In Medias Res Fall 2011

F A L L E V E N T S c alen d a r I N S I D E , p a g e 2 9
In Medias Res
cms.mit.edu fall 2011
Finding Ones Way at CMS

Faculty Grows with Civic Media Scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock Alumni Opinion: Why Gay Employees Need to Come Out MIT to Host Electronic Literature Organization
FA L L 2 0 1 1

from the directors
In Medias Res Now More Apt Than Ever

William Uricchio and James Paradis
alumni opinion
20

p r o j e c t u p d at e s
Readers as Editors: New Digital Tools to Support Literary Interpretation

Kurt Fendt
ABOUT IN MEDIAS RES

In Medias Res is published twice a year by: Comparative Media Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology E15-331 Cambridge, MA 02139 617.253.3599 / cms@mit.edu / cms.mit.edu Please send comments to Andrew Whitacre at awhit@mit.edu.
Why Gay Employees Need To Come Out

Parmesh Shahani
f e at u r e s t o r i e s
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6 8

Introducing the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab

Fox Harrell

Class of 2013 and CMS Alumni
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The Class of 2013

Locast: Creating Visual Narratives with Location-Based, User-Generated Content

Federico Casalegno
events
Research Managers
Federico Casalegno, Mobile Experience Lab Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio Fox Harrell, ICE Lab Scot Osterweil, The Education Arcade Philip Tan, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Ethan Zuckerman, Center for Civic Media
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Faculty Grows with Civic Media Scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock

Ethan Zuckerman
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Media in Transition 7
David Thorburn
events
12

The Undergraduate P.O.V.: Maeve Cullinane, 12

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Staff
Justin Bland Administrative Assistant Susan Fienberg Development Officer Mike Rapa Technology Support Specialist Brad Seawell Communications Coordinator Becky Shepardson Academic Coordinator Jessica Tatlock Events Coordinator Andrew Whitacre Communications Manager Sarah Wolozin Program Manager
2011 Civic Media Conference

Andrew Whitacre
events
14

MIT to Host Electronic Literature Organization

Nick Montfort
CMS i n t h e N e w s
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Sampling of CMS & Co.s Fall 2011 Events

people, places, things
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CMS Brilliance: Not News to Us

30 32

CMS Welcomes Fall 11 Visiting Scholars

people, places, things
Cyberscholar and Media Maker Join Center for Civic Media

Andrew Whitacre
Faculty and Alumni Updates
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As Kids vanished, Science Learning Flourished

Scot Osterweil
On Our Cover
Wayfinding By Andrew Whitacre

above
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Games: More Than Cool

Marleigh Norton
Poikelia design sketch, Hing Chui of the 2010 GAMBIT summer program
FROM THE DIRECTORS
In Medias Res Now More Apt Than Ever
By William Uricchio and James Paradis, Comparative Media Studies Directors

medieval garb; our disciplines, some of which hearken back to the Trivium and Quadrivium; and our organization of study, which largely reflects the needs of the industrial age, all offer a reassuring sense of continuity and tradition, an anchored position from which to assess ongoing change. This legacy view has many affordances, and media studies have made good use of them. Yet, for a program like ours, the situation is complicated. CMS seeks to understand the dynamics of media change. We want to train people who can make sense of and lead that change as it plays out across an array of cultural practices. Comparativity offers a useful methodology but also requires that we move across disciplinary traditions with agility. This movement, characteristic of media studies generallybut also womens studies, American studies, and morefits awkwardly with the disciplinary tradition. On one hand, we studies programs make use of the good work of our more disciplined colleagues, and on the other, our strength comes precisely through our ability to combine approaches and develop strategic responses outside the domain of any one discipline. CMS has gone a step further and embraced a non-disciplinary stance, permitting us to ask unexpected questions and discern long unrecognizable patterns. More a principle than an entity, CMS was, for its first decade, a logic that linked specialists across disciplinary and departmental bounds. With the reorganization, we face the challenges of reificationof becoming a thinggreat for program sustainability, challenging for our programs remit. Might this shift, too, be read in terms of a seasonal metaphor? And if so, where in the calendar are we? That will take some time to ponder, but regardless, one of Ozus great lessons regards embracing and savoring the process of change.
asujiro Ozu had a great feel for seasonal nuance. His Early Spring, Late Spring, Early Summer, The End of Summer and An Autumn Afternoon, gave voice to subtle distinctions that pervade his many films, including those without seasonal labels. The last two titles were also Ozus final two films. They have always seemed particularly poignantthe final statements of one of Japans most accomplished directors. To life-long academics, this particular shift is a familiar if more mundane one, heralded by the autumnal advances of the new academic year, in the face of the lingering experiences of summer. Like Pavlovs stimuli, the rituals of the impending season trigger well-rehearsed responses that slowly but surely tip the perceptual frame. We go back in medias res, in the middle of things. The distinctions are as fine-grained as Ozus, even though the triggers are sometimes just as paradoxically dramatic. The build-up for this fall actually started last spring with the admission of our 11th graduate class, and the addition of Sasha Constanza-Chock to the CMS faculty and Ethan Zuckerman to the Center for Civic Media. Grant renewals for Civic Media, a funding extension for GAMBIT, new support for The Education Arcade and HyperStudio, and the inclusion of a new research groupthe Mobile Experience Labinto CMS all contributed to a growing sense of anticipation and excitement. Fortunately the rituals of summersuch as the arrival of GAMBITs Singapore interns and wonder of seeing finished games emerge from research; or the altered work routines of the CMS staff, which this year included expanding our office space into the Media Labs Pondkept us from getting ahead of ourselves. Summer was full enough to generate its own distractions quite a task considering the steady build-up for fall! But the actual arrival of the students, visiting scholars, the transitional rituals marked by the CMS orientation, and the finishing touches on syllabi, the colloquium line-up, and the newsletterall combined inexorably to shift the delicate balance away from late summer. Despite the longue dure rhythms that seem to govern these events, this year has
William Uricchio
James Paradis
had its share of differences. A one-year hiatus in the graduate program means that there are no seasoned second-year students on hand to welcome and share their collective wisdom with the incoming class. And as the programs reorganization process enters its third and, we all hope, final year, for many of the faculty, the continuity of meetings and discussions undercuts any sense of seasonal undulation. If anything, the pastoral cycles of recurrence and change celebrated by Ozu and routinized in the academic calendar, for this cohort anyway, have been overwritten by a far more linear trajectory. The ongoing reorganization has yielded much of interest to students of institutional behavior. And it has, at least for some, generated a new empathy for the challenges facing our colleagues in the media industry, caught as they are, in the face of fast-changing conditions, between the competing logics of stability and transformation. In fact, some of the debates sparked in our reorganization serve as powerful reminders that, generally speaking, the university has been blissfully isolated from the seismic changes taking place in culture at large. Our ritualistic use of
fall 2011 3
ALUMNI OPINION
Why Gay Employees Need To Come Out

Parmesh Shahani, S.M. 05
Parmesh Shahani. Photo by Vikas Khot, Forbes India.
ne cold spring evening in March 2006, I was having dinner with Anand Mahindra at the highly rated Tamarind Bay restaurant in Harvard Square. I had sought Anands advice about whether I should stay on at MIT, helping run the think tank I had co-founded as a graduate student the year before, or return to India, and put my newly-minted masters degree to use in the real world. If I decided to return, he told me, the Mahindra group would be happy to have me. The offer took me by surprise, which is perhaps why, without thinking too much, I responded that I would love the opportunity, but was wondering if Mahindra had a diversity policy that included LGBT as a category and more specifically, if my then-partner would be offered spousal benefits. Anands answer was short and simple. He told me that there wasnt any specific policy that addressed LGBT issues but were I to join the group, I should be assured that I wouldnt be treated any differently from other employees. This assurance was a key factor in making me return to India and join Mahindra & Mahindra, and it has also ensured that I will be a lifelong ambassador for the company, even though I may not be working there any more. I would certainly never have had the courage to articulate these concerns to any employer before I left India for Boston. In the different jobs that I had held previously, I was deeply closeted and lived in fear of being outed. I remember that at Sony Entertainment Television, when I first encountered a gay colleague, I tried very hard to pretend
that I was straight, and when that failed, I swore him to secrecy to not reveal the secret to anyone else. When I was a writer at Elle magazine, my editor had assigned me a feature on the changing gay scene in Bombay, with a smile. This had irked me no end. Why me? Did she suspect anything? I had a persecution complex and simply denied being gay. Going to Boston and living freely and openly as a gay person for the first time in my life was a liberating experience. I witnessed history firsthand as Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to allow gay marriage. This feeling of freedom inspired me to organise a universityfunded South Asian LGBT film festival and also work on contemporary Indian sexuality as my masters thesis1, which would eventually be published as a book, Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be) longing in Contemporary India. Being gay was such a non-issue in Boston and the matter-of-fact manner in which my then-boyfriend and I applied for joint health insurance at MIT, or as co-tenants in a rental apartment meant that by the time the Anand conversation took place in Harvard Square, enquiring about equal rights in the context of a job offer seemed almost natural. My decision to be open about my sexuality within the Mahindra group, on my return to India, stemmed from the confidence that the
1 http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/ParmeshShahani2005.pdf
4 in medias res
ALUMNI OPINION
head of the group respected me for my professional skills and didnt discriminate against me based on my personal life. In July 2009, the Delhi High Court, in a landmark verdict, decriminalised same-sex relationships between consenting adults, which meant that it was finally legal to be gay in India. After this verdict there have been companies that have come out with diversity policies that address LGBT issues, but I think we should acknowledge progressive companies like Mahindra for their commitment to employee equality even before the court decision.
Gay employees need to come out and identify themselves. What is the point of having gay employee resource groups if no one is willing to state that he or she is gay? What is the point of thinking of partner/same sex spousal benefits if there will be no one to claim them?
There are two main reasons for the Indian corporate world to become more LGBT-friendly. It makes good business sense since LGBT people are customers and dont like buying products or services from companies that discriminate against them. More importantly, LGBT people are talent to be pursued and they dont like working with companies that discriminate. This is why I am happy that the rubric under which the Indian corporate world is looking at LGBT employees is diversity and inclusionthis framework actually reflects the wordings of the 2009 Delhi High Court judgement perfectly. Consider this excerpt from the judgement: If there is one constitutional tenet that can be said to be underlying theme of the Indian Constitution, it is that of inclusiveness. This court believes that Indian Constitution reflects this value deeply ingrained in Indian society, nurtured over several generations. The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognising a role in society for everyone. These are powerful words, and I am glad to see corporate India activating the spirit of this judgement through a change in HR policies and practices. The past two years in particular have seen rapid change. I would never have imagined in July 2009 that by 2011, I would be sitting at the Google office in Bangalore, giving a talk to the Indian Gayglers, or discussing a diversity policy at my current employer Godrej, with team members who all agreed that sexual orientation should appear as a category under which discrimination cannot take place. Or that I would attend a Pride march with my straight Godrej colleagues, who had brought along their families as a sign of support. Im not pretending that the Indian workplace has suddenly become rainbow hued. Far from it! I know of individuals whove been fired from their jobs after their sexual orientation has been revealed. I know of bosses who make snide comments about their LGBT juniors, enough to make them want to quit. And I know of cases where job offers have been made but withdrawn after the company came to know that the candidate is gay. But there are also loads of offices where, when straight colleagues talk about what they did on the weekend with their wives and husbands, the gay colleagues join in equally vocally and without
any gender substitution in their pronoun choices. I have friends who display their partners pictures on their tables at work. And this seems to be a universal phenomenon globally: the moment your colleagues (of either gender) come to know that you are gay, they come to you for fashion advice! Indeed, the small change that is happening in the Indian workplace with regard to LGBT issues is as much a result of small daily interactions as it is of the rewriting of HR policies. This change in mindsets needs one prerequisite, which is that gay employees need to come out and identify themselves. What is the point of having gay employee resource groups if no one is willing to state that he or she is gay? What is the point of thinking of partner/ same sex spousal benefits if there will be no one to claim them? Even in companies that have progressive HR departments, there are still few out people, and this to me, is a huge problem. I think that the root of the problem is that there are many high-level corporate executives who continue to remain in the closet. Coming out will not change a thing for them. Their promotions dont depend on this secrecy. They wont be judged if they come out. If at all, it will be a relief to everyone around them as their preferences are often open secrets. But what they would do by coming out is become role models for other LGBT people in corporate India, struggling with issues about their sexuality and lacking the confidence to be themselves in the workplace. In the US, Apples COO Tim Cook, who topped Out magazines 2011 list of the most powerful LGBT men and women in America, or media mogul David Geffen, are an inspiration to those at lower levels in the corporate hierarchy. We need similar gay role models in India. I consider myself luckyI had the chance to go to America to gain my confidence and I also found supportive corporate alliesbut the next generation of corporate gay India shouldnt have to rely on luck. Along with progressive HR policies, Id also like for them to have some desi gay role models. Any takers?
This article was commissioned by and published in Forbes India magazine2, Issue 3 Volume 133 (18th June 1st July 2011) and is reproduced with permission. Forbes India is published in India by Digital18 Media Limited, a Network184 company, under a license agreement with Forbes LLC, USA5.
2 http://business.in.com/article/real-issue/why-gay-employees-need-to-comeout/26262/1 3 http://business.in.com/magazine/582 4 http://www.network18online.com/ 5 http://www.forbes.com
fall 2011 5
F E AT U R E S T O R I E S

