MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Hong Qu, "Keepr: Algorithm For Extracting Entities, Eyewitnesses And Amplifiers"

18 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

When a big news story breaks, Twitter goes crazy. Keepr tries to make sense of these periodic bursts by implementing natural language processing and s...

Conversation with Leo Marx, Lucy Marx, and Rosalind Williams

15 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

From http://rosalindwilliams.com/2013/09/introduction-a-podcast-conversation/ Annotations by Rosalind Williams.

What's In a Slash?

11 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

What's In a Slash? by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Phoenix Burns Out: Remembering A Boston Institution

11 Sep 2013

Contributed by Lukas

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 announce...

Media in Transition 8: "Summing Up, Looking Ahead"

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Roderick Coover, Temple University Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck Molly Sauter, MIT Dan Whaley, hypothes.is Moderator: James Paradis, MIT

Media in Transition 8: "Counterpublics: Self-Fashioning and Alternate Communities"

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside a...

Media in Transition 8: "Surveillance: Big Data and other Watchers"

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations...

Media in Transition 8: "Oversharing: The End of Privacy?"

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users ...

Mary L. Gray, "Size Is Only Half the Story: Valuing the Dimensionality of BIG DATA"

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of "big data" in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline o...

News or Entertainment: The Press in Modern Political Campaigns

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candid...

A Conversation with Nate Silver

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver will discuss his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creato...

A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates

21 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic; author of a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, about his father's influence during his childhood in...

Media in Transition 7: "Unstable Platforms"

12 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

The fate of narrative. What is happening to our culture’s stories and story-tellers? What has been the impact, what is the future import of the prol...

Nick Montfort, "Code and Platform in Computational Media"

06 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Computing plays an important role in some types of media, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature. It seems evident that an unders...

Stephen Duncombe, "Art of the Impossible: Utopia, Imagination, and Critical Media Practice"

05 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or ...

Ethan Gilsdorf, "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks"

03 Jun 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Ethan Gilsdorf discussed some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gam...

Randy Testa, "Telling Stories In Print, Online and Onscreen: Walden Media and Family Audiences"

30 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in t...

Christina Klein, "Transnational U.S.-Asian Cinema: The Case of Tekkon Kinkreet"

30 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become e...

John Bell, "Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance"

29 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a cont...

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

19 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

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. T...

MIT's ZigZag on Podcasting and the Future of Media

12 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Chris Boebel and David Tamés gave us an overview of the production of ZigZag, MIT's new video podcast/magazine, as well as a look into the future of ...

Frank Espinosa, "Rocketo"

12 May 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Newly appointed MLK scholar Frank Espinosa leads a discussion of his Eisner-award nominated graphic novel, Rocketo.

David Novak, "The Cultural Feedback of Noise"

07 Apr 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Cosponsored by the MIT Cool Japan Project. Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, fir...

Jesper Juul, "The Pain of Playing Video Games"

17 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

We often talk of video games as being "fun," but this is a mistake. When we play video games, our facial expressions are only occasionally those of of...

D.T. Max, "Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle against Irony, Letterman and Leyner"

10 Mar 2013

Contributed by Lukas

D.T. Max, staff writer at the New Yorker, looks at David Foster Wallace and irony, with an eye especially on his 1990's attacks on David Letterman and...

Gregory Crane, "Automated Methods, Human Understanding, and Digital Libraries of Babel"

20 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Organized by Literature. Co-sponsored with CMS, the MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, and Ancient and Medieval Studies. Millions of documents...

Convergence Journalism: Emerging Documentary and Multimedia Forms of News

17 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Co-sponsored by the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Hybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are a...

Marcella Szablewicz, "Digital Games and Affect in Urban China"

13 Feb 2013

Contributed by Lukas

Young people born in 1980's and 1990's China are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention as they are the country's first generation of only c...

Al Filreis, "Teaching Modern & Contemporary American Poetry to 36k"

12 Dec 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Al Filreis has taught his “ModPo” course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera, to more ...

