watching,” Lisa Glebatis Perks employs the label “media marathoning” to describe viewers’ rapid engagement with a story world. Rather than positioning these media experiences as mindless indulgences, the phrase media marathoning intimates engrossment, effort, and purpose. These media engagement efforts can be rewarded with pleasurable experiences, but they can also lead to feelings of disappointment. Perks draws from discourse gathered from over 100 marathoners to describe some of marathoners’ most common emotional experiences, including anger, empathy, parasocial mourning, nostalgia, and regret. The theme of the talk is that characters become the marathoners’ pseudo-avatars, gaining shape, texture, and life through viewers’ affective investments.
Lisa Glebatis Perks (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Merrimack College. She recently published Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality, which explores the ways readers and viewers become absorbed in a fictive text and dedicate many hours to exploring its narrative contours.

Thomas Elsaesser: "Media Archaeology as Symptom"
2016-03-17 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Thomas ElsaesserColumbia University
For nearly one hundred years, the moving image has been discussed primarily from the perspective of photography: organizing our questions and theories around cinema as an ocular dispositif, based on light, projection and transparency, or as a recording dispositif, based on index, imprint and trace. In the age of digital imaging technologies, some of which have little to do with optics, such a history of the moving image seems too narrowly conceived. The broadly based, if loosely defined research field calling itself “media archaeology” not only locates the cinema within more comprehensive media histories, it also investigates apparently obsolete, overlooked, or poorly understood past media practices. The expectation is that by once more “opening up” these pasts, one can enable or envisage a different future. The question then arises: is media archaeology a (viable) disciplinary subject or a (valuable) symptom also of changes in our ideas of history, causality and contingency?
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam and since 2013 has been teaching at Columbia University. Among his most recent books are: The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012) and Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2nd edition 2015, with Malte Hagener). Forthcoming is Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2016).

A Conversation with Guy Maddin
2016-03-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Installation artist, filmmaker, and director Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin will discuss why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form.
Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007).
In the winter of 2015/16 he and Evan Johnson will launch their major internet interactive work, Seances, which will enable anyone online to “hold séances with” movies fashioned out of fragments of long-lost films.

Ariane Labed From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Maria de Medeiros From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Clara Furey From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Excellence in Teaching
2016-03-03 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn.
David Thorburn is an MIT Literature professor, director emeritus of the Communications Forum, and a past winner of MIT’s MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.
Robert Pinsky is a three-term US Poet Laureate. He is a recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center.
Alan Guth is MIT’s Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.
Hazel Sive is a biology professor at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.
A reception in room 14E-304 will follow.

Vincent Brown: "Designing Histories of Slavery for the Database Age"
2016-02-25 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vincent BrownCharles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University
Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.
Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

Caroline Jack: "How Facts Survive in Public Service Media"
2016-02-18 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caroline Jack, CMS/W Exchange Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University
Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics.
Caroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.

Lisa Parks: "Drone Matters: Vertical Mediation in the Horn of Africa"
2016-02-11 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa ParksUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
Since 2002, the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and CIA have orchestrated a covert drone war from Camp Lemonier in the African country of Djibouti, monitoring and striking alleged al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab suspects in Yemen and Somalia. As a media scholar, UC Santa Barbara’s Lisa Parks is interested both in the discourses that have been used to expose covert US drone interventions and in the ways that drone operations themselves function as technologies of mediation. Drawing upon media such as training manual diagrams, infrared images, Google Earth interfaces, and drone crash scene photos, this talk explores the drone’s mediating work through three registers: the infrastructural, the perceptual, and the forensic. Focusing on maneuvers between the ground and sky, Parks suggest that military drone operations are irreducible to the screen’s display and should be understood as practices of vertical mediation–as practices of communication and materialization that occur dynamically through the vertical field, and, as such, have particular kinds of affects. The talk based on a chapter of her forthcoming book, Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror.
Lisa Parks is Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005) and Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and is co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003), and another in progress entitled Life in the Age of Drones (under contract, Duke UP). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a principal investigator on research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department.

Is There a Future for In-Depth Science Journalism?
2016-02-11 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Traditional media outlets have been facing budget cuts and layoffs for years, with specialized reporters often among the first to go. And yet last year, Boston Globe Media Partners made a significant investment in launching STAT, a new publication that focuses on health, medicine and scientific discovery. STAT‘s leadership and reporting team will discuss the publication’s progress and how the field of science journalism is changing.
Speakers
Rick Berke is the executive editor of STAT and former executive editor of POLITICO. Berke joined The New York Times in 1986 and served as a political correspondent and senior editor for nearly three decades.
Carl Zimmer is a national correspondent for STAT and hosts the site’s “Science Happens” video series. Zimmer also writes the “Matter” column at The New York Times and has written 12 books including Soul Made Flesh, which was named as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Rebecca Robbins is a reporter for STAT covering money in life sciences.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

Amanda Lotz: "Television Didn't Die: But Broadband Distribution Revolutionized It"
2016-02-04 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Amanda Lotz University of Michigan
Beginning in the late 1990s, the technology and even mainstream press opined extensively on the coming death of television. A decade later—and a time that found television still very much alive—that theme evolved to instead pronounce the coming death of cable. Rather than demise, the emergence of broadband-distributed television has both reinvented the medium and revealed how extensively our expectations and understandings of television are based not on the medium of television but on logics developed for its broadcast distribution.
Amanda D. Lotz’s talk presents key arguments of her current book project, Being Wired: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All with a focus on what transpired when the long anticipated face off between “new media” and television finally took place in 2010.
Lotz is professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan where she studies contemporary media industries, television, and gender and media. She is the author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York University Press, 2007; Rev. 2nd ed. 2014), Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century(2014), and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), and editor of Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (Routledge, 2009). She is co-author, with Timothy Havens, of Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2nd ed. 2016) and, with Jonathan Gray, of Television Studies (Polity, 2011). Her current work examines how cable changed television and became the dominant supplier of internet access in the early twenty-first century.