Alumni and the Graduate Class of 2013
his summer, we invited the incoming graduate student class of 2013 to ask advice of CMS alumni. At the time, we had little idea what would come of it: would their questions reflect wariness? Ambition? Or simply where to grab an after-class drink? But the excerpts of that conversation that follow, from three incoming students and two alums, turned out to be some of the most insightful accounts of the CMS programas viewed by both newcomers and veterans alike. Accompanied aftward by short bios of the class of 13, here is a sample of whats at the front of their minds as they start the programand what wisdom a couple of their predessors have to offer. Rogelio Alejandro Lopez, 13, to Sarah Kamal, 05 I see that you have worked with underrepresented groups in media spheres, such as women in Afghanistan and refugee youth in Iran. I have worked with underrepresented groups in Los Angeles, such as migrant workers, low-income communities, and other historically marginalized communities that have struggled to attain representation in the media. I found the work of scholar Jennifer L. Fluri on the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) to be highly informative to the conditions found among communities in Los Angeles. I see from your profile that you have had extensive international experience, which is one of the comparative aspects that I am hoping for with the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. I too hope to gain an international perspectives on such themes and struggles that occur constantly on a global scale. My question is, do you feel that gaining an international perspective of media access and creation among marginalized groups has informed you in regards to addressing such societal disparities? For creating more inclusive media spheres? Kamal responds: Perhaps like you, I first entered CMS because of an activist bent, out of an interest in harnessing communications technologies for fostering inclusiveness and understanding. I quickly found out that the academic world wasnt about activism: the concerns I could address were differentstill important, but requiring patience (which I lack) and different strategies. The international comparative aspect you picked up on is both one of the most frustrating and rewarding areas Ive engaged with. In my view, local details matter, and I say this having watched the Afghanculture-unrelated media reconstruction in Afghanistan unfold with its destructive power (dont believe what you read regarding Afghan medias success. They are only now beginning to publicly discuss
warlord media there). Yet the stories of locally-ungrounded development efforts are so old and well-known that its tempting to say that local details dress a more general story about asymmetries in decisionmaking power and resource flows. I was a visitor in a conference of Canadian Inuit recently, and was struck by the similarities between the struggles Afghans and Inuit face. Both peoples are fighting, among other things, to address painful social problems while maintaining their personhood and a space for a different way of life. I saw among the Inuit what I thought were some of the traps of institutionalized development Id seen in Afghanistan; yet even as I stood up to ask questions or to offer opinions, I was very aware that I knew nothing of what it meant to live in that community, day in and day out, with the problems they have long been working to address. So the international aspect has given me an empathy and an awareness of some general patterns regarding marginalized groups and the means through which they attempt to improve their conditions, yet at the same time a healthy respect for local expertise and experience which reminds me (sometimes in vainsigh) to hold my horses and listen as best I can. Sonny Sidhu, 13, to Jacson Rockwood, 09 How did your experience guide you towards and prepare you for your post-MIT professional accomplishments? Are there any research projects, academic endeavors, or personal connections from your time at CMS that you now consider particularly formative? What was the most valuable thing you gained from your experience at MIT? Rockwood responds: My time at MIT and CMS had a profound impact in shaping and preparing me for my professional accomplishments. Those accomplishments are in marketing, advertising, and corporate/brand strategy, so as you read my comments, please keep that context in mind. Im by no means an academic, and my thoughts here might not apply if thats the direction you are heading in. Prior to CMS, I was working as a freelance consultant focusing on helping corporations understand media change and how it could impact their operations. Getting accepted to MIT had a very strong impact in how my clients viewed me and my contributions. I find that since graduating, being associated with the MIT brand is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I now work in advertising as a social media/digital strategist, and clients are always happy to have an MIT graduate working on their business. Likewise, employers always know that if someone could get into (and out of!) MIT in one piece, they are probably pretty good to have around.
6 in medias res
Ive found that the MIT name carries a lot of external brand credibility, but that in no way discounts the impact of CMS on training and shaping my internal (intellectual) credibility. When I started at CMS, so many people said things like, Wow, MIT, thats great, but youre going to study media? Like video games and Facebook? Many people told me it was an impractical pipe dream to spend so much time and effort to study something so esoteric as new media. But by the time I graduated in 2009, those same critics were suddenly calling me prescient.
on when things get crazy. MIT is tough, and when things get overwhelming, dont be afraid to reach out to alumni for support. It was the combination of the unparalleled resources of MIT with the depth of insight and expertise of CMS that made my two years in Cambridge the best two years of my life. Enjoy every minute! Jia Zhang, 13, to Kamal and Rockwood If you had the experience of transitioning from a different field and making the CMS program the process by which to redirect your career or refocus your interests, how was that experience? Was the program helpful in reevaluating your past work as well? How was the cross-disciplinary nature and structure of the program helpful in this regard? Most of you have graduated for a few years: what part of CMSs training is most important now compared to your original field of study? What do you still find integral in your current work? Kamal responds: My bachelors was in mathematics, and I worked for some time in the telecommunications field. I then switched over to international development, and applied to CMS when I began to be interested in media systems. My career/studies since then have revolved around media development. Definitely, the S.M. helped to reorient and focus my work on media in the aid world and was also a transition out of the logic-centered structures of mathematics into the perspective or paradigm-based argumentation of the humanities and social sciences. It was a fruitful switchover for me, as I now can read things from either (logic or paradigm-based) camp. I also find that the silocrossing perspective I grappled with for my S.M. thesis continues to influence my current doctoral work in ways that are useful and (hopefully) interesting. Rockwood responds: I think my answer to Sonny touched upon many of your questions too To clarify my points there in relation to your questions, CMS was, for me, like a kind of awakening. I had spent the previous four years as an undergrad and consultant trying to make sense of what I saw as massive upheavals in culture and governance. CMS gave me the tools and language to understand that change, and to help others navigate that change successfully. It was a very empowering experience, personally and professionally. It helped me see all the work I had been doing in a completely new way, and the rigor of the CMS methods gave my work and thinking discipline and accountability. You hear a lot that CMS prepares students for jobs that dont yet exist. In my experience, those jobs came into existence in the past two years, and sometimes I think they are the only jobs left! Media change has made entire industries and labor populations obsolete. I cant think of a better degree to prepare you for the future of work than CMS. The two things that I think were most valuable about the education itself are the cross-disciplinary thinking plus an understanding of media in transition. Combined, CMS has trained me to be able to function in a diverse number of settings, and to understand how to keep up as the workplace evolves due to changes in technology, communication, and culture.
Getting accepted to MIT had a very strong impact in how my clients viewed me and my contributions. I find that since graduating, being associated with the MIT brand is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I now work in advertising as a social media/digital strategist, and clients are always happy to have an MIT graduate working on their business.
Dont underestimate the importance media change is having on our society, across all areas; and likewise dont underestimate the power of a CMS education to help you navigate the professional sphere with vigor and finesse. Studying at CMS was like getting a secret key to understanding 90% of the problems that corporations and governments are going through today. Pay attention; youre learning the future for the next two years! I feel like what I learned in my two years at CMS will easily keep me ahead of the curve beyond the next decade. As for practical advice for making the most of your time: 1. Choose a thesis topic early and dont waiver. Just look at it as an assignment youve given yourself and work on it early and often. Youll learn to stay on track and finish what you start, as well as to be proactive in self-management. If you change your mind or procrastinate youll regret it. 2. Think about finding a balance between exploring the depths of CMS and exploring the breadth that is MIT. You dont have the luxury in a S.M. program to dawdle, but there is no reason why you cant integrate course work from other departments. My classmates found connections to the Science, Technology, and Society program, the Writing Program, Computer Science, Sloan, and of course the Media Lab. I personally formed some great relationships with the Art, Technology, and Culture program. I also found connections at Harvards Kennedy School to support my work on correctional policy. If youre at all interested in policy or public governance, Harvard has an immense set of resources and people that can help. 3. Take advantage of the alumni. Were all right here over email or phone and would be happy to support you in either making the most of your time/education, or just helping you get through the inevitable difficulties that come with studying at a place like MIT. Your class doesnt have a second-year course ahead of you1 to lean on, and I cant express what a help it was to have those experienced CMSers to lean
1 CMS held off graduate admissions during the transition that followed co-director Henry Jenkins' departure.
fall 2011 7
The Class of 2013

Amar Boghani, after graduating with a B.S. in computer science from the Rochester Institute of Technology, joined Orange Labs Boston, a research lab of France Telecom. There, he was part of a group researching how mobile application development is affected by new web technologies, as well as the social and business implications of future mobile devices. Afterwards, he joined the Mobile Experience Lab, now a part of Comparative Media Studies. At the lab, he has worked primarily on a locativemedia framework designed to allow for the quick prototyping of media platforms centered on various social topics such as community, culture, and sustainability. He is currently most interested in the relationships between media, society and urban spaceshow these relationships exist in traditional media, how they evolve with new media, and how new experiences can be designed around them. His other interests include cycling and music, visual arts such as graphic design, photography, and film, which he hopes to be able to incorporate into his research and future career. Katie Edgerton, a native of Virginia Beach, graduated Williams College with a degree in history and theater. She is an assistant curator for exhibitions at the 9/11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center site, where she works on content development and scriptwriting for the primary historical exhibition and several digital initiatives. Elyse Graham is a candidate for the Ph.D. in the English department at Yale University. She studies literature, the history of print culture, and the history of books. She has essays forthcoming from Modern Philology and other journals, and contributes regularly to The American Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2007. She is currently on leave from Yale to attend the CMS program, where she will study old and new media. Her interests include early modern literature, print and information systems, and the history and theory of technology. Ayse Gursoy joins CMS after having completed her A.B. at Princeton in the English department. She is interested in looking at games critically and developing a working vocabulary for game criticism that takes into account the emergent properties of games, as well as the historical context. For her spring independent work in junior year, she wrote about Oblivion (TES IV), taking into account its debts to hypertext and tabletop RPGs, as well as the affordances made available by the programming and by the means of interacting with the game. For instance, the game actively encourages modding and gives players easy access to the console; what does this imply for the act of playing? She is also interested in the possibilities of gaming for representing and embodying new identities, and hopes that in developing a critical language for games, will be able to investigate the unique nuances of this question. Sun Huan recieved a B.A. in journalism from Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her interest is in the rise of digital media and its socio-political implications on China. Her undergraduate thesis built up structural equation models to examine the use of SNS (renren.com) by Chinese college students and how it relates to civic engagement. She worked with Professor Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute on the fifth estate in the context of China. She plans to concentrate on the topic of new communication technology and how it strengthens a developing civil society. She has also completed internships at he New York Times (Beijing), Beijing Daily, Beijing Evening Newspaper, and with Eurosport.com. Rogelio Alejandro Lopez, from Guadalajara, Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA summa cum laude with degrees in chicana/o studies and Spanish. As a scholar in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Rogelio has conducted research regarding the use of new media among Latina/o activists in L.A. Emphasizing a ground-up approach to scholarship and civic engagement, he has been involved with integrating media and technology into social justice movements. His work looks into lessening educational and health-related disparities among historically underrepresented and underserved communities. Past examples of such fusion between media and public service include his involvement with the Fast for Our Future, a human rights focused hunger strike
8 in medias res
that utilized a new media campaign, and the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund. Rogelio will work closely with the Center for Civic Media to further develop the use of technology and media as a means of addressing societal disparities. Molly Sauter grew up in Bucks County, PA, and has lived in Annapolis, Austin, and Somerville, MA. She studied philosophy and the history and philosophy of science at St. Johns College and the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a Brackenridge Fellow. Before arriving at MIT, she worked as a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and as a freelance narrative designer and game critic in the indie game scene. Mollys research focuses on cultural and socio-political analyses of technology, particularly hacktivist and other political technologies exported across cultural lines. She also nurses interests in digital poetry, science and technology in popular culture, the HCI of information security, and remix aesthetics. She can be found on Twitter @oddletters and occasionally blogging at oddletters.com. Steven Schirra worked most recently as coordinator and researcher at Emerson Colleges Engagement Game Lab, collaborating with communities to design and deploy local game initiatives. With a background in composition/ rhetoric, his work focuses largely on the ways in which communities (geographical and virtual) use digital media and games to deliberate, learn, and research. His research interests include game studies, civic engagement, new media literacies, fan studies, composition studies, digital archives, digital writing, and the history of the book. He holds a B.A. in English from Kent State University and an M.A. in publishing and writing from Emerson College. Sonny Sidhu comes to MIT from Philadelphia, where he lived after graduating from Swarthmore College with a special major in film and media studies. His interests are the art and practice of narrative storytelling in interactive or computational media. At MIT, Sonny hopes to map the contours of phenomena such as disruptive processes of subjective identification,
projection, and transferral among spectators of interactive narratives; the computational organization and data-structural qualities of narrative, rhetorical, and logical constructions drawn from literature and the humanities; and the aesthetics of choice in highly variable interactive media environments and games. A native of Chestertown, Maryland, Sonny also enjoys following pro sports, playing and recording music, making art, eating good food, drinking good beer, and having a good laugh every now and then. Abe Stein, Audio Director at our own Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, began making goofy noises when he was very young, creating detailed action sequences and death defying car chases on the kitchen floor with his G.I. Joes and Matchbox cars. Having since been enlightened to the capabilities of recording technology, Abe can still be found in front of a microphone trying to replicate the sound of a 1986 IROC-Z engine with his mouth. Abe graduated from Haverford College with a bachelors degree in religion, and studied audio engineering and sound design at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts of Boston University. A one-time high school English and history teacher, his sound design, music and mix work can be heard on a variety of educational videos, long and short form documentary films, various promotional shorts, and on the Cartoon Networks Adult Swim animated series Assy McGee. Abe is primarily interested in understanding the interrelationship of sports, sports games, and rituals. Jia Zhang is a native of Beijing and has lived in the United States since 1993. She believes in a pragmatic approach to sharing data through imagery, interaction and research while stripping away unnecessary convention, jargon and sometimes the notion of objectivity. Jia received her B.F.A. in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design and M.F.A. in design and technology from Parsons. Between schools, Jia has worked as a photographer, playground designer, data visualization fellow for the International Budget Project, researcher at NYUs Environmental Health Clinic, and design director for the artist Xu Bings studio.
Each CMS graduate student works with a research group, so keep updated on their contributions throughout the year via groups websites, future issues of In Medias Res , and every day on Twitter: @cms_mit.
fall 2011 9
Faculty Grows with Civic Media Scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock

By Ethan Zuckerman
With VozMob, day laborers tell their own stories using mobile phones.
asha Costanza-Chock is joining the faculty of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT as Assistant Professor of Civic Media, and is one of the three principal investigators (along with Ethan Zuckerman and Mitchel Resnick) of the Center for Civic Media. He caught up with his new colleague Ethan Zuckerman to talk about his background and his plans at MIT. Im a scholar and activist as well as a media maker, explains Costanza-Chock. My scholarship has been based on engagement with the world of media activism and civic media more broadly. In his work at MIT, Costanza-Chock plans to continue straddling the line between action and reflection, building tools and systems to help communities express themselves and reflecting on the role of media in social movements. Costanza-Chocks work on media and social change began in the late 1990s with the emergence of Indymedia at the Seattle WTO protests, and the subsequent spread of over one hundred Independent Media Centers (IMCs) linked to the global justice movement. I got involved with people connected to the Indymedia network and ended up doing music and video production for films that documented that wave of transnational mobilization, for example This Is What Democracy Looks Like1, Fourth World War2, and The Miami Model3. Costanza-Chock sees analogies between methods used in those early days of digital civic media and the current interest in crowdsourcing media production. Those films were produced by dozens, sometimes hundreds of people shooting video on handheld cameras, sharing footage widely, edited by collaborative teams. It was participatory news production prior to the emergence of the term citizen journalism. In the late 1990s, open publishing was just beginning to take off, and the social media tools that dominate contemporary internet usage hadnt emerged. But models of participatory production that are familiar today were starting to challenge broadcast medias dominance of the coverage of protest events. Mass media firms had
1 http://www.thisisdemocracy.org 2 http://www.bignoisefilms.com/films/features/89-fourth-world-war 3 http://www.archive.org/details/miamimodel
to take seriously the idea of the internet as a vehicle for participatory journalism, because they were getting scooped by what they saw as these punk kids in the street with handheld cameras. His experience with Indymedia connected him to a transnational network of media activists, many linked to community based media projects across a wide range of platforms, from the Net to newspapers, from local radio stations to mural painters, all with their own deep histories but connected on a global scale for the first time through the internet. Costanza-Chock traveled through Latin America helping with the setup of these centers, often bringing donated cameras and computers from the US. It was a fruitful time for the development of new tools and tactics and for the exchange of ideas, he explains. Most importantly, we were creating a network of people engaged with passionate, participatory media making from a social movement standpoint. While Indymedia is no longer as prominent as it was a decade ago, Costanza-Chock notes its influence on the broader civic media landscape. In some cases, key civic media tools were built by people connected to the IMCs; for example, developer Evan Henshaw-Plath was one of the key platform architects of Twitter4. In other cases, local Indymedia centers are still going strong; for example, the UrbanaChampaign IMC purchased the local post office5 and converted it into a 30,000 square foot community media center. One of the challenges of Indymedia was that it was dominated by white, male, middle-class activists who had the time to spend on all-volunteer projects. Indymedias approach to journalism took a bright-line stance against accepting money from corporations, political parties, or advertisers, which both validated the idea that volunteers could do high quality journalism, but also made it difficult to sustain longer-form investigative journalism. The model excelled at mass mobilization in crisis events, but Costanza-Chock became concerned about issues of privilege and sustainability. In 2001, he began work on a Masters degree at the University of
4 http://nextgenerationlabor.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/how-txtmob-influenced-twitter 5 http://www.zcommunications.org/imc-uc-indymedia-as-social-movement-by-amy-ldalton
10 in medias res
Pennsylvanias Annenberg School. Presenting a paper at a conference, he met legendary media reformer and scholar Robert McChesney, who invited him to join Free Press, then a startup organization focused on issues of public interest media policy in the US. Costanza-Chock became global media policy project coordinator, trying to figure out how to make global media policy interesting and engaging and to find pressure points for a public interest approach to media reform at the international level. Free Press focused primarily on issues before the FCC in the US, while Costanza-Chock pushed the organization to work on issues connected to global media policy bodies like WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization), the International Telecommunications Union, ICANN, UNESCO, and especially the World Trade Organization and regional and bilateral trade agreements.
Many civic media projects are geared around that small slice of the population lucky enough to have always-on broadband connectivity. Im interested in how civic media reaches beyond that 5-10% of the global public.
For example, in the mid-2000s, NGOs around the world began engaging with WIPO, where the most powerful countries were pushing for maximalist approaches to intellectual property. NGOs began to seek a more balanced IP system, one that would include fair use exemptions to copyright, patent exemptions for access to vital medicines, and protection of indigenous knowledge and seed stocks from appropriation by multinational agribusiness firms. CostanzaChock was particularly interested in issues of trade justice in the audiovisual and information sectors, referencing Koreas attempts to protect their cinematic industry and allow it to develop, a policy challenged by Hollywood in the recent US-Korea free trade agreement. Its important to reflect as well as to act, Costanza-Chock explains. Many social movements are also hotbeds of scholarly and intellectual productionits not an unusual thing for actors within the movement to step back and work through issues of theory as well as practice. So in 2005, he followed his mentor Larry Gross from Annenberg East to Annenberg West, at USCs Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. USC had just hired Manuel Castells, prominent scholar and theorist of the information society, and Costanza-Chock saw an opportunity to learn from Castells while working on the theory behind communication and social movements. The move to L.A. was also a chance to rethink sustainable, locally grounded civic media practices. I wanted to focus on local organizations deeply rooted in their communities, as a counterweight to the globetrotting activist approach. This new focus on working hand in hand with community-based organizations had a major payoff, leading Costanza-Chock to participatory research methods, collaborative design using free and open source software, and communitybased projects like Radio Tijeras and VozMob. Radio Tijeras was an effort, based at the Garment Worker Center6,
to share information about labor rights with workers in L.A.s garment industry. L.A. is one of the few American cities that still produces garments, and 80,000 workers are part of the sector, many working in sweatshop conditions with frequent cases of underpaid and unpaid wages, health and safety violations, and physical and sexual abuse by employers. Radio Tijeras involved a team of garment workers in the production of radio spots distributed by low-power FM as well as on Discos Volantes or audio flyersCDs that included music, interviews, and PSAs on workers rights7, passed hand to hand by workers in the shops, many of whom are told by employers that theyre not allowed to talk, but spent their workdays listening to the radio or to music on headphones. (The projects name is a pun disco volante means flying saucer, but volante also means flyer. ) I believe in thinking beyond Web 2.0, looking beyond the glossy surface of the latest high-end tools. Many civic media projects are geared around that small slice of the population lucky enough to have always-on broadband connectivity. Im interested in how civic media reaches beyond that 5-10% of the global public. That design strategy, as well as a strong practice of rooting both research and design in community participation, led to Costanza-Chocks work with the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) on VozMob (Mobile Voices/Voces Mviles), which helps day laborers in L.A. share stories and reports with their community using mobile phones to write stories, record audio, and take photos. It was working with the immigrant rights movement that led Costanza-Chock to develop theory around what he calls transmedia mobilization: My research suggests that social movements are most effective when the media opportunity structure shifts and opens; when they engage in cross-platform production and distribution; when they develop a praxis of digital media literacy; and when movement organizations shift from top-down structures of communicative practice to horizontal, participatory structures that include their social base. Why is MIT the next stop for Costanza-Chock? Its the most exciting possible place to imagine doing the kind of work Ive been doing. Not only is there a rich pool of talented people, he explains, but sometimes it has been a struggle to find acceptance for projectbased learning approaches, at MIT, this method is basically a given! The Center for Civic Media will both make things and reflect on them, leaning on the expertise of the Comparative Media Studies Program, where people are focused not exclusively on the newest and latest, but on how we contextualize, theorize, and think about media and communication across geographies, technologies and historical moments. With the strength of the Media Lab as toolbuilders and the reflective and scholarly capacity of CMS, well build new tools and future possibilities in a way thats thoughtful and responsive to community needs. Costanza-Chock will be teaching an Introduction to Civic Media course in the fall, and is exploring other courses for the spring term, possibly including a project-based service learning course on participatory design, a course on the copyfighting movement, one on social movement theory, or one on the political economy of new media. More about his work can be found at http://schock.cc.
6 http://garmentworkercenter.org
7 http://vozmob.net/es/radiotijera
fall 2011 11
The Undergraduate P.O.V. Maeve Cullinane, 12

Each issue, we present a profile of a CMS undergraduate. But this time, we decided to change things and ask an undergradMaeve Cullinane, an intern this summer at MTV and set to graduate this coming springto put the experience in her own words. How does Cullinane see the CMS program, its advantages and challenges to an undergrad, but especially: what does it mean at the early stage of a career full of options? hen I first entered CMS, my main goal was to learn as much as I could about the medium of television. I signed up for William Uricchios great class, Understanding Television, and it really introduced me to a whole field of study Id never even considered before. I learned about the history of the medium, its economics, its future. I learned a massive amount about the study of television, though for better or for worse that was the end of the line for me as far as television classes go. I have to admit I was a little lost as to what I should do after that. I had found something I truly loved, but there was no longer a direct way to pursue it. Luckily, that class wrapped up just before summer break, and I got some time to think more about what I could do with CMS and how I could make it work for me. It was the summer after my sophomore year; I took an internship at WGBH here in Boston, working on a local game show called High School Quiz Show. It was a much smaller production than what I do now at MTV, but that was actually perfect: I got to be hands on with a lot of different aspects of the show and was able to figure out more about what I was interested in. Its around that time that I decided I really wanted to attempt writing for television. I honestly hadnt even tried creative writing probably since middle school, and I just decided to take a crack at it and see what happened. I signed up for a playwriting class and Writing for Social Media. I really enjoyed the freedom that I found in both. Im looking to do more creative writing in the future, but I dont want to box myself in either. I love television in general and can definitely wax poetic about why I think its such a fantastic story-telling medium. Im really exploring all the possibilities right now. Ive thought about writing, producing, marketing, and Im sure there are other possibilities I havent even discovered yet. Im taking advantage of the myriad options in CMS and figuring out what works for me. At MIT, Im an intern. I guess I kind of do everything, though specifically Im interning in Series Development and Animation. MTV is headquartered in New YorkTimes Square in fact, as some might remember from the days of TRLand so our department is pretty much in the center of all the projects being developed for the network and also those that are currently in production. The department is fairly small. Its split into different development groupsone set of people developing all the comedy projects and another set developing reality shows, etc. I work for two different people in the department. One of them assists the senior vice president of the department, while the other works on the development of movies for MTV.
CMS undergrad Maeve Culllinane
MTV also has a very visible internship program. Its something that theyve done a really good job organizing and developing and I really felt when I was coming to MTV that I was coming somewhere that had built interns into the work environment. Were all really well woven into the structure of the company and because the program is so well-run and has been around for awhile, our bosses know how to work with interns and delegate and make the most of a group of people that are really eager to be involved and learn from the experience. Some of what I do involves putting together research for the promotion of projects that are soon to be released. I read through scripts, treatments, and books being considered for development. I write basic summaries of the projects, but Im also lucky to work somewhere where my opinion about the project is considered along with the summary. My boss always asks me how I felt about a particular piece, whether I could see myself watching it, if I could see it on the network. Its been great to participate and learn how a network follows a strategy by passing all incoming projects through a filter that fits their demographic and the mission of the company. The department also manages the budgets and logistics of current projects, so Ive also had a lot of exposure to the organization of company that has to manage many projects at once. With so much going on, Ive been doing all kinds of different work just to help out with whatever needs to be done. Ive been exposed to so many new aspects of the industry this summer, and I get to take it all in and decide what I enjoy doing the most. MTV just felt like a great fit for me right now because its such a young company. The programming is aimed at my age group and the people that work on the company are generally not much older than
12 in medias res
me either. I feel like Im working with a group that sees things with a similar perspective to mine. The programming is geared to people my age and I always feel that interns arent there on accident or simply as a form of public outreach. Were there because were seen as the demographic of the company and they want our input. I feel really comfortable there. Its a great group of people that have fun doing what they do and are enthusiastic about new trends. I think the television medium really lends itself to long form story-telling. Theres a great potential to develop a show into something that lives and breathes, something that the viewer can become a part of. A movie is something that ends quickly. It has a finite time and when you leave the theater you leave that world and those characters behind. With a good television show, the viewer can feel like theyre a part of that world, or that its a familiar place they visit every week. Sometimes you feel like you get to know the characters of the show, that you become more and more familiar with them as the show goes on and more is revealed about them. I think its great when you feel like youre going through one experience in your life and a character on TV is mirroring that same experience. Its like youre traveling along with them. Something that also made TV an even more compelling medium for me was when we started learning in Professor Uricchios class how TV is increasingly a transmedia experience. Im really interested in how
The Hotel Astor, 1515 Broadway, circa 1916. Below, at same Times Square site, MTV studios, Viacom Building, 2007. Latter credit: Flickr user mishkali.
transmedia develops and whether it becomes something all viewers participate in or if that part of the show will be relegated to only the die-hard fans. Im actually hoping to take a transmedia storytelling class this term and learn a bit more about the different ways we can build a whole world around a show.
fall 2011 13
MIT to Host Electronic Literature Organization