Mark Turner, "Minding the News"

28 Nov 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview o...

Hector Postigo, "Cultural Production and Social Media as Capture Platforms: How the Matrix Has You"

14 Nov 2012

Contributed by Lukas

This presentation develops a theoretical framework (rooted in Science and Technology Studies) for understanding how, generally, social media's technic...

Tracy Fullerton, "Finer Fruits: Experiment in Life and Play at Walden"

08 Nov 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Sponsored by the Purple Blurb series. Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in living. The game simulates Henry D...

New Media in West Africa

08 Nov 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Despite many infrastructural and economic hurdles, entertainment media industries are burgeoning in West Africa. Today, the Nigerian cinema market–”...

Digitizing the Culture of Print: The Digital Public Library of America and Other Urgent Projects

01 Nov 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The role of the library in the digital age is one of the compelling questions of our era. How are libraries coping with the promise and perils of our ...

Linda Gregerson, "Why I Write Poems"

25 Oct 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Linda Gregerson discusses her new book of poems, The Selvage, and her calling as a poet and professor of Renaissance literature in conversation with F...

Gediminas Urbonas

21 Oct 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Gediminas Urbonas is artist and educator, and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio – an interdisciplinary research program that advoca...

Tom Streeter, "What Would Pierre Bourdieu Say About Facebook"

11 Oct 2012

Contributed by Lukas

We have come to associate the internet with narratives of appealing unpredictability. We have become accustomed to scanning for the next best thing, t...

Kelley Kreitz, “Yellow Journalism as Civic Media?”

10 Oct 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The so-called “yellow journalism” of the New York Journal and the New York World in the 1890s has been discredited by scholars and journalists for...

Jeffrey Hamburger, "Script as Image"

29 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies Seminar Series and co-sponsored by Literature, HTC, and the SHASS Dean’s Office. Writing, in ...

Jim Bizzocchi, "Close-Reading Media Poetics"

26 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Close reading is a classic humanities methodology for the analysis and understanding of texts across a variety of media. It’s a rigorous discipline ...

George Lakoff, "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why"

23 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Everything we learn, know and understand is physical — a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is unders...

Nancy Baym, "Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media"

16 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music record...

Francis Steen, "The News as a Social Process for Improving Society"

10 Sep 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Television news provides a window into the cognitive processes commonly deployed to frame, explain, and reason about events. What Hart & Honore (1959/...

Johanna Drucker, "Designing Digital Humanities"

07 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So muc...

Frontiers of Electronic Literature, with Katherine Hayles and Rita Raley

06 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes f...

Reshaping the Book

02 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Participants: Christian Bök (University of Calgary), Bob Stein (SocialBook), Gita Manaktala (MIT Press) Moderator: Amaranth Borsuk (MIT Writing an...

Electronic Literature and Future Books

02 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Participants: N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University), Rita Raley (University of California Santa Barbara), Nick Montfort (Comparative Media Studies and...

Unbinding the Book

02 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Participants: Bonnie Mak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), James Reid-Cunningham (Boston Athenaeum), Wyn Kelley (MIT Literature), Mary Ful...

The Xenotext, So Far

01 May 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Kick-Off Performance by Christian Bök Participants: Opening remarks by Amaranth Borsuk and Gretchen Henderson, Introduction by Nick Montfort, and ...

S. Craig Watkins, "The Digital Edge: Exploring the Digital Practices of Black and Latino Youth"

26 Apr 2012

Contributed by Lukas

S. Craig Watkins studies young people’s social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Rad...

Adapting Journalism to the Web

09 Apr 2012

Contributed by Lukas

New communications technologies are revolutionizing our experience of news and information. The avalanche of news, gossip, and citizen reporting avai...

David Kelley, "The Color of Seawater Through a Picture Window"

26 Mar 2012

Contributed by Lukas

David Kelley primarily works with digital video installation and photography, with recent projects involving performance and sculpture. His practice c...

Jesse Shapins, "Mapping the Urban Database Documentary"

26 Mar 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The urban database documentary is a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems as generative processes and organizational frameworks to e...