John Jennings: "The Cipher Back to Here"
2016-02-02 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John JenningsState University of New York at Buffalo
John Jennings is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York. He is the co-author of the graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture, Vol. 1 and the art collection Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture (both with Damian Duffy). Jennings is also the co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem, MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco, and the AstroBlackness colloquium in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Jennings’ current comics projects include the Hiphop adventure comic Kid Code: Channel Zero, the supernatural crime noir story Blue Hand Mojo, and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred.

Global Game Jam 2016
2016-01-29 - 2016-01-31 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Please refer to full information and schedule at http://student.mit.edu/iap/ns82.html
Register now at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/global-game-jam-2016-at-mit-tickets-19781298396
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.

"Theory" and its Quotation Marks
2016-01-19 - 2016-01-21 | TBA
Full info at http://student.mit.edu/iap/ns82.html:
Lilia Kilburn, Katie Arthur
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
The aim of this course is to provide an opportunity to explore (and a community with which to do so) the longstanding dialogue in the humanities commonly known as “theory,” using inroads offered by certain modifiers (queer theory, feminist theory, media theory, critical race theory, affect theory and so forth). “Theory” is a word to which some people express an allergic reaction, but we posit that the transformative potential of many of these theoretical writings, and the power of the critiques they render, make them worth the occasional difficulty.
Everyone is welcome, with or without any background or experience in theory or literature! We will provide short readings for each session, and we recommend that you commit to the full program, however, you may also attend individual sessions.
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Lilia Kilburn, liliak@mit.edu

The Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project: Documenting South Asian America's Interracial Past
2015-12-03 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor
Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, will discuss his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.
The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo will present a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.

CMS Alumni Panel
2015-11-19 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.
Margaret Weigel, ’02
Dan Roy, ’07
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06

Erik Stayton, ’15
Chelsea Barabas, ’15
Here’s who we’ve lined up so far (subject to change as ever):

Margaret Weigel, ’02, who works in digital education: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretweigel/
Dan Roy, ’07, widely known for his games for learning projects: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2512953
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06, who does big data-driven consumer research: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3838774
Erik Stayton, ’15, now a Ph.D. student at MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society: http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/stayton.html
Chelsea Barabas, ’15, the newly minted advisor to the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75805502

On-Campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2015-11-19 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Come join us for snacks, ask questions, and learn about the CMS Master’s Program.
Slots are limited. Register now at Eventbrite!
This program will be livestreamed, with a moderated chat room at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cEyEXhb4ryX.

Women in Politics: Representation and Reality
2015-11-12 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet TV shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral curve to give us our first female president(s). What messages about women and power do these fictional representations of female politicians send? What connections (if any) can we draw between representation and reality? What challenges do real-life women politicians face as they represent themselves to voters and to the press?
Mary Anne Marsh is a Boston-based political consultant who has worked on many local and national campaigns. She also serves as a Democratic political analyst on the FOX News Channel and on other national and local media.
Ellen Emerson White is the author of many books for children and teens, including the critically acclaimed President’s Daughter series, which chronicles the experiences of a Massachusetts girl whose mother becomes the first female president of the United States.
Moderator: Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, is the author of Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009).

Global Internet Development Viewed Through the Net Vitality Lens
2015-10-29 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Stuart N. Brotman
Net Vitality is a new analytic approach to examine ways to sustain long-term Internet vibrancy, both in the United States and around the world, and helps inform future government policies that impact the deployment and adoption of broadband technologies. Unlike other comparative studies that rank countries quantitatively based on a simplistic assessment of broadband speeds, Stuart N. Brotman’s Net Vitality Index, released earlier this year, also measures countries qualitatively to determine how well they are performing in a global competitive environment, gauging the true vitality of a country’s Internet ecosystem.
Based on five years of research, the Net Vitality Index is the first holistic analysis of the global broadband Internet ecosystem, identifying the United States, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France as the top-tier leaders. Unlike the one-dimensional rankings that serve as the basis of most broadband comparative studies, Brotman’s composite metric takes into account 52 factors developed independently to evaluate countries on an apples-to-apples basis. Overarching categories assessed encompass applications, devices, networks, and macroeconomic factors.
Brotman is a faculty member at Harvard Law School and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

From Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor
2015-10-22 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Heather Hendershot
William F. Buckley’s public affairs program Firing Line (PBS, 1966–1999) offered a space for no-holds-barred, honest intellectual combat at its finest. The conservative Buckley hoped to convert viewers, but there was more to it than that. You could actually learn about other points of view, and thereby become a better liberal or a better conservative from watching the show. There is simply no equivalent on TV today. Conservatives have Fox News, liberals have MSNBC, and in more neutral territory we find C-SPAN. Overall, politically oriented broadcasting has become a vast echo chamber (especially on talk radio), with many tuning in largely to have their views confirmed—and to hear the other side vilified. What happened? How did we get from Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor? And how can we possibly fix things? Hendershot’s talk will provide the historical, regulatory, and political context we need in order to begin to address these very difficult questions.
Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media in CMS/W. Her book on Firing Line is forthcoming in the summer of 2016.

Syria and the Right to the Image
2015-10-19 17:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