By Nick Montfort, Electronic Literature Organization President & Associate Professor of Digital Media
ductive. Were grateful for the ways that UCLA and MITH have helped us to accomplish our mission, sustain and add projects, and develop as an organization. With work from ELOs directors, members, and collaborators, were now going to try to establish a long-term home for ELO at MIT that will allow the organization and the campus to continue to benefit from their collaboration for many years. ELOs main projects are currently a biannual conference, the Electronic Literature Directory, the Electronic Literature Collection (the second volume of which was released this past spring: http://collection.eliterature.org) and the eliterature.org site. ELO Director and Associate Professor of Digital Media Fox Harrell agrees. MIT is an ideal home for the Electronic Literature Organization, Harrell, who also heads the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab said. The humanities at MIT have long combined literature and the arts with technologynot to mention that MIT holds an illustrious place in the history of text adventure games. Since I work in both the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), having an organization on campus that naturally combines the humanities and computing makes it easier to explain what my lab does. Co-founder Rettberg expressed pride in the ELOs accomplishments. We put together the ELO back in 1999 in order to give the field of electronic literatureand the community of artists and writers develop literary experiences specific to the computera kind of voice and institutional identity that did not exist at the time. He added that even a mere ten years ago, people were much more skeptical to even the idea of literature made on and for the networked computer. Forming a literary nonprofit helped both to strengthen the community of artists and scholars and to make more people in the general reading public aware of these new literary innovations and practices. He concurred with Harrell and me:
I think there are a number of reasons why MIT and the ELO are a good match: both entities are focused on how technology can be used to better society, and to create an ever-more interesting culture. Technology isnt simply a utilitarian aspect of our lives or a set of tools, but pervasive in every aspect of our contemporary lives. What better place to support and develop innovation in technological arts than MIT? Nick has been with the ELO from the very beginning. He and I worked to bring electronic literature readings to the Boston Cyberarts Festival back in 2000, and worked together on the first Electronic Literature Collection in 2006. He has always been very committed to the work of this organization, and I could not be more pleased that he is serving as the President of the ELO. His leadership has been essential. Fox has been a very inventive and influential artist and theorist in the field, particularly in developing compelling expressive processing platforms.
IT has long been a premier center of technological innovation. On July 1, a new locus for literary innovation was added to the mix: the campus began hosting the headquarters of the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org). The Electronic Literature Organization, or ELO, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization composed of an international community of writers, artists, teachers, scholars, and developersall with a focus is new literary forms that are made to be read on digital systems, including smartphones, web browsers, and networked computers. ELO is coming to MIT with the support of our world-renowned Comparative Media Studies program. CMS, with its undergraduate major, graduate program, and large-scale research projects, much like ELO, is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. The program considers media change and the rise of new forms of writing in different eras, including our current one. ELOs supporting and collaborating organizations at MIT include the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Hyperstudio; the Literature Section; and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. There is already a great deal of work in electronic literature ongoing at MIT, including that being done by me and ELO Director Fox Harrell. The Boston area is home to several other ELO directors and to a great deal of digital art activity, thanks to organizations such as the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Turbulence.org, the AXIOM Gallery, the Upgrade! Boston series, and the Peoples Republic of Interactive Fiction. ELO and MIT have already been successful in advancing the state of the art in electronic literature. Now, by working together, we can sustain ELOs core operations and projects and further MITs commitment to electronic literature. ELOs coming to MIT is a chance to find new opportunities for collaboration here in Cambridge and beyond. The Organization was founded in 1999 by novelist Robert Coover, electronic author Scott Rettberg, and Internet business leader Jeff Ballowe. It operated from an office in Chicago until moving to UCLA in 2001. In 2006, ELOs headquarters came to the University of Marylands Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH). ELOs relationships with its academic hosts have been extremely pro-
Rettberg described it as a great bonus for the ELO to have two active and involved board members at MIT. We hope the organization will remain and prosper in years to come.
14 in medias res
CMS IN THE NEWS
CMS Brilliance: Not News to Us

countenance of felines. Scot Osterweil received a Bringing Out the Best MIT Excellence Award. For those who work in MITs Education Arcade, Scots acknowledgement read, he is a selfless mentorthe go-to guy for assistance of all kinds. He remains close enough to projects to provide influence, while giving others space to grow. Fox Harrell, along with colleagues from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, released a key report examining how the arts, sciences, and technology can overcome decades of diverging interests and practices. Strategies for Arts + Science + Technology Research is available online. Harrell was also interviewed by the International Review of African American Art. Harrell believes that digital media can transform users ideas, improvise new aesthetic meanings, and critique society and culture. In Newsweek, Junot Daz reflected on Tokyo. Today, as radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station drifts toward Tokyo, I am again thinking about the vulnerability of cities and of our love for them. Perhaps cities provoke so much love because they know that in that love lies their own endurance. Philip Tan talked to USA Today about the controversy of using real-world enemies in first-person shooters: The game [Medal of Honor] may be making a very poignant and important point about war with the Taliban, but the majority of people who are commenting havent engaged with the game itself. Harvard University Law Schools Berkman Center for Internet and Society announced its fellows for 2011-12, a list that includes CMS professor Beth Coleman.
For more CMS updates, see cms.mit.edu/news.
Images from VANISHED
The Education Arcade game, VANISHED, reached thousands of middle school science students to help explore a world affected by climate change. The game was covered by the Boston Globe, LiveScience, and Bostons local ABC affiliate NewsChannel5. The 2010 GAMBIT summer team ZZZ Games developed Symon, which subsequently won the Kongregate Award for Best Browser Game at the Indie Game Challenge. Meanwhile, the Meaningful Play Conference audience and jury presented awards to GAMBIT games Afterland, Elude, and Yet One Word. Red Ink, a Center for Civic Media project developed by the Media Labs Ryan OToole to help consumers make better collective financial decisions, was named a notable entry in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. Mia Consalvo spoke with NPRs Jane Clayson about the rise in popularity of social games like Farmville. We all remember connecting with friends over a game of cards, Parcheesi or Monopoly. These days, games are more popular than everbut increasingly theyre virtual and played on Facebook. [...] The small
fraction of serious players who pony up cash for coveted virtual goods means the business of social games is booming. Can video games be art? Absolutely, Nick Montfort told New Scientist. Look at the creations of Cory Archangel, Mark Essen and Eddo Stern. Can video games tackle difficult issues and sensitively present us with different perspectives? They already have. Can video games present an experience of aesthetic beauty that is particular to the medium? Indeed they do: see Tetsuya Mizuguchis Rez, a game dedicated to Kandinsky. Montfort also spoke with the Cape Cod Times about game violence: Reading reviews and playing games at least a bit with your children is a good way to be aware of what these games are like, which ones arent acceptable for children of certain ages, and how to help your children understand the views these games represent. Alum Sam Ford spoke with Mashable to answer the eternal question, just why does the web love cats? Juxtaposing surprising meanings over cat images, la the LOLcats phenomenon, allows us to engage in an activity humans have long been doing: projecting our thoughts onto the mysterious
fall 2011 15
PR O J E C T U PD A T E S
CIVIC MEDIA
MIT CENTER FOR
Cyberscholar and Media Maker Join Center for Civic Media

By Andrew Whitacre
than Zuckermanscholar of the global blogosphere, free expression and social translationwas introduced this summer as the new director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, soon after CMS also announced the appointment of Sasha Costanza-Chock in the newly created position of Assistant Professor of Civic Media (see page 12 for Zuckermans own profile of Costanza-Chock). In his role, Zuckerman will solidify and advance the Centers vanguard of researchers conducting community-based research and hands-on media work, efforts that came to define the new field of civic media under the leadership of Center co-founder Chris Csikszentmihlyi. Zuckerman has been a longtime fellow at Harvard Universitys Berkman Center for Internet and Society, as well as a fellow atand advisor tothe Center for Civic Media. He was co-founder in 2000 of Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps, and in 2004 of Global Voices, a global citizen media platform with volunteers in more than one hundred countries. With several notable exceptions, the Centers most successful projects, such as grassroots balloon-and-camera mapping of the Gulf oil spill, have focused on communities in the United States. Zuckerman pans an invigorated emphasis on international test-beds for Center technologies. The importance of civic media in documenting the protest movements of the Arab Spring has been a reminder of both the power of digital tools and how little we understand the ways in which citizens, activists, governments, new and traditional media interact, Zuckerman said. I believe the Center for Civic Media will be able to contribute both to the understanding of the role and power of civic media in the broader media ecosystem, and
Ethan Zuckerman. Photo by Erik Hersman.
Sasha Costanza-Chock.
build tools that help communities around the world share their perspectives and stories. Meanwhile, Costanza-Chock brings to the Center and CMS a focus on the interrelated areas of social movements and information and communication technologies; participatory technology design and community based participatory research; and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. His work has involved the use of mobile phones for social change; digital literacies and digital inclusion; and race, class, and gender in digital space. He has done research on the transformation of public media systems; the political economy of communication; and information and communications policy. He holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate, and he will teach CMSs new civic media course. Both Zuckerman and Costanza-Chock participated in this years annual MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, at which Knight Foundation also unveiled a new three-year, $3.76 million grant for the Center.
The two will work closely. Im particularly excited about working with Sasha, Zuckerman said. He is committed to understanding civic media through scholarly inquiry and through the creation of activist projects like VozMob, a platform Costanza-Chock developed for immigrant and/or low-wage workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. Since its founding five years ago, the Center has enlisted leading innovators and new technologies in empowering communities through grassroots information experiments, said Alberto Ibargen, president of Knight Foundation about both the Centers new director and its renewed funding. Its work shows that lab-based news technologies can be applied successfully in geographic communities. The Center now aims to build on that strong foundation with new leadership and expanded programming. If it becomes an international hub of civic media, as it strives to, we expect the benefits to radiate to communities everywhere.
Visit the Center online at civic.mit.edu.
16 in medias res
As Kids vanished, Science Learning Flourished