Documentary Film and New Technologies

20 Mar 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video camera...

The Future of the Post Office

15 Mar 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The American postal service has an impressive history, but an uncertain future. Older than the Constitution, it was a wellspring of American democracy...

Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Media Culture in the Occupy Movement"

07 Mar 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protes...

Heather Chaplin, "Games and Journalism"

23 Feb 2012

Contributed by Lukas

As a journalist covering games since 2001, Chaplin has seen a lot of changes in the industry and among game academics. In this talk she will give an o...

Tracing Playographies: Methods and Approaches to Research Transformative Experiences in Video Games

16 Feb 2012

Contributed by Lukas

“This game meant everything to me” – statements like this emphasize how players encounter deep and meaningful experiences playing video games in...

Clara Fernández-Vara, "Performing Videogame Narratives in Space: Indexical Storytelling"

09 Feb 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Videogames are performance activities, like theatre, sports, rituals or dance. The presentation will draw comparisons and contrasts with theatre to un...

Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos

08 Feb 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Otto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he ela...

Jeremy Douglass, "Visualizing Play: Graphic Approaches to Game Analysis and Innovation"

02 Feb 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Visualizing games and gameplay reveals both startling complexity…and stunning simplicity. This talk discusses many applications of information visua...

T.L. Taylor, "Professional Play and the E-sports Industry"

29 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The rise of e-sports signals a development in computer gaming well worth paying attention to. Not only are we witnessing the emergence and refinement ...

Jessica Hammer, "What Games Mean (And How They Mean It)"

24 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

Games are increasingly seen as a way to address human needs, from the intimate work of maintaining social relationships to the pragmatic benefits of g...

Konstantin Mitgutsch, "Purposeful Games: Research and Design"

23 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

In the last few years a new trend of designing video games intended to fulfill a serious purpose through impacting the players in real life contexts h...

Anne Balsamo, "Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work"

22 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

In her transmedia project, Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo investigates the way in which culture influences the process of technological innovation. D...

Heather Hendershot, "Right-Wing Broadcasting, Cold War America, and the Conservative Movement"

11 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

In the Cold War years, there was a tremendous surge in right-wing broadcasting in America. Hendershot explains how radio and TV extremists feigned a “...

John Hartley, "A Cultural Science Approach to Cultural and Media Studies"

02 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences too." (Walt Whitman) This paper outlines recent developments in the field of cultural and media...

Philip Napoli, "Social Media, Television, and the 'Institutionally Effective' Audience"

02 Jan 2012

Contributed by Lukas

The relationship between the media industries and their audiences is in the midst of a period of profound change. A key aspect of this transition is t...

Ian Bogost, "The Cartoonist and the Whaler: Notes on the Future of Journalism and Other Media"

15 Dec 2011

Contributed by Lukas

A “newsgame” is a videogame that does journalism. Drawing from five years of commercial development and academic research on this new approach, th...

Frank Lantz, "The Aesthetics of Games"

15 Dec 2011

Contributed by Lukas

This talk explores what it means to consider games an aesthetic form -- something akin to literature, music, or film. That this is the most appropriat...

Fred Turner, "The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America"

14 Dec 2011

Contributed by Lukas

In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most widely seen – and widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all time, The Family of...

Cities and the Future of Entertainment

13 Nov 2011

Contributed by Lukas

As a prologue to the conference, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Ri...

Marina Bers, "The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development"

02 Nov 2011

Contributed by Lukas

As the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns, there is a sense of urgency fo...

Surveillance and Citizenship

27 Oct 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Digital technologies have exponentially expanded the power of government and corporations to keep tabs on citizens. But citizens in turn are exploitin...

John Bryant, "Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human"

23 Oct 2011

Contributed by Lukas

In revising their own texts, or other people’s texts, writers erase the past, remodel it, or reinvent it. They create versions of themselves, and th...

Federico Casalegno, "Designing Connections"

11 Oct 2011

Contributed by Lukas

By providing a critical description of existing technologies and projects related to the use of information and communication technologies to enhance ...