By Scot Osterweil
n April 4, 3,000 kids logged in to play Vanished, advertised as an MIT-Smithsonian science mystery game. What they found when they logged in was a video message from several MIT undergrads, alerting them that the planned game couldnt begin because the site had been mysteriously hacked. Players were asked to visit the sites discussion forums to figure out what was going on. On the forums the players, all middleschoolers, collectively recognized that there were fragments of text flashing briefly in the videos and that each player had a different fragment. They quickly guessed these were coded messages, and within an hour a player hypothesized that these fragments were in a Caesar ciphercreated by shifting letters several positions in the alphabetand another player found a website that assisted in decoding Caesar ciphers. Working together, and using an applet provided by MIT, it took the players two days to assemble all the fragments into a single message. Apparently, they were being contacted by people from the future, asking their help in figuring out what catastrophe had wiped out the historical record sometime between our present and theirs. Over the next eight weeks the players, whose ranks swelled to nearly 7,000, peeled back layer within layer until the secret of the catastrophe was revealed. Along the way they collected data, formed and debated hypotheses, solved puzzles, visited museums around the country, and held online discussions with Smithsonian scientists in the fields of volcanology, forensic anthropology, paleo-botany, and entomology. Through all this they were assisted in their efforts by MIT undergrads serving as mentors and coaches encouraging their efforts, but never giving away answers.
Vanished, designed by Caitlin Feeley, Jason Haas, and Dana Tenneson, is a curated game, a new model museums can use to extend their mission beyond their walls. Funded by the National Science Foundations program in Informal Science Education, Vanished was developed in collaboration with Smithsonians Center for Education and Museum Studies. The back-end code was developed as open-source and will be free for other institutions to create similar games. CMS staff will develop a Curated Game Handbook to assist institutions. An additional goal of Vanished was to demonstrate that through gameplay, students would engage in rigorous scientific practice: observing, probing, collecting data, forming hypotheses, and using evidence in argumenta-
tion. These practices are common in gameplay; in the proper context students could exhibit them in more explicitly academic pursuits. If the connection could be made between their play and their studies, students could exhibit positive attitudes toward authentic practices in science, math or history. We are still pouring over the massive amount of data generated by Vanished, but the early evidence is that the game achieved its goals. Along with the quality of the work the students performed (always solving problems in a fraction of the time we allotted) they also enthused on line about their conversations with the scientists, and how cool they were. Weve received letters from teachers whove overheard Vanished players talking about wanting to pursue careers in science. When Vanished ended, players organized their own websites to continue creating challenges that they could collectively solve. Perhaps the most interesting finding for us was the relationship between imagination and rigorous scholarship. Within hours the players all figured out that the premise of the game was fiction, yet that didnt dampen their efforts. Quite the contrary, it was apparent through their comments that the fiction of the game is what motivated them to do real scientific research. If we had simply offered up a series of intellectual challenges, we doubt most of the players would have remained involved, but the opportunity to imaginatively project themselves into the games science fiction inspired them to greater efforts. As we continue our data analysis, we hope to be able to argue that imaginative projection is what provoked them to not only work harder, but more effectively and with greater creativity.
Visit the The Education Arcade online at educationarcade.org.
fall 2011 17
Games: More Than Cool

By Marleigh Norton
For MITs 150th anniversary open house, GAMBIT weclomed the public to test its games on-site.
blink, reread the text message, and start dashing around the Lab. In my memory of this, the sound effects for The Bionic Woman are playing as I run, my luminous GAMBIT lab coat flapping dramatically in a brisk, implausible wind. I suspect in reality my sprint was much less theatrical, if just as intense. Its April 30ththe campus-wide open house for MITs 150th anniversary, a highly publicized eventand our lab is already packed with
guests, happily occupied with a variety of experimental games. Normally Id be pleased at this sign of a successful event, but just now I find it daunting. What am I going to do with a million kids? My first stop is Mia Consalvo and Sara Verrilli, who are researching the social aspects of Facebook-style games. I go to them first because the game theyre testing is a paper prototype (exactly what it sounds like), so hopefully I can take a large group of people
without the restriction of available computers. Sara looks worried when I brief her; its an hour to go before the end of the open house and theyre running out of supplies. She and her students begin hastily recycling paper game pieces as I head to the next room. I dont have as much luck with postdoc Konstantin Mitgutsch. His study on video game research methods and learning behaviors requires guests to play through Afterland and then to participate in a focus group or
18 in medias res
interview. Its a good way to collect data, but time-intensive. He needs to keep his groups small, so when I ask, he can only commit to one or two more people. One of our collaborators from The Education Arcade is next, and thats a bit more promising. Jason Haas has a few computers turned off because of the heaton top of everything our air conditioning isnt working but in the light of an influx of new visitors, we agree to boot them back up. The game we made together, Poikilia, is a child-friendly game where the player uses color theory principles to navigate a set of mazes. Hopefully the kids will like it. I do one last quick survey of the other activities in the office. Our computers set up for free gaming are all in use, as are the computers Abe Stein is using to test his computer adaptation of the Greek play Antigone. Minor victory with the students from the Creating Video Games classtheyre showing off their final projects and they can take a few more people. My scan complete, a plan in mind, I sprint for the front door. I hit the entrance just as middle schoolers start piling out of the elevators like clowns out of circus cars. Welcome to the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, I say brightly. How many? Video game research and development at MIT: to some, its a natural combination. As Shannon Fischer of Boston Magazine put it, I suspect there would be something wrong with the world if MIT did not, in fact, have a dedicated video game research center. Kids too. They just get it. You dont have to justify why grown women and men spend their time studying games when talking to a child. Games are cool, ergo MIT researchers should be working on them, duh. I have to admit, theres a core of truth to this oversimplified belief. Everyone is interested in games in some form or another. I play peekaboo with my baby cousin, hide and seek with his older sister, discuss hockey with my brother, and learn cribbage from my grandparents. Games are part of our culture, so tightly integrated that we barely notice. Studying such a pervasive social phenomenon is important work, and concentrating on technology-based gamesi.e., video gamesis a great fit for MIT.
The 2009 prototype Tipping Point, a game about project management based on research by the MIT Sloan School of Management. Given its success during MIT150, GAMBIT clearly internalized the games lessons.
But when a million kids push past during the open house and their teachers look at me with pleasant yet expectant faces, I feel they deserve a better answer than Games are cool. Luckily I have one At GAMBIT, our games all forward some sort of research agenda. Easiest to evangelize are our educational games such as Poikilia, Waker, and The Magical Journey of Orez. Developed with The Education Arcade, these games are designed to help players develop intuition about math and science principles. A bit more abstract, if just as insightful, are Tipping Point, a game showing how projects run out of control, and Elude, a clinical tool to help the friends and families of those suffering from depression to understand the affliction. But we dont stop there. We turn a critical eye on our art and how it fits into the greater game industry. Clara Fernandez-Varas games Symon and Rosemary look at a wellestablished game genrepoint-and-click adventure gamesand innovate on the style. Abe Steins work on the plays of Sophocles grew out of frustration with current perceptions of what a game adaptation should be, focusing instead on themes instead of plot or characters. Todd Harper and Generoso Fierro
both challenge the bigotry that clings to video game culture, Todd with his exploration of queer-positive games and Generoso with his video art piece on the use of hate speech by video game players. This is a great body of work, but too many people dont know about it. Sure we speak at conferences and write research papers like all academics, but lets face it, most people dont care about those. Quite the problem. To fix it, we need to take our work to the general public. The MIT150 event that ran me ragged was one, as well as smaller, less complicated open houses. Our games are on display at the MIT Museum and soon at Bostons Museum of Science. And finally, we have articles like this one. You, dear reader, can help our humble research lab. All games named in this article are available to play for free at gambit.mit.edu. Play them to learn about gaming research. Play them to learn about the development that goes into making a game. But most of all, play them because theyre cool.
Visit GAMBIT online at gambit.mit.edu.
fall 2011 19
Readers as Editors: New Digital Tools to Support Literary Interpretation
By Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio Executive Director

popular musical forms has come to define new modes of artistic production and consumption that inspire active creators. Similarly in academic scholarship and pedagogy, an appreciation for how artists borrow and rework cultural materials has energized the study of creative processes. In a literature classroom, traditional methods of close reading, source study, and literary analysis can merge with newer interpretive models to view texts in creative flux: as fluid vessels for recombining older forms of inspiration and engendering new ones in different media adaptations. Reading literary works as textual remixes reinforces strong close reading and critical skills while rejuvenating source study. As an example of what we have in mind, Miximize might allow students to represent digitally the mix implied in the title page of Mary Shelleys 1818 Frankenstein: A text area at the center displays the target text selection. A second area would display source textsfor example, as the collection of images on the facing page shows, a painting by Rubens of Prometheus, the figure to which the books subtitle refers; the opening of Miltons Paradise Lost, from which Shelleys epigraph comes; and Fuselis painting The Nightmare, which may have inspired some of the Gothic and erotic overtones of the story. A third area might display examples of different adaptations of Shelleys novel: here, Boris Karloff playing the Creature in James Whales 1931 Frankenstein; Marvel Comics Monster of Frankenstein series from 1973; and Kenneth Branaghs film Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1994). Miximize allows students to easily find, compare, and discuss textual and multimedia materials. Students are able to filter (i.e. select for particular aims) using faceting, full-text search, and a zoomed-out view of text with tags or relevant search terms highlighted in order to show different patterns. Within a single window, students are able to compare passages from different texts and adaptations, as well as related media. Finally, students are able to tie these elements together by writing annotations and commentary on compared passages and other juxtapositions. These activities as well online discussions based on collections of their aggregated search material feed into group projects, presentations, and multimedia essays that would build a special edition of the text. Miximize expands on HyperStudios Repertoire digital platform (see next page) that has been used in a number of current projects such as Berliner sehen, the ComdieFranaise Registers project, or the US-Iran Relations project. For Miximize, HyperStudio is developing new Repertoire functionality such as text juxtaposition, annotation across multiple texts, transparent filtering and comparison of annotations, and a fluid text display that can reflow, condense and expand text depending on selected tags, annotations, source or related media. Part of the project is an extensive assessment process that will accompany the classroom use and the development of the digital tools. In the future, we envision using this approach with other literary and non-literary texts for a new way for readers to engage with texts.
Visit HyperStudio online at hyperstudio.mit.edu.
ogether with Senior Lecturer Wyn Kelly in the Literature Faculty at MIT, HyperStudio has embarked on a new project, Miximize, that engages students in the critical reading of literary texts. By employing different visualization, mapping, tagging, and annotation tools, texts will become more accessible, and fluid to students. Original sources, adaptations, variations, and textual editions become part of the process of analyzing and interpreting literary texts. Miximize will allow students to examine the relationships between sources (pre-texts), the literary text (often in multiple versions), and adaptations in different media. Students engage more actively in critical reading, writing, and thinking when they see themselves as editors directly involved in making a text understandable: not just producing a correct text but providing the full apparatus of introductions, annotations, and other explanatory material that open a text up to a wide variety of users. Students can learn a great deal about the process of editing by observing how authors remix their own sources, and similarly by discovering how stories get adapted into other media; these recirculations of texts in different forms mimic another kind of editing, as artists comment on other texts by borrowing from them. At the heart of this approach lie theories and technologies for understanding the mix as a central feature of new media literacies or competencies, in Henry Jenkinss terminology.1 The notion of remix borrowed from
1 Henry Jenkins, et al, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006. (January 22, 2011). Web.
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About Repertoire
Some humanities projects call for close reading of text and image; others, a rich sense of cultural context; still others use numerical methods to unearth voices hidden by history or expose larger trends. This principle of no one size ts all, guides the design of Hyperstudios Repertoire software. Media repositories stop short of the full immersive experience rather than tailor the digital environment to the humanities intent. Repertoire was conceived to allow Hyperstudio the exibility to pursue such customizations, without re-inventing the wheel. Its purpose, in short: to put the individual professors humanities approach rst. To enable this more exible approach, Hyperstudio staff identied some core features:
Individual projects need their own characteristic graphic design, or look and feel Since each project has a unique view of its content, it should be able to maintain custom databases Likewise, each project should be free to implement its own collaboration or analysis code Even if renements take time, it should be relatively fast to get a basic project up and running Where desired, projects should have access to each others software tools:
User management and collaboration Data visualization Text markup and data extraction Full text searching Faceted browsing Timeline display The result is a software ecosystem rather than a monolithic platform. Individual projects make use of the modules that provide functionality they need, and ignore the rest. Hence the name Repertoire, a stock of digital humanities skills or prociencies that you can mobilize as needed.
fall 2011 21
Introducing the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab

By Fox Harrell, Associate Professor of Digital Media and ICE Lab Director
he Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) has had an extremely productive inaugural year at MIT. The ICE Lab builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts phantasmal media. Such systems include new forms of computational narrative and poetry, computer gaming, social computing, and new forms of computer-based art unanticipated by any of those. The ICE Labs systems are based in cognitive science, digital media arts, and computing (additional information is available on the ICE Lab site; see Figure 1).
Recent and Ongoing Projects

Imagining Worlds During the past year, we have continued our efforts in the area of computational narrative. In particular, we completed Phase I of the Gestural Narrative Interactive Expression (GeNIE) Project to develop and better understanding the use of gestural interfaces for expressive works of interactive narrative (NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant; Kenny Chow and Erik Loyer, collaborators). Gestural interfaces have become more popular with the increasing prevalence of systems such as the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360, mobile phones with multi-touch screens and built-in gyroscopes and accelerometers, and laptop computers equipped with touchpads. Yet, most previous interactive narrative systems have used menudriven or text-based interfaces for communication between characters. In contrast, the GeNIE project has resulted in a platform for building gesture-driven narratives: imagine
responding to another characters questions by continuously sliding your finger up and down, puppeteering your own characters nodding head to indicate a yes response. Or you might use your finger to draw a ^ shape, raising a characters eyebrow to express skepticism, followed by your performance of a pinch-in motion using your fingers to result in your characters mood becoming more withdrawn. The computer-controlled characters facial expression continuously changes in response to your actions (see Figure 2). The GeNIE platform enables this, and more, tied into a storytelling system for mobile devices based on my earlier work. Such interfaces have several advantages. They may be more immediately familiar for users, resulting in very intuitive input mechanisms. Beyond this, such interfaces allow for a diversity of forms of non-verbal input. Non-verbal, gestural input can be either universal (like smiling) or culturally-specific (like shoulder shrugging), but either way it is a type of communication that we all use everyday. Gestural interfaces have not yet been well explored in interactive narrative or creative computing more broadly, the GeNIE project is a step in that direction. Among other venues, this research will be presented at the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Creativity and Cognition conference, of which Harrell is coincidentally Co-Chair and Art Program Chair. At the ACM conference, I will also debut an interactive fiction (IF) work called Skeletons of Mare Incognitium built using my colleague Nick Montforts innovative Curveship IF platform. Imagining Selves The ICE Lab also pursues research to enable users to more creatively and powerfully
Figure 1: The new ICE Lab site launches in fall 2011 at icelab.mit.edu.
represent ourselves on computers using characters, avatars, profiles, online accounts, and more. Toward this end, the Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project develops new models and technology for social identity in games, social networking, and emerging platforms. ($535,060/5 years, NSF CAREER Award #0952896). The ICE Lab has developed an AIR toolkit, a set of software tools for modeling computational identity phenomena. The toolkit uses computer science techniques to represent quite subjective social phenomena such as using multiple self-representations can reflect identity phenomena from the real world including self-presenting differently in different communities, attempting to pass as a member of another community, or being a central or marginal member of a community. To give one example, the system can analyze a users social network in order to find implicit categories of friends, items a user likes, etc. The toolkit can then allow the user to see how similar (or different) his or her own profile
22 in medias res
Figure 3: The AIR Toolkit can discover categories of users based on shared likes.
3). Greg and ICE lab member Christine Yu (a Writing and Humanistic Studies student) also created a Facebook application using the toolkit as a project in my CMS course on Advanced Identity Application. Simultaneously with technical development of the AIR Toolkit, I worked with ICE Lab members Rebecca Perry and Melissa Edoh (HASTS Ph.D. students) to run empirical social scientific studies looking at current gaming systems (including the Mii Creator and Sims 3) to learn more about the ways in which they support or fail to support users needs and whether any of the current systems result in users being marginalized or stigmatized. Results will inform development of the toolkit and applications built using it and the resultant methods will be used hold AIR project systems to the same type of scrutiny. Imagining the Future I have also been working to envision the future of interdisciplinary research such as conducted in ICE Lab and other groups in CMS. Toward this end, in September 2010 I was principal investigator on an NSF grant to run Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology, a workshop inviting art/science thought-leaders to develop a national agenda for funding and collaboration integrating the arts and computing/information science. In 2011, the ICE Lab looks forward to welcoming a new cohort of students from CMS and CSAIL and to continuing its efforts in all of the initiatives listed above and more.
Visit ICE Lab online at icelab.mit.edu.
Figure 2: Screenshots from a story made using the GeNIE platform. The user ran her finger right across the touchscreen, causing the characters head to turn.
is to that category. I have worked with ICE Lab member Greg Vargas (CSAIL M. Eng student) to develop the toolkit and run exper-
iments with it using Facebook data (though the system could just as easily be applied to a role-playing game or other media; see Figure
fall 2011 23
Locast: Creating Visual Narratives with Location-Based, User-Generated Content

By Federico Casalegno
allows users to generate their own media, create their own stories, and actively participate in the media production process. Locast started as a distributed television project to increase user contribution. While Locast has evolved into a larger means for mobile storytelling, geo-located videos have always been a fundamental part. Locast leverages location-based services in order to improve context-awarenessoffering a set of tools to recognize location, improve navigation, and extend the amount of accessible, quality information. Additionally, the Locast platform is designed to easily pair with hardware such as wearable devices, environmental sensors and other highly-specific electronics. An open-API philosophy makes Locast an ideal platform for different contexts. It has been used as a promoter of cultural awareness and local heritage, a means of street reporting and encouraging civic engagement, an experience documenter and informational resource, a tool to facilitate hands-on contextual learning, a collaborative travel guide, and a diary to monitor health. One implementation, Locast Civic Media, engaged the public in the process of collecting, reporting, and disseminating news and information related to the urban environment. Specifically, the project enabled users to create street reports (casts) through video and audio content and decide whether to produce them individually or to involve peers in larger-scale reports on a certain topic or urban area (projects). Casts and projects were created, collected, and shared in real-time on the Locast website, where the greater community could join the exchange with comments and further casts. Locast Civic Media was launched in Porto Allegre, Brazil, while the area was suffering from major flooding. The severe weather had taken its toll on the roads and in one area created a significant pothole.The damage went unnoticed, or at least untreated, by the local government despite the hindrance to traffic. In response, residents set up a small roadblock around the gap and as the days went by added a life-sized doll who sat out by the hole holding humorous signs.The entire experience was documented by Locast, videos showing the progression of the communitys involvement.The published videos eventually drew the attention of the municipality, and the student who published them was hired by the city government. Locast users upload media, control the systems organization, and democratically decide how it should be shared.Therefore, it is users who breathe life into the platform and control the direction of the project. Locast presents a remarkable research opportunity because, given a certain toolset, it allows us to see how people choose to share their own stories. The history of Locast is filled with creative narratives and distinctive opportunities that, when captured and shared, demonstrate the power of user-generated content. At the Mobile Experience Lab, our design approach is human-centered. While stating that you design for people has become a somewhat clichd notion, we truly envision the end users reaction throughout every stage of design and evaluate technologies based on the experiential impact for the user. Locast showcases this philosophy: by becoming active participants in the media production process, users dictate their own stories and define their own experiences.
For more information on Locast, visit http://locast.mit.edu, and for the Mobile Experience Lab, http://mobile.mit.edu.
t the Mobile Experience Lab, our research focuses on the interaction of three themes: sustainability, mobility, and connectivity. Our researchers reimagine the world as environmentally and socially sustainable, exploring how the consumption and utilization habits of current generations can be improved. Mobility is a way to strengthen links between people, places, and information to ensure flexibility and freedom of access. We seek to improve connectivity by designing technologies and services that foster locationbased connections and social interactions and redefine the user experience. Locast is one project that amalgamates these themes to create hyperlocal, highlyconnected experiences. It is a platform that combines distributed web and mobile applications to share and discover location-based user-generated media. It superimposes layers of collectively generated information within the physical space; this augmentation of space is democratically chosen by Locast users, in real-time, as they participate in the contentgeneration process. In other words, Locast
24 in medias res
Locast - Civic Media, a mobile and web platform to collect, report, and disseminate news and information related to the urban environment. Below, Locast - H2flOw, web and mobile applications and constructible tangible interfaces for teenagers to develop an awareness of sustainable water usage.
fall 2011 25
EVENTS
Media in Transition 7
By David Thorburn, MiT7 Conference Director, Professor of Literature, and Director of the MIT Communications Forum
ore than three hundred scholars, journalists, and media makers from every continent and twenty four countries participated in the seventh Media in Transition conference in May 2011 at MIT. These biennial conferences, organized by the MIT Communications Forum and CMS, have come to be recognized for their international and cross-disciplinary character and for their hospitality to both emerging and established voices. One measure of the success of the Media in Transition series, which began in 1999 and marked the launch of the then-new graduate program in Comparative Media Studies, is that nearly half of this years participants had attended a previous conference, and a smaller, indomitable contingent had taken part in several of them. A number of CMS alumni also delivered papers this year. The conference theme, Unstable Platforms: the Promise and Peril of Transition, sought to engage a topic at the core of past conferences: the experience of transition itself and the troubling possibility that other eras of media change may have limited relevance for the apparently perpetual churn of the digital age. There are significant precedents for our experience of destabilizing transition and transformation, as a number of papers suggested. But others argued that if the instability of platforms is not a new phenomenon, this ceaseless hurricane of change may be different from earlier turbulent transition. A number of papers described particular ways in which emerging technologies and cultural practices are challenging inherited conceptions of art and journalism, communication formats, citizenship itself. Even our notions of an end state, of a desired coherence or completion, some provocative papers suggested, must yield in many cases to more open-ended ideas of a text or object that evolves as users and collaborators shape it in an ongoing process. A notable series of panels on digital methods presented by scholars from the University of Amsterdam explored what Prof. Richard Rogers, chair of media studies at Amsterdam, described as an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are born in the new medium, as opposed to those that have migrated to it. A recognition of this fundamental distinction was implicit at least in many other papers, and especially in a large group of presentations devoted to social media: their rapidly changing formats and their capacity to empower oppressors and violent fringes as well as righteous protestors, ethnic minorities, and other marginalized subcultures. Theorizing this ambiguity in a plenary session on Power and Empowerment, Sandra Braman of the University of Wisconsin argued that a new form of powerinformational powerhas emerged. That corporations and governments have access to troves of personal information about citizens is one kind of informational power. That individuals have the capacity to create a website like WikiLeaks to expose government and corporate malfeasance is another.
#mit7
Looking forward to 3 awesome days of Media in Transition talks, good friends, and taxidermy field trips Thanks all for a terrific #mit7! Overflowing w/ ideas as a result. Boston treated us v well culinarily too. All round excellent trip I think #mit7 helped save my brain Still buzzing from discussions after #mit7 noise presentation. So good its hard to refocus on whats next It was a great honor to be here listening to so foda :) people who think and create media changes Oh, man. Everybody cool is at #mit7 . This whole agoraphobia thing sucks sometimes Interdisciplinarity is great for scholarship, but to get a job or fundingin the academy you need to fit squarely in one discipline The supermarket is the last broadcast medium We live in an age of willful documentation, but also need to figure out what we should forget Zines are available in college archives; yet people making zines often feel alienated by that environment Colleen Kaman on Internet infrastructures. In 1991, some countries are listed as having e-mail but not Internet connections On the persistance of old media: two ppl sitting next to me are engaged in written conversationwith pens and a sheet of paper! We should bring the term information superhighway back. Ironically, of course
26 in medias res
EVENTS
Above, Erik Borra presents in The Social Media Protest Environment session. Below, MiT7 attendees socialize during lunch. Photos by Anne Helmond.
Audio recordings, summaries of the plenaries, abstracts of all papers, and many complete papers as well are available at web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7. MiT7 was supported by the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, the Literature Section, and the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT. The conference directors were Nick Montfort, James Paradis, William Uricchio, and David Thorburn.
fall 2011 27
EVENTS
2011 Civic Media Conference
By Andrew Whitacre
he MIT Center for Civic Media this June hosted another Civic Media Conference, the annual chance for an invitation-only crowd of 250 journalists, hacktivists, and foundation/NGO representatives to take stock of a joint enterprise and, just as fun, find out which projects would receive millions of dollars in News Challenge funding from Knight Foundation. This years Knight News Challenge winners represented a vanguardalready turning into a trendof projects focused on statelevel data, international conflict and corruption, and creative media funding models. Whereas earlier conference saw Knight Foundation funding solutions to future of journalism-type questions, this latest round of prizes acknowledged that newspapers large and small are starting to figure out their financial models and that the focus of innovation now must shift from professional, full-time journalists can do and more toward what an engaged citizenry can. Two examples include Center for Civic Media alums. Jeffrey Warren, a longtime fellow at the Center, won $250,000 for the group he co-founded, the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. Public Lab will use to the money create a tool kit and online community for citizen-based, grassroots data gathering and research. The project is an outgrowth of ballon-mapping work Warren developed at the Center to cheaply photograph local geography, public use of space, and even (with a simple camera hack) photosynthesis. Likewise, Christina Xu, the Centers former outreach coordinator, won a $244,000 News Challenge grant on behalf of the Awesome Foundation, a chapter-based group that will funnel that money into $1,000 microgrants in Detroit and other cities to develop civic media pilot projects, prototypes, events and social entrepreneurial ventures. The 2011 conference also served as the staging ground for two major Center announcements: the hiring of Ethan Zuckerman as its new director and a new infusion of $3.76 million from Knight Foundation (see page 16). But the conference wasnt all cash and congrats. As it has the last several years, it provided a platform for discussions of crticial import to the civic media community. In addition to informal breakout sessions and demos, plenary speakers set the tone. Mohamed Nanabhay, online editor of Al-Jazeera English, spoke about the Arab Spring and the role and limitations of social media in protest movements. Departing Center director Chris Csikszentmihlyi proposed five principles governing civic media project design: all technology is politics; technology is personal and geopolitical at the same time; politics of most technologies are socially regressive; the free software model has principles that offer significant new modes of production and distribution; most technologies configure their user as a consumer, not as a citizen.1 Even the hilarious Baratunde Thurston of The Onion, speaker at the opening night dinner, drove a dramatic point home: that mainstream media and social media dont realize how dependent they are on one another, even if it is only to find an audience for The Onions satire.
1 http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/06/25/visions-of-civic-media-from-chriscsikszentmihalyi-and-sasha-constanza-chock/
Above, a pre-conference balloon-mapping workshop outside the Media Lab. Below, Mobile Storytelling in Realtime, featuring Andy Carvin of NPR, Liz Henry of BlogHer, Dan Sinker of @mayoremanuel fame, and Ethan Zuckerman.
28 in medias res
EVENTS
Sampling of CMS & Co.s Fall 2011 Events