Local News in the Digital Age

22 Sep 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Is local news a casualty of the digital age? A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission suggests that although the broad media landsca...

Scott Nicholson, "Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design"

08 Sep 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Over the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed...

Media in Transition 7: "Summing Up, Looking Ahead"

16 May 2011

Contributed by Lukas

The closing plenary from Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms: Goran Bolin, Sodderton University, Sweden Pat Brereton, Dublin City University...

Media in Transition 7: "Power and Empowerment"

14 May 2011

Contributed by Lukas

New technologies and media systems have been deployed for new distributions of power, knowledge and social organization. What do you see as the most c...

Media in Transition 7: "Archives and Cultural Memory"

13 May 2011

Contributed by Lukas

“Web 2.0″ has been shaped by startup corporations and systems (such as Wikipedia) that employ large-scale collaboration and crowdsourcing. How do ...

Cynthia Young and Anamik Saha, "Race and Representation after 9/11"

08 May 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing on recent U.S. television series “The Unit” and “Sleeper Cells,” Cynthia Young examines recent shifts in media representations of Afri...

Richard Rogers, "The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods"

02 May 2011

Contributed by Lukas

There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are “...

Mark Dery, "(Face)book of the Dead"

25 Apr 2011

Contributed by Lukas

In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discus...

Amaranth Borsuk, "Between Page and Screen: Digital, Visual, and Material Poetics"

13 Apr 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Amaranth Borsuk discusses her poetic practice as a multi-media writer and artist, reading selections from recent work and showing images and performan...

A Conversation with Sherry Turkle

12 Apr 2011

Contributed by Lukas

The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of ...

John Ellis, "How Documentary Went Digital: Implications of Informal Filming and Skeptical Audiences"

17 Mar 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Digital filming has transformed documentary, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers ha...

Purple Blurb: "Computers and Creativity"

14 Mar 2011

Contributed by Lukas

The computer’s creative involvement in the visual and literary arts is the topic of this panel discussion, held on the occasion of the Drawing with ...

Public Sphere or Echo Chamber

24 Feb 2011

Contributed by Lukas

The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as n...

Clara Fernández-Vara, "Theatre and Videogames as Performance Activities"

23 Feb 2011

Contributed by Lukas

What do Shakespeare and videogames have in common? Clara Fernández-Vara, a Comparative Media Studies alumna, explains her journey from researching Sh...

Christoph Lindner, "Amsterdam and New York: Transnational Photographic Exchange"

09 Feb 2011

Contributed by Lukas

This lecture examines the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government ...

Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Transmedia Mobilization in the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights Movement"

23 Jan 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar and mediamaker who works in areas including: social movements and ICTs; participatory technology design and communit...

Gabriella Coleman, "Anonymous, Politics of Spectacle, Geek Protests against Scientology"

23 Jan 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and d...

Nitin Sawhney, "Creative DIY Cultures and Civic Agency among Marginalized Youth"

10 Jan 2011

Contributed by Lukas

Nitin Sawhney, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow and Lecturer with the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) in the School of Architecture and Plannin...

Communications in Slow-Moving Crises

18 Nov 2010

Contributed by Lukas

Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; To...

Trace Beaulieu and Mary Jo Pehl, "MST3K and Cinematic Titanic"

07 Nov 2010

Contributed by Lukas

In December of 2007, Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu, two of the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000, assembled many of the original members of t...

Civic Media and Law

04 Nov 2010

Contributed by Lukas

What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected...

Eric Gordon, "How Neighborhoods Use Local Engagement Games to Plan for the Future"

04 Nov 2010

Contributed by Lukas

There are a growing number of games that are location-based. They use mobile devices and locative technologies to turn physical space into a game boar...

Humanities in the Digital Age

21 Oct 2010

Contributed by Lukas

What is happening to the intellectual field called the humanities? Powerful political and corporate forces are encouraging, even demanding science and...

NGO 2.0: When Social Action Meets Social Media

21 Oct 2010

Contributed by Lukas

Professor Wang discusses the genesis and implementation of a civic media project that she conceptualized and launched in China in May 2009. The projec...