Sept 8 | 5:00 PM | 4-231
From Settlers to Quarriors: Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design
Learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate, with Scott Nicholson, CMS visiting scholar and author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages.
Sept 15 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Oct 27 | 5:00 PM | Bartos Theater
Surveillance and Citizenship

How does the persistence and ubiquity of surveillance in our digitizing world affect what it means to be a citizen? Sandra Braman, professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Susan Landau, a visiting professor at Harvard University and author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies; and Marcos Novak, professor and artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Nov 02 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Representing Islam
What does it mean to represent roughly one-fifth of humankind? How does participatory media change the dynamics of representing Islam... or representing any other faith, belief, or conviction? Intisar Raab, Amir Ahmad, and Nasser Wedaddy.
Sept 22 | 5:00 PM | Bartos Theater
Mapping Media Ecosystems

Hal Roberts, Berkman Center; Erhardt Graeff, Founding Member and Lead Researcher at the Web Ecology Project; and Gilad Lotan, Vice President of Research and Development at SocialFlow.
Nov 10 | 5:00 PM | Bartos Theater
Local News in the Digital Age

Speakers include Callie Crossley, host of her own talk show on WGBH; David Dahl, who oversees local news initiatives for the Boston Globe; and Adam Gaffin of the online news site Universal Hub.
Sept 29 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Cities and the Future of Entertainment

A focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? Parmesh Shahani, University of Pennsylvania; Jonathan Taplin, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab; Mauricio Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer of the Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co.
Dec 01 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Marks of Materiality in Digital Bodies

Hye Jean Chung, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at CMS, explores how digital effects are not only used to mediate the real but to replace or enhance human capabilities via cyborgian hybrids.
Oct 6 | 5:00 PM | 4-231
The Aesthetics of Games

What it means to consider games an aesthetic formsomething akin to literature, music, or film. Frank Lantz is the Interim Director of the NYU Game Center.
Dec 08 | 5:00 AM | E14-633
Designing Connections
Ways to design new media and digital interactions to foster connections. Federico Casalegno, Director, MIT Mobile Experience Lab.
Oct 13 | 5:00 PM | 4-231
Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human

John Bryant, Professor of English at Hofstra University, on the elements of creativity, appropriation, and cultural difference that are at stake in dealing with the ethics and editing of revision.
Oct 20 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America
For the last 40 years, critics have decried the Museum of Modern Art show The Family of Man as a model of the psychological and political repression of cold war America. This talk challenges that view. Fred Turner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University.
Subject to additions and changes. Current schedule, including conferences, availble at cms.mit.edu/events.
Civic Maps
Laura Kurgan, Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University and Jeffrey Warren, Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science.
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Cant make it to an event? Subscribe to the CMS Podcast at cms.mit.edu/news/podcast. Download mp3s and videos of events with Niel Gaiman, the creators of MST3K, Scott McCloud and more!
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fall 2011 29
PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS
CMS Welcomes Fall 11 Visiting Scholars

Pascal Chesnais, Visiting Scientist Pascal specializes in leading talented research teams in creating prototypes of innovative services and applications. Previously he was Senior Research Director at Orange Labs Boston. There he helped create and staff the France Telecom Research and Development Boston lab. He defined research and development plans, managed research teams and projects, and created new mobile technologies involving multimodal haptics, electronic publishing, and location-based applications and services. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences and an M.S. in Visual Studies from MIT. He has extensive experience in leading R&D teams at media and communication organizations in the Boston area, including the Movies of the Future and News in the Future initiatives of the MIT Media Lab. He is the holder of several patents in media technologies. Hye Jean Chung, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Hye Jean is working on a book project that analyzes the globally dispersed and digitally networked workforce of film production pipelines and its relation to the fictional spaces, computer-generated imagery, and digital aesthetics of contemporary cinema. She received her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary research interests include transnational cinema, cross-border mobility, production studies, digital visual effects and animation, and East Asian cinema. Her work has been published in journals such as Spectator and Contemporaneity and in the anthology Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. Other essays will soon appear in forthcoming issues of Cinema Journal and The Velvet Light Trap. She has recently co-edited and contributed to a themed issue of Media Fields Journal on the intersection of media, labor, and mobility. In addition to her scholarly endeavors, Hye Jean has worked as a journalist and published translations of literary works from Korean into English and vice versa. Martin Fredriksson, Visiting Scholar Martin completed his Ph.D. (2010) in Cultural Studies at Linkoping University in Sweden, where he studied the history of copyright in Sweden. His thesis examines the way in which the legal concept of copyright and resulting creative conditions have changed in relation to certain cultural developments in Sweden during the 19th and 20th centuries. The thesis consists of a chronological study of the copyright laws that were adopted in 1877, 1919, and 1960, but it also deals with the 1810 press law and recent legal developments. He has taught in the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University, has worked as an administrator and coordinator at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) and as executive editor of the cultural research journal Culture Unbound. His interests are in copyright, law and literature, comparative literature, cultural theory, and gender theory.
Adam Banks, Visiting Scholar Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and educated in the Cleveland Public Schools (when they were public and not municipal ), Adam received his B.A. in English from Cleveland State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Penn State University. Formerly an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, Banks served as the 2010 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas and is currently on the Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media faculty at the University of Kentucky. His teaching and research interests include African American rhetoric, digital media, social and cultural issues in technology, community literacies and engagement, and rhetoric and composition theory and pedagogy. He is the author of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, a book challenging teachers and scholars in writing and technology fields to explore the depths of Black rhetorical traditions more thoroughly and calling African Americans, from the academy to the street, to make technology issues a central site of struggle. This debut book was reviewed in four major journals and awarded the 2007 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. His current book, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, was published this spring by Southern Illinois University Presss Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series.
Patricia Kennon, Visiting Scholar Patricia is a lecturer in English Literature and the coordinator of the Programme for Lifelong Learning at Froebel College of Education, Dublin, Ireland. She completed her Ph.D. (2002) in English at the University of Birmingham, and conducted post-doctoral studies in teaching and learning at the School of Computer Science and the School of Education at Trinity College in Dublin. She is the editor of Inis: The Childrens Books Magazine (inismagazine.ie), the vice president
30 in medias res
of the Irish Society for the Study of Childrens Literature and the President of iBbY Ireland, the Irish national section of IBBY, an organization dedicated to promoting intercultural dialogue through childrens literature. She won a 2010 National Award for Excellence in Teaching from the National Academy for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning. Her research interests include science fiction, childrens literature and popular culture, visual literacy, and Victorian literature. Pierre Le Quau, Visiting Scholar Pierre is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Pierre Mendes-France university, Grenoble, France. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Comparative Sociology from Paris Rene Descartes University (University of Paris V), where he completed his thesis on Buddhism in France. He is the author of The Man in Chiaroscuro: Reading Michel Maffisoli (1997), a study Twenty Years of Sociology of Art (2008), and the co-editor of a special edition of Media and Culture on Fiction and Monster Figures (Mar 2008). He was the founder of GEMM, the Study Group on the Myth and the Imaginal World.
on the World Wide Web. He combines his backgrounds as a librarian, computer programmer, a gamer and statistician both in the classroom and in his research role as a library scientist. He uses system research methods to develop bibliomining processes and to explore facets of librarianship, with the goal of helping librarians better serve their user communities. He is the author of Bibliomining: Data Mining for Libraries. One of his research areas is the intersection of gaming in libraries. Scott studies the ways in which libraries use recreational gaming activities and explores what activities are most effective for different user groups and different goals. More about this project can be found at gamelab.syr.edu. Andr Fagundes Pase, Visiting Scholar Andr holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from the Pontifcia Universidade Catlica do Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, where he completed his dissertation on online video and digital culture as alternatives to television. He is currently a faculty member at the Pontifcia Universidade Catlica and is working on geolocalization and mobile telephony. He has published papers on gaming and on the Internet and media convergence. His current research concentrates on the comparative study of the Brazilian and American gaming worlds, from the perspectives of the industry, the traditional press, and blogs and social networks. Oren Soffer, Visiting Scholar Oren is a senior lecturer and the head of Communication Studies at the Open University of Israel. Oren earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002. In the same year, he was accepted as a member of the Israeli Bar Association after completing his legal studies at the Tel Aviv University. Oren has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He taught as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University and held a lecturer position at Manchester University. His research deals with the relationship between new technologies and social discursive changes. Recently, Oren has been studying new media, using historical analysis to better understand new textual and social phenomena. His current study in this area deals with comparative and theoretical conceptualization of SMS and CMC languages.
His research topics also include the study of the socio-political and technological history of Hebrew mass communication (e.g., of the early Hebrew press through the establishment of varied radio channels and the conflict over color television in Israel). He is currently engaged in the study of the broadcasting case of Israels most popular radio station, Galei Tzahal, which, owned by the army, has been broadcasting for sixty years to civilians and is recognized as a vanguard of cultural force.
Scott Nicholson, Visiting Scholar Scott is a library scientist and assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in New York. He holds a Ph.D. (2000) in Information Science from the University of North Texas, where he completed his dissertation on Creating an information agent through data mining: Automatic identification of academic research
Tristan Thielmann, Visiting Fellow From the University of Siegen, where Tristan is assistant professor in Media Studies. His research interests include the aesthetics of geomedia, the history of navigation systems, and the social theory of mobile and locative media technology. He received his Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He is a former Visiting Fellow of the Software Studies Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, and is best known for his books Media Geography (2009) and Spatial Turn: The Space Paradigm in Cultural and Social Sciences (1st edition 2008, 2nd edition 2009). His 800-page book Actor Media Theory, with papers by Bruno Latour and others, is forthcoming. His research at CMS focuses on how a social media theory can benefit from the graphical conversation theory, developed at MIT in the 1970s, and to what extent Mapping by Yourself, the first DARPA-funded project of the Architecture Machine Group, constituted a multi-media paradigm for computer based geographics that has now achieved a breakthrough thanks to locative media and web-based mapping application.
fall 2011 31
Faculty and Alumni Updates

Faculty and Scholars
Ed Barretts eighth collection of poetry, Down New Utrecht Avenue, was published in spring 2011. Also that spring he collaborated with artist Amanda Matthews on The Holy Sonnets, a mixed-media piece which was displayed at Boston Universitys School of Fine Arts. He and co-author Frank Bentley of Motorola completed the manuscript for their book Building Mobile Experiences, forthcoming from MIT Press in 2012. Fox Harrell (CMS, Writing and Humanistic Studies, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) continues to lead his Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory and has published multiple articles on recent outcomes of his NSF CAREER project Advanced Identity Representation. His NEH-funded Gestural Interactive Narrative Expression (GeNIE) project has resulted in a computational engine and new theory for constructing interactive narratives driven by gestural input on mobile devices.He received an NSF grant to run a joint workshop of the NSF and NEA that brought together 55 international thought leaders to discuss the future of art, science, technology research. He alsohas been collaborating on organizing the upcoming ACM Creativity and Cognition conference in his roles as Program Chair and Art Program Chair. Most importantly, he is completing his book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression for the MIT Press. Stefan Helmreich (Anthropology) has completed his co-organizing (with Anthropology colleague Heather Paxson and postdoctoral fellow Emily Zeamer) of Sensing the Unseen,a year-long John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and sponsored by MIT Anthropology. He has an article forthcoming in Senses and Society with Michele Friedner entitled Sound Studies meets Deaf Studies. His Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science is forthcoming in The OxfordHandbook of Sound Studies. Martin Marks (Music and Theater Arts) completed work as music curator for the latest collection of silent films produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Called Treasures V: The West, 1898-1938, it will be issued in the fall by Image Entertainment.He is also happy to note the publication of his essay Screwball Fantasia: Classical Music in Unfaithfully Yours, in 19th-Century Music, vol. 34, no. 3 (spring 2011).
Eugenie Brinkema (Literature) is finishing her book manuscript on film form and affect, and has two new articles coming out this fall, Critique of Silence in the journal differences, and Nudity and the Question in the Blackwell Companion to Fassbinder ; she is also preparing a new seminar for the fall term on the global horror film.
Amaranth Borsuk (CMS and Writing and Humanistic Studies) taught Digital Poetry this spring and was delighted to see three of her students work included at the Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain. This summer, Amaranth presented her augmented reality book of poems, Between Page and Screen, to publishers and developers at the FUTUReBOOK Innovation Workshop in London. It has been shown in Kassel, Berlin, Bury, and Buffalo in the past year and will be published by Siglio Press this fall. She is also working on an interactive site-specific text installation, Whispering Galleries, with her partner Brad Bouse, for a public art group in New Haven. With her collaborator Kate Durbin, she is preparing aniPad application of their forthcoming book Excess Exhibit (ZG Press). She was honored to win the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and has recently published and has poems forthcoming in a number of literary journals. An essay on pervasive data poetics is forthcoming in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
Ian Condry (CMS and Foreign Langauges and Literatures) will be Director of Undergraduate Studies for CMS starting in the fall. In the past academic year, he published two book chapters and two journal articles, including an essay on touch and ethnography in Japanese Studies. During the summer, he put the finishing touches on his book, The Soul of Anime (forthcoming, Duke UP, 2012)and gave talks in the US and Europe. In July, he attended Anime Expo in Los Angeles, where he gave a keynote address and also attended the US live concert debut of Miku, a virtual idol from Japan (see civic.mit.edu/blog for details).
32 in medias res
Konstantin Mitgutsch (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab) just finished two papers about meaningful experiences in players biographies and learning through failures invideogames. He edited the Proceedings of the 4th Vienna Games Conference, Exploring the Edges of Gaming , and focused his last year on analyzing the recursive learning game Afterland. In the coming months he will research transformative learning processes in so-called serious games and conduct an interview series with serious game designers.
Bruno Perreau (Foreign Languages and Literatures) has a book coming out in January 2012:Penser ladoption (Presses universitaires de France). In 2011, he published two articles in the spring Lombre de la loi (Blanchot, Duras, Foucault) (Multitudes 44) and Rachid O.s Inner Exile. Homosexuality and Postcolonial Textuality (in Masculinities in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century French and Francophone Literature) and will publish two others by the end of the fall: La rception du geste queer en France. Performativit, subjectivation et devenir minoritaire (in Le genre lpreuve des dispositifs de pouvoir) and La inversin de lo universal. Una epistemologa de los estudios gays y lsbicos en Francia (deSignis). He split time this summer between Cambridge University, MIT, and Paris. Jeff Ravel (History) traveled to Paris in June, along with HyperStudio Executive Director Kurt Fendt and four others, all of whom participate in the Comdie-Franaise Registers Project (CFRP). The MIT CFRP team held two days of workshops in the French capital with partners from the Comdie-Franaise, the Sorbonne, and the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris. In the coming year the CFRP will make available online box office data and digital facsimiles of daily receipt registers for several decades of the troupes commercial activity in the late eighteenth century. Irving Singer (Linguistics and Philosophy) published Modes of Creativity: Philosophical Perspectives (MIT Press) and has started writing a sequel, tentatively titled Creativity in the Brain. He has also been working on two other manuscripts. He was recently invited to participate in the Singapore-MIT Initiative and will be leading an interdiscipinary research seminar on the nature of creativity. David Thorburn (Literature and CMS) completed his fifteenth year as director of the MIT Communications Forum this spring. His scholarly work included the keynote address, Flux and Instability in the Digital Age, at a national conference on New Paradigms attended by American designers and graphic artists, and a review-essay on new approaches to television studies, which appeared in the summer 2011 issue of Cinema Journal.
Edward Baron Turk (Foreign Languages and Literatures) is pleased to announce the publication of his new book, French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and Avignon (University of Iowa Press). On June 20, 2011, the Socit des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD) hosted the books Paris launch. The books Cambridge launch will take place at MITs New Media Lab, 6th floor, on Friday, October 21, 2011, at 5 p.m., when Edward, who is retiring from MIT at the end of academic year 2011-2012, will also give a talk entitled Valedictory Thoughts of an MIT Humanist. In a twist on Morton Salts enigmatic, when it rains, it pours, the summer of William Uricchio (CMS) brought with it a downpour of keynotes. Uricchio gave the opening keynote for the Amsterdam launch of the new Dutch National Research School for Media Studies; and the Camillo Lecture for the annual Performance Studies International conference, held this year in Utrecht. In Bologna, he gave a keynote entitled when metaphors slip their bounds at Media Mutations 3, and he addressed the television industry several times, in contexts ranging from the Annual Media Congress in the Netherlands to an RTL master class. Uricchio gave The Annual Lecture at the University of Nottinghams Centre for Advanced Study, and early fall will see him keynoting in Berlin (Medienwoche), Istanbul (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) and Porto Alegre (XI Seminrio Internacional da Comunicao). During the summer, Andrea Walsh served on the editorial committee of Angles 2011, the Writing Programs annual online magazine of exemplary writing from the foundational writing classes at MIT. She also continued to research the 19th century/early 20th century American womens movement and its relationship to print and visual media and served as reviewer for Vanderbilt University Press.
Montfort photo courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Labrune
Nick Montfort (CMS and Writing and Humanistic Studies ) released the large-scale interactive fiction system Curveship, a browser-based poetry generator Sea and Spar Between that he developed with Stephanie Strickland, and a set of 32-character programs called Concrete Perl. He spent his summer helping to move the Electronic Literature Organization, of which he is president, to its new home at MIT; giving talks in California, France, and Brazil; and completing a 10-author single-voice scholarly book, to be published by MIT Press, called 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Jim Paradis (CMS and Writing and Humanistic Studies) has an edited volume out exploring how the sciences exerted a defining influence on the changing concept of culture in the 19th century public sphere. His and Suzy Angers Victorian Science as Cultural Authority is part of an eight-volume science and cultural studies series exploring the historical origins of modernism and professionalism and the role of the sciences in the rise of popular culture. He is currently working on new volume on civic media and continues as Director of CMS (with William Uricchio).
fall 2011 33
Alumni
any CMSers who would like to re-start the MIT chapter. Amanda Finkelberg, SM 07, continues to teach college digital arts and produce motion graphics and digital animations. Her latest projects include infographic movies for an innovative medical startup and some stereoscopic work for the upcoming 3D film, Hugo.
rytelling. She remains chief participation officer for the Alchemists and is nearing completion on her interactive fan fiction, Muggle Studies.
Jim Bizzocchi, SM 01, (www.dadaprocessing. com) has had an eventful year. He was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor at Simon Fraser University (in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology). He served as the interim director for the Masters of Digital Media Program (MDM)a professional Masters degree offered jointly by the University of British Columbia, the Emily Carr University of Art & Design, the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University. He continued to supervise his research-oriented graduate students at Simon Fraser University, where he was the Senior Supervisor for two successful masters defenses, and a supervisory committee member for three other successful defenses (one masters and two Ph.D.s). He currently leads or serves on twelve other SFU grad student supervisory committees. He continues to receive funding and to publish and present on his two research specialties (interactive narrative and the evolution of moving image aesthetics). Finally, he has extended his own Ambient Video art creation to include computationally-generative ambient video art installations. Liz Burr, SB 03, is the managing director of Moguldom Studios, the production company for an innovative media startup, Moguldom Media Group. She oversees all web video content and distribution operations. Kevin Driscoll, SM 09, is entering his third year as a Ph.D. student at USCs Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism studying popular technology cultures. When hes not knee-deep in a pile of dusty magazines and newsletters from the early days of microcomputing, hes been learning about the Southern California ham radio community (his call is KJ6KVC.) He is still involved with Students for Free Culture and happy to help
Sam Ford, SM 07, co-edited a collection of essays on the current state and potential futures of the U.S. soap opera entitled The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era, published through the University Press of Mississippi (http://amzn.to/ bfTabA). He continues in his role as director of digital strategy at Peppercom Strategic Communications from his home office in Bowling Green, Kentucky. On July 19, 2011, he, Amanda, and daughter Emma welcomed their latest Ford model, Harper Madison Ford. She weighed 6 lbs., 15 oz. Lilly Kam, SB 04, has been working in Beijing as a researcher for the Tsinghua University School of Journalism (and in fact is friends with Tsinghua students who have been accepted into the CMS masters program this fall). She recently started a new job as a program manager for an American NGO called Golden Bridges, which does projects promoting US-China relations. It is currently building a social media platform for Americans who have worked or studied in China, called projectpengyou.com. Flourish Klink, SM 10, is a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies program, including two courses this fall: Intro to Comparative Media Studies and Transmedia Sto-
Hillary Kolos, SM 10, developed and helped implement a pilot workshop at a school on the South Side of Chicago for the Pearson Foundations New Learning Institute. The workshop challenged fifth and sixth graders to design mobile tours at the Lincoln Park Zoo about endangered species. While the freelancing life was nice, Hillary is about to take on a new full time position as the director of digital media at DreamYard, an arts education organization in the Bronx and recent recipient of a MacArthur digital learning center grant.
Andres Lombana, SM 08, completed his second year of doctoral studies at the University of Texas-Austin and came back to Cambridge to work at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University during the summer. He joined Bermans Youth and Media Lab, an R&D collaboration with young people devoted to media literacy and digital empowerment. He worked in cur-
34 in medias res

riculum design, multimedia production, and research. He plans to come return to Austin to continue his Ph.D. and research the connections between learning, play, civic engagement, and mobile devices. CMS loves to hear from its alums. Have news to share with CMS and the alumni community? A new gig? A new family addition? Let us know! Email us at cms@mit.edu or catch our eye on Twitter: @cms_mit.
Jason Rockwood, SM 09, is now director of social strategy for Tribal DDB Worldwide. He takes the helm there having spent a year at R/ GA, where he worked on social strategy for Walmart and Verizon. He misses everyone at CMS, and looks forward to reconnecting in NYC or Cambridge.
Philip Tan, SM 03, working with CMS, was successful in securing funding for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab for an additional year and continues in his efforts to keep the behemoth fed. He is also introducing his one-year old daughter Marion to Linux and Starcraft 2. Philip notes that a significant portion of his personal media budget has been redirected towards walkers, cardboard books, and things that go clonk on his head.
Lana Swartz, SM 09, is entering her third year of the Ph.D. program at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She has been named the 2011-2012 Wallis Annenberg Research Fellow.
Huma Yusuf, SM 08, spent 2010-11 in Washington, DC, on a research fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She was ostensibly there to write a book about the independent media in Pakistan and its growing impact on politics, policymaking, and foreign relations, a project that builds on work she began as a research assistant with the MIT Center for Civic Media. Instead, she spent her time chatting with people at the State Department and Pentagon, finding out how DC ticks (and what that means for Pakistan). She is now living in London, retroactively writing the book.
Illustration by Mike Rapa
fall 2011 35
MIT Comparative Media Studies Building E15, Room 331 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139

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F A L L E V E N T S c alen d a r I N S I D E , p a g e 2 9

Finding Ones Way at CMS

from the directors

In Medias Res Now More Apt Than Ever

Readers as Editors: New Digital Tools to Support Literary Interpretation

ABOUT IN MEDIAS RES

Why Gay Employees Need To Come Out

Introducing the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab

Finding Ones Way at CMS

The Class of 2013

Locast: Creating Visual Narratives with Location-Based, User-Generated Content

Faculty Grows with Civic Media Scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock

The Undergraduate P.O.V.: Maeve Cullinane, 12

2011 Civic Media Conference

MIT to Host Electronic Literature Organization

Sampling of CMS & Co.s Fall 2011 Events

CMS Brilliance: Not News to Us

CMS Welcomes Fall 11 Visiting Scholars

Cyberscholar and Media Maker Join Center for Civic Media

Faculty and Alumni Updates

As Kids vanished, Science Learning Flourished

Wayfinding By Andrew Whitacre

Games: More Than Cool

FROM THE DIRECTORS

In Medias Res Now More Apt Than Ever

By William Uricchio and James Paradis, Comparative Media Studies Directors

Why Gay Employees Need To Come Out

Parmesh Shahani. Photo by Vikas Khot, Forbes India.

2 http://business.in.com/article/real-issue/why-gay-employees-need-to-comeout/26262/1 3 http://business.in.com/magazine/582 4 http://www.network18online.com/ 5 http://www.forbes.com

Finding Ones Way at CMS

The Class of 2013

Faculty Grows with Civic Media Scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock

The Undergraduate P.O.V. Maeve Cullinane, 12

CMS undergrad Maeve Culllinane

MIT to Host Electronic Literature Organization

CMS IN THE NEWS

CMS Brilliance: Not News to Us

Images from VANISHED

MIT CENTER FOR

Cyberscholar and Media Maker Join Center for Civic Media

Ethan Zuckerman. Photo by Erik Hersman.

As Kids vanished, Science Learning Flourished

Games: More Than Cool

Readers as Editors: New Digital Tools to Support Literary Interpretation

By Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio Executive Director

Introducing the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab

Recent and Ongoing Projects

Locast: Creating Visual Narratives with Location-Based, User-Generated Content

2011 Civic Media Conference

Sampling of CMS & Co.s Fall 2011 Events

Oct 27 | 5:00 PM | Bartos Theater

Surveillance and Citizenship

Mapping Media Ecosystems

Local News in the Digital Age

Cities and the Future of Entertainment

Marks of Materiality in Digital Bodies

The Aesthetics of Games

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

Subscribe to the CMS Podcast

Download the Colloquium Poster

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

CMS Welcomes Fall 11 Visiting Scholars

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS