In Medias Res, Fall 2014

c ms w. mi t.
e du f a l l 2 0 1 4
F A L L E V E N T S C A L E N D A R I N S I D E , P A G E 3 5
In Medias Res
3
TO OUR RE ADE RS
Changes and Challenges
This Fall
Edward Schiappa
4
P ORTF OL I O
Teaching, and Exploring,
Photography in Liberia
B.D. Colen
9
GAME S I N L I MA
The Creative Industries
Prototyping Lab
Eduardo Marisca, 14
12
TO THE ARCHI VE S
An Admissions Excavation
Ceri Riley, 16
17
BE CAUS E , WHY NOT?
@mitblogs_ebooks
Chris Peterson, 13
18
NE WS
A New Kind of Media Theory
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Ofce
20
NE WS
The Bill Bash
Ed Barrett and William Corbett
21
P E OP L E , P L ACE S, THI NGS
The Incoming Classes
25
Faculty Fellows
26
Artists in Residence
27
Personal Updates
32
RE S E ARCH GROUP UP DATE S
Their Latest Work and Projects
35
E VE NTS
Fall 2014 Talks

The photos you see here should provide
a sense, if nothing else, of how privileged
we in this country are. I have returned from
Liberia thinking, as I returned from Somalia
two decades ago, that we in America do not
even know what poverty and true depriva-
tion are.
CMS/W lecturer, writer, and photographer
B.D. Colen, p. 4
There were people who were working on
really crazy, weird projects, like robot guinea
pigs or tangible games that youre playing
with recycled materials. And theres honestly
not a lot of work like that being done in Peru.
It was exceptional.
Eduardo Marisca, S.M., 14, p. 10
What started as a blind excavation through
a mystery box of admissions relics turned into
the discovery of a bunch of cool snippets from
MIT Admissions history. Those old disorga-
nized CDs were actually a sort of short-lived
time capsule.
Ceri Riley, 16, p. 12
I had never used Ruby, or MarkyMarkov,
or a lot of other things before I began this
piece of carpentry, but I personally fnd that
trying (and failing, and trying again) is the
best way to learn.
Chris Peterson, S.M., 13, p. 17
Over the past weeks upon hearing I am
retiring friends have smiled and said, Con-
gratulations. I know they mean to speed me
on to a better place, but I love teaching. To
not work with MITs brilliant and quirky
kidsTo not be touched and inspired by their
ardor and intelligenceTo not be in daily
touch with all that youth and promise
Bill Corbett, p. 20
F A L L 2 0 1 4
Comparative Media Studies|Writing
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
E15-331 and 14E-303
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 02139
617.253.3599 / cmsw@mit.edu / cmsw.mit.edu
cmsw.mit.edu/magazine

Head
Edward Schiappa
Research Managers
Federico Casalegno, Mobile Experience Lab
Ian Condry, Creative Communities Initiative
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Center for Civic Media
Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio
Fox Harrell, ICE Lab
Nick Montfort, The Trope Tank
Scot Osterweil, The Education Arcade
Philip Tan, MIT Game Lab
Sarah Wolozin, Open Documentary Lab

Core Staf
Alex Efgen
Financial Assistant
Jill Janows
Director, Grants Development
Suzanne Lane
Director, Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional
Communication
Shannon Larkin
Graduate Administrator
Karinthia Louis
Administrative Assistant
Michael Rapa
Technology Support Specialist
Becky Shepardson
Academic Coordinator
Sarah Smith
Administrative Ofcer
Steven Strang
Director, Writing and Communication Center
Jessica Tatlock
Events Coordinator
Andrew Whitacre
Communications Director
cmsw.mit.edu/people
A B OU T I N ME DI A S R E S
fall 2014 3
Changes and Challenges This Fall
By Edward Schiappa, Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing
G
reetings and welcome to the
start of a new school year!
Every year brings with it a
new set of changes and chal-
lenges.
This years changes include the July
1
st
launch of WRAP, or the Writing,
Rhetoric, and Professional Communication
program. WRAP administratively and con-
ceptually combines the First-Year Writing
(FYW) program with the Writing Across
the Curriculum (WAC) program in order
to develop a more coherent pedagogical
approach across all segments of the Commu-
nication Requirement. WRAP collaborates
with MIT faculty and departments to teach
written, oral, and visual communication to
over 4,000 students a year in more than 100
communication-intensive subjects.
Building on the strong foundation that
FYW and WAC developed over the past
dozen years, WRAP will ofer a new vision
for communication pedagogy, one that is
both more frmly based in research in the
feld of rhetoric and writing studies, and more
aligned with current practices in professional
communication.
In addition, this structure allows us to
consider deeper issues of sequencing across
the Communication Requirement, and spe-
cifcally teach for the transfer of communi-
cation knowledge from one component of
the requirement to another. This focus on
knowledge transfer will be supported with
greater attention to researching our teaching
practices and outcomes, and a more system-
atic approach to pedagogical innovation,
including the integration of online peda-
gogies made possible through MITx. Led
by Director Suzanne Lane and Associate
Director Andreas Karatsolis, we expect big
things from WRAP in future years.
Speaking of changes and challenges:
WRAP and the Writing and Communica-
tion Center have been moved out of building
12, which is being torn down, and into a new
space in E39.
Though he has been a part of the MIT
community since 2004, July 1
st
also marks
the ofcial start to Mobile Experience Lab
Director Federico Casalegnos appointment
as an Associate Professor of the Practice in
CMS/W. Kudos!
This issue takes note (page 20) of the re-
tirement of long-time Lecturer Bill Corbett.
On September 12, CMS/W hosts a retire-
ment event for science fction giant and
30-year faculty member Joe Haldeman, along
with long-time Writing and Communication
Center consultant Gay Haldeman. If you
wish to attend and have not registered, drop
me a note at schiappa@mit.edu.
As described on page 25, four of our
faculty have received prestigious fellowships
that will allow them to spend a year away
from campus devoted to their research: Vivek
Bald will spend 2014-15 at Harvard Universi-
tys Warren Center for Research in American
History; Heather Hendershot will be Maury
Green Fellow at Harvards Radclife Institute
for Advanced Study; Fox Harrell will be
at Stanfords Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences; and William
Uricchio will spend six months of 2015 at the
American Academy in Berlins Hans Arnhold
Center as a Berlin Prize Fellow. Though we
will miss their presence, we look forward to
hearing about their time away and will share
an update in the fall 2015 issue of In Medias
Res.
This year we welcome artist/scholar Dr.
Coco Fusco, who will join us as an MIT
Martin Luther King Visiting Scholar for
2014-2015 (see page 26).
We are also pleased to welcome accom-
plished author Marjorie Liu as a Lecturer
this fall. Ms. Liu will be teaching a fction
workshop class titled The Sweet Art of
Comic Book Writing, informed by her ex-
perience as a successful author for Marvel
Comics.
This issue has something for everyone,
ranging from the evocative photo-journalism
of B. D. Colen to an exegesis of the schol-
arship of Fox Harrell to the impressive edu-
cational adventures of our CMS graduate
students last spring in Peru. I hope that you
are as impressed with the range and quality of
work going on in CMS/W as I am and that
you enjoy this installment of In Medias Res.
T O OU R R E A DE R S
Building on the strong foundation that First-Year Writing
and Writing Across the Curriculum developed over the
past dozen years, Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional
Communication will ofer a new vision for communication
pedagogy, one that is both more frmly based in research in
the feld of rhetoric and writing studies, and more aligned
with current practices in professional communication.
4 in medias res
P OR T F OL I O
R
ather than sufer in Bostons cold, I spent the better
part of two January weeks in Liberia, in West Africa
where the temperature hovered around 90 and the
comfort index pegged at 107. I went to the war-
ravaged country, frst colonized by free American blacks and freed
slaves, on behalf of CODE and the International Book Bank, two
literacy NGOs dedicated to the proposition that literacy, reading, and
critical thinking are the keys to every other kind of improvement
and success. I spent the frst week running a workshop for Liberian
writers, illustrators, and photographers, whom IBB, and the Liberian
group We-Care, hope to teach to produce non-fction school books
for primary school students. This required teaching the students in
the workshop the diference between fction and non-fctionwhich
was much more difcult than you might imagine, and starting with
the most basic principles of photography. It also required fve days of
teaching from 9-5, a far cry from one, three-hour, night-a-week at
MIT.
I spent the second week photographing in urban and rural schools,
documenting, where possible, the work of CODE, IBB, and the
We-Care Foundation. The photos you see here should provide a
sense, if nothing else, of how privileged we in this country are. I
have returned from Liberia thinking, as I returned from Somalia two
decades ago, that we in America do not even know what poverty and
true deprivation are. And I returned ready to do more of this work
anywhere it is ofered to me.
You can see more images, a color collection called Liberia Through
My Eyes, and Liberian Schools in Black and White, in galleries on my
website, bdcolenphoto.com.
Teaching, and Exploring, Photography in Liberia
Books in trunks and students in povertyB. D. Colens two weeks in Monrovia and Buchanan
A student in a Monrovia public school reading a book provided by the International Book Bank, a Baltimore-
based literacy NGO which provides books free or steeply discounted to schools in developing nations.
fall 2014 5
P OR T F OL I O
Students in a Liberian school. A student I found by himself in a classroom in a public school in Monrovia, reminding
me of a scene I might have expected to see in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s.
Members of the community served by this Monrovia public schoolwhich as this
magazine went to press is being ravaged by an Ebola outbreak and overlooks a now-
quarantined areascraped and saved to purchase the two water tanks in the foreground.
But they cannot aford the $40-per-tank, per-month that it would cost to provide the
children with clean drinking water.
A student reading to the class in a Monrovia public school. The students uniforms cost
their parents about $7.50 in a nation whose economy has not begun to rebound from
more than a decade of civil war, and a security guard is lucky to make $75-a-month.
6 in medias res
F E AT U R E S
A corner in a Monrovia public school classroom.
fall 2014 7
P OR T F OL I O
Inside the school near Buchanan. Here, where the students lack textbooks, we found three steel cases containing what appeared to be brand new books (n.b., neither from IBB nor
CODE). Teachers at the school said the books arrived three years ago, and were being preserved in the trunks because they are precious. Apparently they are too precious to
be used by students.
A corner of the We-Care Library, in Monrovia. The library was established as the
We-Care book chain by Michael Weah, at the start of Liberias savage civil wars
during the 1990s and early 2000s. Weah loaned books out to people to give them some
distraction during the endless curfews, and only asked that they pass the books along
when they fnished reading them. Today, the We-Care Foundation is working with the
countrys Department of Education to improve Liberias low literacy rate.
A scene in Buchanan, a costal Liberian town that was bombed from the air, bombarded
from the sea, and repeatedly changed hands during the wars. Ten years after the wars
fnally ended, the towns main street along the coast still looks like the war zone it was.
8 in medias res
P OR T F OL I O
Counterclockwise from top left. 1) Representatives of Liberias We-Care Foundation, and of the International Book Bank, who saw this public school building outside Buchanan,
said it is the worst they have ever seen; the school is only a few miles from the local headquarters of ArcelorMittal, one of the worlds richest corporations. 2) Students in a public
school in Monrovia. The schools lack electricity, and some do not have any drinking water. 3) School girls reading in the We-Care Library, in the heart of Monrovia. The free library,
supported by the We-Care Foundation, provides free services to readers of all ages, and is flled every day with school classes. 4) A young student reading in the We-Care Library.
5) A teacher at work in a school in Monrovia.
fall 2014 9
F E AT U R E S F E AT U R E S G A ME S I N L I MA
The following is a condensed edit of a podcasta conversation between
Eduardo Marisca, 14, and Andrew Whitacrewhich you can listen to
at cmsw.mit.edu/creative-industries-podcast. The rest of the CIPL team
included 14 CMS students Rodrigo Davies, Erica Deahl, Julie Fischer,
Jason Lipshin, and Lingyuxiu Zhong.
M
y name is Eduardo Marisca. Im a recent graduate of
the Comparative Media Studies program.
Back in late April, a group of my cohort in the
CMS program traveled to Lima for several days, and
we held a workshop. We called it the Creative Industries Prototyping
Lab.
It was a pilot workshop, the frst time we did something like that.
And the idea was to get together some local practitioners in the
creative industries and help them think through their projects criti-
cally to make them stronger in a way that they could ideally come out
with a stronger pitch if they were looking for partners, investors, or
just were looking for new ideas as to how to implement their projects.
We partnered with several people. Our frst initial partner was the
Peruvian Minister of Culture, who helped us get things together, get
things moving.
We partnered with a local corporation called Intercorp, who helped
fnance a signifcant part of our expenses, along with a hotel chain,
Casa Andina. And then we had local partners like a local start-up
called IU, which helped us put things together. There was a digital
agency called Liquid who helped to do some PR. So as soon as word
started spreading around Lima that there was a group from MIT
coming down to do human-centered design and innovation work,
there were just a lot of people who were lining up to try and help us
get things together.
We started thinking about it when we frst learned of the HASTAC
Conference, the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technologys
Advanced Laboratory. It was the frst time it was going to be happening
outside of North America, and it just happened to be in Lima.
And I learned about this when I was in Lima doing feldwork for
The Creative Industries Prototyping Lab
Eduardo Marisca, 14
The frst prototype sketches.
10 in medias res
F E AT U R E S F E AT U R E S G A ME S I N L I MA
my thesis. I learned about it from the Minister of Culture, who was
going to be doing the organizing. So that kicked gears into motion.
We brought back that piece of data.
And since HASTAC overlaps with a lot of the work my classmates
were doing for their own research, we fgured its likely that we
would all want to go to this conference. And if were all going to be
down there for this conference at the same time, it makes sense to do
something else as well. Something that probably has more of a local
impact than the conference itself.
But the need was not for technologies themselves. I think people
have ready access to technology. Its something that they can get their
hands on.
The biggest problem was mostly process.
So that was our initial cue, and thats
where we started thinking: what is the
best thing where we can put together
our diferent skill-sets? And we coalesced
around a theme of design and helping
people go through the design thinking
process around their projects.
I was interested in this, frst of all,
because Im from Peru. And having been
there for a signifcant amount of time
doing the feldwork for my thesis recently,
and just interacting with a lot of the in-
novation and technology in design space,
I could tell that there was a need for a
series of tools to think through technol-
ogy products.
But the need was not for technologies
themselves. I think people have ready
access to technology. Its something that
they can get their hands on.
The biggest problem was mostly
processhow to think through the
problem. How do you do user research?
How do you think about testing? How do
you think about whether the tool, platform,
whatever it is youre building is actually
adjusted to the living conditions of the target population youre
aiming for?
And thats where I thought that coming from CMS, we had a
critical skill-set that could help that. So I was interested in doing a
little bit of scope transfer from what we were learning here in the
program to the sort of thing that would really beneft practitioners on
the ground in Lima. That was my frst intention.
And the other one was really to get more bridges going between
Peru and MITjust get more people from MIT down in Peru and
get people from Peru to see what sort of work is done at MIT, with
a little bit of a demystifcation intention. I wanted people in Peru to
see that the people who were coming from MIT, the work they do, is
accessible. Its something that anyone can do. Surely there are better
conditions to do it here, but its not something thats totally out of
possibility. And [so we wanted to] get those bridges going and com-
munication lines fowing and things like that.
We defnitely brought a diferent sort of thinking about the
problems. The typical approach you would usually hear from people
is either all engineering-based or all social science-based. So its all
about either the technical solution or about the community and social
relations.
I think what we were able to do is show people that they were pretty
much walking hand-in-hand and they had to think about both things.
And at the same time, for them having a group of people coming from
a technology mecca such as MIT provided people with a very strong
sense of validation.
There were people who were working on really crazy, weird
Creative Industries Prototyping Lab, featuring fellow CMS grads Lingyuxiu Zhong and Julie Fischer, at front.
What we found was our greatest contribution
for all the groups across the board was helping
them really refne their pitch, the way they
presented their projects and the way they
thought about their projects. Rather than
leaving them with, hey, heres a prototype, now
go fgure out, test it, whatever, it was mostly
like, hey, heres your project.
fall 2014 11
F E AT U R E S G A ME S I N L I MA
projects, like robot guinea pigs or tangible games that youre playing
with recycled materials. And theres honestly not a lot of work like that
being done in Peru. It was exceptional. So to come from an elite insti-
tution and tell them this is a great idea, this actually works, provided a
strong sense of validation for them to keep on working on that.
We were in there for two and half days in the workshop. Thats not
a lot. And it also became evident to us very quickly that people were
in very diferent stages in their projects. Some people were very fairly
advanced. Some people just had a crazy idea and wanted to fgure out
how to implement it.
And it also became evident to us that we were not going to be able
to do much actual prototyping. Defnitely not as much as we origi-
nally expected. So what we found was our greatest contribution for all
the groups across the board was helping them really refne their pitch,
the way they presented their projects and the way they thought about
their projects.
So rather than leaving them with, hey, heres a prototype, we already
got this, now go fgure out, test it, whatever, it was mostly like, hey,
heres your project. You know what your projects going to need. You
know what you want to build. You know who you need to talk to and
you know how to present it. So youre now in a better position to talk
to the media, talk to researchers, talk to potential funders or partners
or collaborators. So we provided them with a stronger sense of story
of what they wanted to say.
Some people thought they were dealing with a problem of just how
to build a better bike. But we tried to help them think about it, hey,
its not a problem of bikes. Its a problem of trafc and quality of life.
And its actually about the time you get to spend with your family. Its
about health. Its about a lot of other things that are probably more
compelling than just saying that you have a better bike. So we tried to
do all the thinking about that, trying to get them to understand the
systemic problem that they were addressing rather than just a technical
thing that they were focused on.
Theres a group now thats thinking about replicating this, which
would be greatwhich is the next cohort in CMS. And we passed on
a lot of what we learned from that. We learned that two and a half days
is pretty intense. So if you have more time, its probably better, but
you can still get some work done.
And we also learned that even though we were going in thinking
this is going to be very much about designing technologies like pro-
totyping hard-core stuf, it ended up being mostly about unpacking
concepts and seeing whats at stake in everything that youre trying to
bring to the world or youre trying to create. Who is it afecting? Who
should be involved in the discussion? And just providing a bigger sense
of awareness of that.
The other thing is I think we also benefted very much from having
a strong sense of local practices and local needs. Just having this as this
very local connection to be aware of who to talk to, but also what are
actual needs and what are local partners that you can bring to the table
to have conversations and things like that.
My thesis was on the video game industry in Peruhow theres
been a rise of independent video game development over the last few
years and how indie studios are starting to consolidate into a actual
productive industry.
Doing feld work for that thesis was, to a signifcant part, what led
me to understand better how local innovators were struggling and
local technology practitioners were struggling, not so much on the
technology side, but mostly on the process side. And that informed
a fair bunch of how we designed this workshop to think about tech-
nologies from point of view of process and system rather than just
object and thing.
And the connection that came through my thesis work also informed
how we got in touch with partners and collaborators and things like
that. We actually had a game studioone of the game studios that
was part of my research as part of this workshop, they were already
thinking about how to branch out from games into all other forms of
game-defned entertainment. And we had one or two other groups
who were also thinking about getting involved with games. So its all
part, at least from my point of view and from the work I did for my
thesis, of strengthening an ecosystem of people.
There are no interaction design programs in Peru. There are no
easily accessible resources to learn about human-centered design or
user-centered design. So its about how could we start building the
foundations for a community of practitioners that know about this,
that have talked to each other, and they can work across various forms
of digital media, be it games, be it websites, apps, or be tangible design
or some other form of technology?
Many of the things that we implemented in the workshops were
things that we were borrowing directly from classes weve taken at
MIT or workshops that people in my class had been a part while at
MIT. So we borrowed a lot for example from our CMS workshop
class that we took with Fox Harrell, who is really good at leading
you through the process of making things, but in the making youre
thinking very critically about every decision that you make in the
design process.
We kind of wanted to replicate that thought process with people.
But rather than do it across a semester, we were just constraining
ourselves to doing it in two or three days. So there were a lot of items
that we were borrowing from, from stuf weve picked up here at MIT
and just the projects we were showing were also almost always projects
that weve learned from people whove done them at MIT.
Now Im moving back home. Im moving back to Lima, and Im
starting work with a new innovation lab called La Victoria Lab, which
does human centered innovation projects for creating new products in
services for the emerging Peruvian middle class. Because we fgured it
would be pretty fun. And nobody had done it before, so might as well
try it.
Doing feld work for that thesis was, to a
signifcant part, what led me to understand
better how local innovators were struggling and
local technology practitioners were struggling,
not so much on the technology side, but mostly
on the process side.
12 in medias res
F E AT U R E S T O T HE A R C HI V E S
An Admissions Excavation
Ceri Riley, 16
The frst of two pieces authored by CMS/Wers for the MIT Admissions Blog
F
lashback to around June, when Chris Peterson, CMS S.M.,
13, and now Assistant Director of Admissions, sent an
email to all the current bloggers asking if anyone was on
campus this summer and would like to help out with a side
project. A couple back-and-forth emails later, I trekked over to the
admissions ofce to pick up this:
And my mission, as it were, was to dig through this mystery box
of old DVDs, CDs, and tapes of admissions movies and pictures
and unearth anything funny or noteworthy for the blogs. (Also to
organize/label/digitize everything but thats less interesting).
So, this piece shows some of the coolest things I found.
The image at the top of this page is part of a really pretty poster from
2011. Im assuming it was only printed and not uploaded anywhere
online because the fle size was initially massive and incredibly high-
resolution for a single image. Maybe it was the poster delivered to the
early admission applicants that year? (Edit: Ive received confrmation
from a couple of alums in the comments that this is, indeed, the 2011
EA poster!)
There were extensive PowerPoints full of photos that look like they
were used in MIT admissions brochurespicturesque skylines, happy
smiling students in various spots around campus, and artsy photos of
buildings like Kresge. Some of these were aerial views (from 2004)
that look like they were taken from a helicopter and were very well
composed. Fancy stuf, MIT.
Because this was an MIT Admissions box o mystery, it makes sense
that there were old iterations of the MIT Admissions website (back to
pieces from 2000!), a Campus Preview Weekend brochure from 2003
(which made me feel incredibly young because I was in third grade
when those students were running around MIT), and iterations of
the freshman application (where not too much has changed with the
format, other than a diversifcation of essay questions) including a neat
little fowchart. (See page 14.)
There were also some stranger items, like videos with names
ranging from 2.007 and Hockfeld Speech to Liver Chip and
Clocky. One photographer hosted eight separate portrait sessions
in 2002, which meant scanning through hundreds of high-resolution
photos of random graduates. Also on an unlabeled CD, there was this
folder called to tim with some crazycreative????modern art
line drawings. (Page 15.) I dont really understand.
And lastly, a fnd that was probably my favorite discovery out of the
whole box. There was a whole CD flled with MIT museum photos
from 1969 (or so the label said), and it looks like a bunch of old presen-
tations and the meeting of some really clever scientists. (Also page 15.)
What started as a blind excavation through a mystery box of admis-
sions relics turned into the discovery of a bunch of cool snippets from
MIT Admissions history. Those old disorganized CDs were actually a
sort of short-lived time capsule, which was actually pretty fun to delve
into for a couple weeks. Maybe in ffteen more years, a blogger will
fnd our Pie Day video (http://mitsha.re/N2dit5 ) buried in a box and
have a good laugh?
fall 2014 13
14 in medias res
fall 2014 15
16 in medias res
fall 2014 17
F E AT U R E S B E C AU S E , WHY NOT ?
@mitblogs_ebooks
Chris Peterson, S.M., CMS 13, Assistant Director of MIT Admissions
Originally posted at mitadmissions.org/blogs.
S
ome of you may remember @horse_ebooks, a Twitter
account
1
which, before it was bought and subverted by
Buzzfeed, was a truly delightful gibberish machine which
spouted pseudorandomly generated spam tweets from a col-
lection of source texts. Some of my favorites are above.
Fraudulent or not, @horse_ebooks helped inspire a genre of sur-
realist _ebooks-style Twitter bots, which actually do take source
texts and produce randomly generated tweets infected by the voice
of various academics, journalists, and programmers. Because they are
randomly generated, many, perhaps most, of these tweets arent very
funny. But some of them are really funny, if in an admittedly odd way,
because while they are consonant in subject and voice with the source
texts, they are probabilistically written in ways that the actual
authors never would. The practical result is that you get tweets which
sound strangely familiar but are of just enough to be startling and
(sometimes) funny.
A few months ago I decided I wanted to make one for the Admis-
sions blogs. Over the last few weeks, after reading and committee
ended, I actually did. Heres how:
First, I wrote a crude but efective scraper
2
in Python. This script
crawls the blogs, downloads every entry ever written, uses the Beau-
1 https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks
2 https://gist.github.com/peteyreplies/6969a2de4ad337965461
tifulSoup library to parse the HTML, and writes each parsed line to
a text fle.
Then, I cobbled together a tweet generator in Ruby. This script
takes the text fle, uses the MarkyMarkov gem to map probabilistic
word relationships, generates sentences, rolls a D20 to decide if they
should be SHOUTED IN ALL CAPS, and posts the result to Twitter.
I uploaded the source text and the Ruby script to scripts, a free
hosting service operated by MIT students for the MIT community,
and set my cron fle to run it every three hours.
@mitblogs_ebooks is now a thing.
3
Everything it says is randomly
generated from a source text of every blog entry every written. I like
to think of it as admissions advice from an alternate universe, spoken
not by any single blogger but by the rumbling chorus of a collective,
semi-sentient blogger organism.
So there you go. I had never used Ruby, or MarkyMarkov, or a lot
of other things before I began this piece of carpentry
4
, but I person-
ally fnd that trying (and failing, and trying again) is the best way to
learn. In making @mitblogs_ebooks, I learned a lot, and sometimes
the thing I made even makes me laugh because of how weird it is,
which is an added bonus. If you want to try your own exercise in
computationally generated weirdness, you can download my code.
5

Happy making!
3 https://twitter.com/mitblogs_ebooks
4 http://www.bogost.com/blog/carpentry_vs_art_whats_the_dif.shtml
5 https://github.com/peteyreplies/petey_ebooks
18 in medias res
F E AT U R E S NE WS
A New Kind of Media Theory
Professor Fox Harrell works to enrich the subjective and ethical dimensions of the digital media
experience.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Ofce
U
nlike most people, MITs Fox Harrell knew what
he wanted to do in life from a young age. According
to Harrell, an associate professor of digital media who
studies self-expression in online media and creates tools
to help developers add depth to their work, the impetus for his career
came from an epiphany he had one day while doing computer pro-
gramming as a kid in San Diego.
You heard a lot about TV turning people into couch potatoes, so
I thought, Whatever comes next, I would like to be a voice for the
social and ethical dimension of that form, Harrell says. I couldnt
have predicted the exact form it would take, but that [moment]
sparked the direction I would go in.
Or directions, since Harrell occupies an unusual spot in academic
research, with an appointment in MITs Computer Science and Arti-
fcial Intelligence Laboratory as well as in its program in Comparative
Media Studies/Writing. In his research group, the Imagination, Com-
putation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE), Harrell and his students
take formal analyses of thoughtdeveloped in cognitive science,
psychology, sociology, and other feldsand develop computational
programs that can be applied to computer games, social media, and
other forms of emergent media.
The idea is to imbue such media with the same opportunities for
self-expression and social re-
fection that are present in lit-
erature, flm, and other areas of
culture. The programs Harrell
develops take many forms, but
often add layers of nuance to,
say, interactions between char-
acters in games, or social media
experiences.
We try to make works that
can engender critical thought,
conceptual change, or even
social change, Harrell says.
Harrell detailed this approach
to enriching digital media,
and many of his other research
projects, in a recent book,
Phantasmal Media, published
in November by MIT Press.
For his research and teaching,
Harrell earned tenure at MIT
during the last academic year.
Student with a plan
Not long after Harrell had his youthful epiphany about new media,
he also knew that he wanted his education to span both computing
and the humanities.
At a pretty early age, I knew I wanted to pursue these interdisci-
plinary topics, he recalls. Harrell attended Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity as an undergraduate because he could study logic and computation,
a feld in which he received a B.S., while simultaneously obtaining a
B.F.A., with a focus in electronic media. Harrell got a masters degree
in interactive telecommunications from New York Universitys Tisch
School of the Arts, then a Ph.D. in computer science and cognitive
science from the University of California at San Diego.
At each stage it was not just happenstance, it was [a matter of ]
coming up with a plan, with as much rigor as I could, to synthesize
these things, Harrell says. He frst took a job as an assistant professor
at Georgia Tech, then joined MIT in 2010. To get a sense of the
programs that Harrell and his ICE Lab build, consider Chimeria, a
platform that, as he describes it, lets you build narratives, for games
or in social media, involving identities that ft multiple categories, in
a fuid way.
Harrell demonstrates how Chimeria could be applied to an online
game: In this case, in a game called Gatekeeper, a medieval traveler
Photo: Bryce Vickmark
tries to gain entry to a castle, and is peppered with questions from a
guard, who recognizes that the traveler is not from the local social
group. Harrells guest answers those questions agreeably, with the goal
of gaining access to the castle.
But what is the psychological nature of such an interaction? One of
the features of Chimeria is to get game-players to think a little more
about that kind of question.
You could feel positive about [gaining entry to the castle], but
you could also feel negative about it, like you had to change yourself
to ft it, Harrell observes. There are diferent valences besides the
outcome. One of the aims is to help people think critically about
some of these nuances of self-imagination. Your social identity could
involve gender or ethnicity, but it could [also] be something about
your personality, or way of dressing, or way of communicating.
A long-term aim of the ICE group is to build a series of tools like
Chimeria, which programmers and developers can then apply to the
gamesor other media formsthey build. As Harrell notes, the
greater richness of these interactions helps game developers fnd way
to provide more iterations of each game, something the industry likes.
Were also dealing with the design issue of providing alternate
dialogue depending how you play the game, Harrell notes.
Embedding rich ideas in screen life
In building such programs, Harrell is not just linking computation
and arts; he is also drawing on research from the social sciences. Some
of the themes in Chimeria, for instance, explore ground mapped by
the famed 20
th
-century sociologist Erving Gofman, who wrote ex-
tensively about strategic public presentation, among other topics.
In a sense, some of Harrells intellectual work involves recognizing
which social-science concepts could be developed on the program-
ming side of his work.
These are rich ideas that come out of sociology and the humani-
ties that arent represented computationally yet, Harrell says. They
provide some core concepts, grounded in theory, that we can then
implement in these systems.
This coming year, Harrell will dive further into his interdisciplin-
ary research, as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Be-
havioral Sciences at Stanford University, where he will continue to
develop new tools that can help people add nuance to the digital-
media experience. In Harrells estimation, there are increasing
numbers of thinkers working in the feldbut the discipline is still
small enough that his own eforts, he believes, can help to develop
computational media systems that can achieve greater social, and
aesthetic, and afective resonance.
fall 2014 19
NE WS
But what is the psychological nature of such
an interaction? One of the features of Chimeria
is to get game-players to think a little more
about that kind of question.
FEATURED
FALL EVENTS
CMS GRADUATE PROGRAM
INFORMATION SESSIONS
On-Campus (RSVP at cmsw.mit.edu)
October 23 @ 1:00 pm3:00 pm. (Followed by CMS
Alumni Panel at 5:00 pm.)
November 20 @ 1:00 pm3:00 pm
Online (No RSVP required)
October 24 @ 9:00 am11:00 am
CMS ALUMNI PANEL
Three Comparative Media Studies alumsSam
Ford, Rekha Murthy, and Parmesh Shahani
return to discuss their careers.
October 23 @ 5:00 pm7:00 pm
MIT Media Lab, Room 633
BOOK RELEASE
Prof. Sasha Costanza-Chock debuts Out of the
Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing
and the Immigrant Rights Movement
PAUL LEVITZ
Paul Levitz is a comic fan (The Comic Reader),
editor (Batman, among many titles), writer,
executive (DC Comics), historian, and educator.
November 13 @ 5:00 am7:00 pm
Full listings on p. 35, and online at cmsw.mit.edu
20 in medias res
F E AT U R E S NE WS
The Bill Bash: On the Occasion of William Corbetts
Retirement
Ed Barrett and William Corbett
As part of honoring the career and work of poet and retiring MIT lecturer
Bill Corbett, we hosted The Bill Bash on May 15
th
. Fellow MIT poet Ed
Barrett ofered some comments, and we would like to share them along with
some by Bill himself.
Comments by Ed Barrett
Bill, a few days ago Ed Schiappa asked me to say some words at your
party today because you and I have been friends and colleagues for
over twenty years.
Sure, no problem, happy to do it, I said; what could be easier than
saying something for a friend? But the following days were not at all
easy because I just couldnt distill more than two decades into a shot
glass of words.
This morning, in a panic, I reread your book Boston Vermont. The
title is the axis you and Beverly, your children and grandchildren have
traveled along for years. Your poems are about teachers and friends,
about family, about MIT students, about separation and memory. In
one poem about a teacher of yours you write: Ive been thirty-three
years/in his footsteps. Imagine how many MIT students will say,
with fondness, the same about you.
In a poem called Back about the start of the fall semester, you
describe the #1 bus, which carried you from 9 Columbus Square to
77 Mass Ave. as being true as the tides. Maybe the T schedule is true
as the tides. I dont know about that.
Beyond calculation, in this Institute devoted to calculation, is the
infuence you have had on your students as they leave to live their
varied lives after graduation.
Heres what I do know is true: for two decades you have given your
all to your students and MIT. Beyond calculation, in this Institute
devoted to calculation, is the infuence you have had on your students
as they leave to live their varied lives after graduation.
In a later poem, called MIT Poetry, you sketch some students
in your class. It ends with the tide of classes changing, an instructor
waiting to use the room who asks, in a voice laced with acid, if your
class is ahem, ready to leave. No, theyre not. Its Corbetts class.
Why would anyone want to leave?
Comments by Bill Corbett
When I entered 77 Mass. Ave this morning and saw the yellow smiley
face balloons proclaiming today MIT HAPPY DAY I knew it
was the right day to retire. Another omen came on Tuesday when
Charlies Sandwich Shoppe in the South End where I have dined for
over ffty years announced that after eighty seven years it will close.
With Charlies closed I can hardly stay open.
Some of what I did while at MITreading series and Illona
Karmel prize night
could not have been
done without the help
of Nick and Maya,
Magdalena, Ed Barrett,
Fred Harris and Evan
Zipoyrun, and the
many who found the
money. And the MIT
police who kept the
howling crowd at
bay during Haruki
Murakamis reading.
Michael Russem made
several knockout posters
and Karinthia Louis
helped in passing along
the Illonas to Ed.
And big Thanks
to all the writers who gave us discounts during the years. I salute
Seamus Heaney, Haruki Murakami, John Ashbery, Jhumpa Lahiri,
Siri Hustvedt, Russell Banks, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, Robert
Creeley, the maestro Steve Lacy, Nate Mackey, Fred Motenthe list
is Oscar length and stellar.
I am the frst non-senior faculty member to be honored as you do
tonightat least in my twenty three years. I hope this means my
immediate colleaguesJanis, Karen, Cindy, Andrea and Lucywill
be given greater recognition in the future. Ladies, I well know the
value of your good work. Im proud to have served with you.
Over the past weeks upon hearing I am retiring friends have smiled
and said, Congratulations. I know they mean to speed me on to a
better place, but I love teaching. To not work with MITs brilliant and
quirky kidsTo not be touched and inspired by their ardor and intel-
ligenceTo not be in daily touch with all that youth and promise
well, I have books to write and books to publish and read and the life
of a husband, father, grandfather and friend to live and if this is the
frst step into new adventures I am a lucky man. Ive been lucky, un-
surpassably so, in my years here. Ill let you know if my luck holds.
If this is the frst step into new adventures
I am a lucky man. Ive been lucky,
unsurpassably so, in my years here. Ill let
you know if my luck holds.
fall 2014 21
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
Comparative Media Studies
Beyza Boyacioglu is a Boston-based
documentary flmmaker, video artist,
and curator. She directed the short
Toitas, a documentary portrait of
the last Puerto Rican social club in
Brooklyn. Toitas was produced
during Beyzas fellowship at
UnionDocs Collaborative Studio, and
premiered at MoMA Documentary
Fortnight. The flm was awarded
Brooklyn Spirit Award at Brooklyn Film Festival. Beyza curates Fic-
tion-Non, a documentary series exploring narrative/non-fction
hybrid flms. Her work as a video artist has been exhibited in many
venues including MoMA (New York), The Invisible Dog Art Center
(Brooklyn), NoteOn (Berlin), and Sakip Sabanci Museum (Istanbul).
Lily Bui holds dual bachelors degrees
in International Studies and Spanish
from the University of California,
Irvine. Her motley trajectory most
recently brought her to Public Radio
Exchange (PRX), where she helps dis-
tribute STEM content, and SciStarter,
where she helps fnd and tell stories
about citizen science. In other past
lives, she has worked on Capitol Hill;
served in AmeriCorps in Montgomery
County, Maryland; worked for a New
York Times bestselling ghostwriter; and
performed across the U.S. as a touring musician. In her spare time, she
builds gadgets and thinks of cheesy puns. Like many graduate students,
she is interested in anything and everything.
Kyrie E. H. Caldwell earned her B.A. in
Art History and Religious Studies at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
a return to her Midwestern hometown
after a good while spent in Conyers,
Georgia. During that while, Kyrie
played many video games, steeping
herself especially in the rich worlds and
stories of the Final Fantasy series. Since
then, she thought about those video
games through various humanistic lenses, from literature to folklore
to Japanese studies to her undergraduate majors, until she realized that
she could cut to the chase and directly study video games using those
various humanistic lenses. Thus she found the wonderful people of
UW-Madisons Games + Learning + Society group and now fnds
herself in CMS at MIT. Kyries academic interests lie in transcendental
experiences, particularly but not limited to those of mystical religious
practices and play. Personally, she has been known to fence sabre and
chase down frisbees, write wine auction catalogues and bake desserts,
listen to too much music and wear fancy foral dresses. She suspects
that her personal and academic interests are inseparably intertwined,
thanks in large part to being raised by academics on a university
campus. She is constantly inspired by her brother Piers, who is a
musician and producer based in Berlin.
Anika Gupta grew up near Washing-
ton, DC, where she wrote her frst
poem at the age of six. A passion for all
things dramatic and literary led her to
become co-president of her high
schools Shakespeare Club, and later to
a degree in journalism from North-
western Universitys Medill School.
After graduating, she wrote for Smith-
sonian Magazine, where her favorite
subjects included invasive lionfsh and disappearing Indian forts. In
2009, she moved to New Delhi, and working as a national science
correspondent, covering nanotechnology, entrepreneurship and
climate change, among other subjects. In 2012, she started the New
Delhi chapter of Hacks/Hackers, a collaborative group of journalists
and technologists who meet to brainstorm the future of news. A little
after that, she joined the TV channel CNN IBN to head CJ Onlinea
digital storytelling project focused on user-generated content and col-
laborative news. She has been invited to speak on media panels about
creating stakeholders in online journalism, and at entrepreneurship
conferences about participatory and new media. Her articles have
appeared in Smithsonian, Fortune, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
Lilia Kilburn is curious about interac-
tions between the voice and technolo-
gyeverything from invasive vocal
surgeries to Auto-Tune. She seeks to
get at the ways in which writers can
speak to the subtleties of the human
voice through techniques drawn from
ethnography, creative nonfction, and
audio documentary. Lilia has alter-
nately lived near and far from her
birthplace, Boston. She graduated from Amherst College and has
worked as a graphic designer, a jukebox refurbisher, and a researcher
in Cameroon and South Africa. Lately shes been at the Edmond J.
Safra Center for Ethics studying public discourse on autism, which
dovetails with her broader interest in understanding how minority
CMS class of 2016,
Science Writing class of 2015
22 in medias res
groups the world over contend with popular conceptions of their lives.
She likes reading fction aloud and really good mustard.
Lacey Lord was born and raised in
Southern Indiana. She earned a B.A. in
English with a concentration in Litera-
ture and minors in Digital Media and
Peace and Confict Resolution from
Ball State University. Lacey is most in-
terested in the ways in which digital
media are afecting how we consume,
construct, and participate within
fctional and nonfctional stories. Her
most recent projects include an extensive exhibit on the life and work
of Kurt Vonnegut for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and two
transmedia projects for the Indiana State Museum, Transmedia
Indiana and Transmedia Star Wars. She was also a design editor at The
Broken Plate, Ball States national literary magazine, and published a
short memoir as a member of The Invictus Writers in 2013.
Gordon Mangum joins CMS having
worked in radio and media develop-
ment for the last decade. He was previ-
ously Country Director of Internews
Sudan, which built a network of six
community radio stations in border
areas of Sudan and South Sudan. While
there he directed the training of local
journalists in the run-up to the vote for
independence in 2011. He has also
consulted with radio projects in Somalia, Uganda, and Cambodia. He
was most recently Chief Engineer of WERS in Boston. His interests
include developing and improving information systems, participatory
civics and the public good, and music. Gordon holds a dual B.A. from
the University of Virginia in Philosophy and Religious Studies.
Andy Stuhls work centers on the
technologies and social infrastructures
behind creative labor. Hes interested
in how people make music and what it
can tell us about digital mediation. At
Stanford, he majored in Science, Tech-
nology, and Societyan interdisci-
plinary program that let him piece
together coursework in media studies,
computer science, and music technol-
ogyand minored in Creative Writing. His thesis there examined
reactions to the cultural status of analog tools in sound recording
communities. He grew up in St. Louis but keeps coming back toward
his birthplace near Boston; hes worked as a developer on an audio
software team at Avid and spent a year helping design and develop
interactive pieces at Small Design Firm. He likes to cook, mess with
machines and explore resonant spaces for positive expression.
(Due to some extensive travel, Deniz Tortum was unable to send us
a bio by the time In Medias Res went to press. Be sure to learn more
about him at cmsw.mit.edu/people.)
Graduate Program in Science Writing
Rachel Becker is a Boston transplant
originally from the Bay Area. Her love
for science started during college at
Stanford University with archaeology,
anthropology, and osteology, and grew
to include infectious diseases, epidemi-
ology, and fnally immunology. Her
undergraduate thesis investigations
into a novel therapeutic pathway for
treating multiple sclerosis inspired
Rachel to settle on neuroimmunology for her masters degree research
at Harvard, where she studied how the maternal immune environ-
ment shapes fetal neurodevelopment. After years of trying to restrict
herself to just one -ology, Rachel realized that she didnt have to: she
loves that being a science writer means being able to indulge all of her
scientifc curiosities, and is thrilled to be a part of MITs GPSW Class
of 2015. In her free time, Rachel can be found outside, reading, or at
the gym lifting things up and putting them down.
Christina Couch is a human interest
and fnance journalist whos making
the transition into science writing. Her
writing credentials include work for
Wired, Discover Magazine, The AV
Club, Playboy.com, Time Out Chicago
and Entrepreneur Magazine and shes the
author of a fnancial aid guidebook that
came out in 2008, but what shes most
proud of is getting to gesture wildly and say TODAY I INTER-
VIEWED THE MOST AMAZING PERSON ON EARTH! to
family and friends at least once a week. Christina has spent the last fve
years living as a permanent traveler and moving to a diferent city or
country roughly every three months (thank you, remote work tech-
nology). Aside from travel and space and robots (and traveling space
robots), Christinas interests include awkward dancing, indie video
games and the frst three Die Hard movies.
Cara Giaimo graduated from Amherst
College with a double degree in
English and Biology, a thesis that
attempted to illustrate biological prin-
ciples using techniques gleaned from
experimental literature, and several
rescue planarians. They all moved to
Boston straight away and have pretty
much stayed put. Cara has held (with
varying degrees of frmness) jobs in
fall 2014 23
gardening, marketing, farmers market hummus-hawking, travel
writing, genetic researching, and newspaper delivery. Her profession-
al interests include conservation and its movements, bio- and enviro-
ethics, and how diferent cultures view nature (since we cant know
the reverse); some more leisurely ones are gender theory, electric
guitars, and weird ice cream. You can fnd her writing at Autostrad-
dle, Case Magazine, and the Boston Hassle, and her at cjgiaimo@mit.
edu or @cjgiaimo. If you just cant fnd her anywhere, shes probably
on her bike.
Michael Greshko grew up in Hunters-
ville, North Carolina, just north of
Charlotte. Ever since he frst sported a
bowl cutthankfully, many years
agohes been interested in both
creating and sharing moments of
wonder with others, leading him to
science, writing, and performance.
Michael recently graduated from
Vanderbilt University with a degree in
Biological Sciences and a minor in Spanish, and maintaining his
schedule was perhaps the biggest wonder of all: Outside of the
classroom, he split his time between working in a paleoecology lab,
writing award-winning article series for the student newspaper, and
performing in student-produced musicals. Needless to say, hes most
comfortable at the nexus of the arts and the sciences, and for this
reason among many, he is thrilled to be at MIT this year. Michael is
currently orbiting the binary stars of journalism and research science,
hoping to live happily on this professional Tatooine as a science com-
municator and academic. That said, he admits that being a moisture
farmer would have its perks. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking,
graphic design, SyFy Channel Original Movies, and hiking. He is also
a part-time magician and maintains a respectable playing card collec-
tion.
Suzanne Jacobs spent her earliest
years in the New York City suburbs
and Lincoln, Nebraska, but primarily
grew up in Columbus, Ohio. She
headed north to the University of
Michigan. After sampling a wide
variety of subjects, including Greek lit-
erature, extreme weather, philosophy
and organic chemistry, Suzanne found
herself in a physics class, where she fell
in love. As much as she enjoyed her physics classes, Suzanne longed for
a writing outlet outside of lab reports, so she wandered into the
newsroom at the student newspaper and joined the staf of The Michigan
Daily. She soon became as passionate about journalism as she was
about physics and went on to intern at a blog called The Utopianist
and at the local NPR afliate station in Michigan. Since completing
her bachelors degree in physics nearly two years ago, Suzanne has
continued to pursue both science and writing at the University of
Michigan by studying iceberg calving with an engineering professor
and doing research for a book on social entrepreneurship with a
business school professor. Although physics and writing often seem
like separate pursuits, Suzanne hopes to combine her passions to help
show a general audience how amazing hard science really is.
Anna Nowogrodzki spent her
childhood amid the black raspber-
ries, creeks, and cornfelds of
central New York. Though in
seventh grade she made a future
business card that read Anna No-
wogrodzki, botanist, she found
the written word as captivating as
the natural world. At Dartmouth,
she majored in being out in the
woods (Environmental and Evolu-
tionary Biology) and minored in curling up with a good book
(English). Post-college, she found purpose in tracking southern pine
beetles in the feld, editing elementary school science textbooks,
studying fower development genes at the New York Botanical
Garden, teaching gardening to children in the Bronx, and searching
for disease resistance in grapevines at Cornell. In science writing, she
is thrilled to have found a feld where her inability to shut up about
science is actually an asset. Her current interests include agriculture,
ecology, plants, why misinformation persists, fawed systems, and how
to afect change. She frmly believes in singing with people, goat
cheese, mental health advocacy, Excel spreadsheets, and expansive
views.
Sarah Schwartz was born and
raised in the San Francisco Bay
Area. She spent her childhood
getting lost in redwoods and
stories, collecting wood sorrel
and novels, and learning how to
identify constellations and split
infnitives. Dreading that
someday she would have to make
a career decision between the sciences or writing, she studied both
felds at the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her
B.S. in Environmental Systems while taking Revelle Colleges
rigorous Humanities series and as many writing courses as possible.
She has worked in laboratories at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC
San Francisco, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, learning
about bacterial aging, natural sunscreens, neonatal hypoxia-ischemia,
marine sponge biochemistry, and what to do when you set the ethanol
on fre. These experiences fostered her deep respect and appreciation
for scientifc research and professional scientists; they have also left her
eager to keep studying, supporting, and contributing to the natural
and physical sciences. Though her primary interests lie in the areas of
environmental and human health, Sarah hopes to explore various
felds and interdisciplinary challenges, and to generate a broad
dialogue about important, exciting science. In her free time, Sarah
loves to bake, sing, hike, and obsess about Giants baseball.
24 in medias res
A product of Raleigh, NC, Josh Sokol
writes bio blurbs with casual fair and a
knack for subtle self-promotion. Josh
graduated from Swarthmore College
in 2011, where he majored in English
Literature and Astronomy. He then
took his talents to the land of acronyms
as a Research & Instrument Analyst
(RIA) at the Space Telescope Science
Institute (STScI), where he helped
calibrate the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble
Space Telescope (HST) for NASA (NASA). His non-astronomical
interests include oceans, literature, bad movies, fossils, taking his
talents, and his succulent plants, which he will also take, along with
his talents, to MIT.
Equally enchanted by scientifc inquiry
and syntax, Annie Tague is thrilled to
be a science writer in the making at
MIT and a CASW Taylor/Blakeslee
Fellow for 2014-2015. After earning
Departmental Honors in English from
Haverford College, Annie scavenged
post-baccalaureate science coursework
amounting to a B.S. equivalency in
Biology. Curiositythat dynamic
compasscarried her to feldwork in
public health, environmental conser-
vation, chemistry and agriculture. She
hopes to wield communication skills to make fascination infectious,
bear witness to worlds beyond immediate perception and fuel interest
in the social signifcance of science.
REGISTER
FOR EdTechX
TWO SERIES OF SIX-WEEK-LONG
MITX ONLINE COURSES ON edX
Design and Development of Educational
Technology
Starts October 8. This project-based course explores edu-
cational technologies and the theories underlying their de-
velopment through interviews with experts in the feld.
To be efective, educational technologies must be designed
based on what we know about how people learn. Through in-
terviews with multiple experts in the feld, this course examines
educational technologies, outlines the theories that infuenced
their development, and examines their use. The course leads
up to a fnal projecta kickstarter-style pitch for a new edu-
cational technologywhich is worked on iteratively across the
weeks. It involves active weekly participation.
Introduction to Game Design
Starts October 22. A practical introduction to game design
and game design concepts, emphasizing the basic tools
of game design: paper and digital prototyping, design
iteration, and user testing.
An introduction to the basic methods of game design.
This course includes defning and analyzing games and
their mechanics, and understanding how mechanics afect
gameplay and player experiences. Practical assignments
include creating both paper and digital prototypes, using
user testing to fnd points of failure and iterative design
processes to revise and improve overall gameplay.
FOLLOW OUR
STUDENTS
WORK
HERES HOW YOU CAN FIND THEIR
UPDATES AND OTHER NEWS
Daily updates: @cmsw_mit, @MIT_Sciwrite
Event news: facebook.com/MIT.CMSW
Networking: cmsw.mit.edu/linkedin
Research: cmsw.mit.edu/blog
Announcements: cmsw.mit.edu/signup
fall 2014 25
Vivek Bald
Vivek Bald will be spending the
2014-15 academic year as a Fellow at
Harvard Universitys Warren Center
for Research in American History.
Along with seven other Warren
Center fellows, he will be participat-
ing in a year-long seminar centered on
Multimedia History and Literature,
convened by the historian Vincent
Brown and literary scholar Glenda
Carpio.
Balds own research over the course of the year will focus on de-
veloping the digital media components of his Bengali Harlem/Lost
Histories Project: a feature-length documentary flm and a commu-
nity-sourced, web-based oral history project documenting the lives
and histories of mixed Bengali-Puerto Rican and Bengali-African
American families in mid-20
th
century Black neighborhoods in the
U.S. He will also be working on his next full-length book project,
which explores ideas, images, and fantasies of India in American
popular and consumer culture in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Heather Hendershot
Heather Hendershot has been awarded
a fellowship at the Radclife Institute
for Advanced Study at Harvard Uni-
versity, where she will be working on
her book on William F. Buckleys
public afairs show Firing Line (1966-
1999).
Focusing on the shows golden age
from 1966 to 1980, each chapter of
Hendershots book will center on a key
issue and/or set of political fgures; guests discussed will range from
big names (Noam Chomsky on the futility of continuing in Vietnam)
to then-unknowns (27-year-old Captain Oliver North on the absence
of war crimes in Vietnam).
Following an introduction to the programs origins and its link to
Buckleys 1965 run for mayor of New York Cityhe lost the election
but became a media starchapters will focus on: Goldwater and the
Extremists; Communism, McCarthyism, and the Blacklist; Civil
Rights and Black Power; Vietnam and Nixon; the Womens Libera-
tion Movement; and Ronald Reagan and the triumph of right-wing
conservatism. Firing Line ofers a compelling case study for charting
the trials and tribulations of PBS, a case study focusing particularly
on exactly how and why conservative programs thrived when public
broadcasting was defunded. It also helps us understand the pre-history
of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, etc. Bluntly put: how did we get
from there to here? In addition, the program and its creator can help
us chart out new ways to think through the history of the American
conservative movement.
Fox Harrell
Fox Harrell will be a fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Be-
havioral Science (CASBS) at Stanford
University for 2014-2015, where his
focus will be on developing computa-
tional media systems that can achieve
greater aesthetic, afective, and social
resonance. A particular goal is to
develop integrated gaming/social
media technologies for expressing and
better understanding cognitive
phenomena related to social identity.
William Uricchio
William Uricchio received the presti-
gious Berlin Prize and will spend six
months at the American Academy in
Berlin working on a book on the
cultural work of algorithms. From the
15
th
century onwards, things like
three-point perspective, the printing
press, and Decartes notion of the self
all contributed to a celebration of point
of view, authorship and the individual.
Algorithms changed all that, blurring these traditions, challenging
our notions of the self, and in the process subverting the project of the
modern.
Working with cases drawn from predictive musical taste algorithms
(The Echo Nest), image aggregators (Photosynth), story generators
(Narrative Science) and participatory and interactive documentary,
William will explore cultural forms that dont ft easily within our
inherited logics. Todays algorithmically produced texts may look the
same, but they fundamentally undercut the tenants of the modern
and our traditional systems of analysis. The question is, with what
implication? What questions should we be asking, what methods can
we deploy, to critically assess this new order of things? Williams work
will focus on the implications of these developments for the ways that
we represent, relate to, and tell stories about the world in the form of
participatory and interactive documentary.
Faculty Fellowships
26 in medias res
Coco Fusco joins as an MLK Visiting Scholar for
2014-15
Acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and writer will serve in CMS/W
The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) is
honored and excited to welcome Coco Fusco to the MIT community
for the 2014-15 academic year.
Fusco will serve as a visiting associate professor in Comparative
Media Studies/Writing. She will be hosted by Edward Schiappa, the
John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities and head of CMS/W, and
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Daz, the Rudge and Nancy
Allen Professor of Writing.
Established in 1991, the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars
Program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. While
at MIT, MLK visiting scholars and artists enhance their scholarship,
enrich the intellectual life of MIT, and are deeply engaged in the life
of the Institute through teaching and research.
Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer who
is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim fellowship, a 2013 Absolut
Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright fellowship, a 2012 United
States Artists fellowship, and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Her performances and videos have been presented in two Whitney
Biennials (1993 and 2008), BAMs Next Wave Festival, the Sydney
Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Kwangju Biennale, the
Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, the London
International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil, and Performa 05.
Fusco received her B.A. in semiotics from Brown University (1982),
her M.A. in modern thought and literature from Stanford University
(1985), and her Ph.D. in art and visual culture from Middlesex Uni-
versity (2007). She has taught at the Tyler School of Art, Columbia
University School of the Arts, Parsons The New School for Design,
and the Fundaco Armando Alvares Penteado in Brazil.
Novelist and comic book writer Marjorie Liu
comes to CMS/W as Visiting Artist
Shes been a best-selling author and writer for Marvel Comics
Marjorie Liu is an attorney and New York Times bestselling author of
over seventeen novels. Her comic book work includes X-23, Black
Widow, Dark Wolverine, and Astonishing X-Men, for which she was
nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding media images
of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Liu received her B.A. at Lawrence University (2000) and her J.D.
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003). A guest lecturer at
Stonecoast and the Asian American Writers Workshop, she currently
teaches popular fction at the Voices of Our Nation workshop.
Some of her other widely known work include the two series Dirk
& Steele and Hunter Kiss.
This fall, Liu will teach our Genre Writing Workshop, framed this
semester by Liu as The Sweet Art of Comic Book Writing:
In our class we will read a wide range of comics, corporate and indepen-
dent, print and web, but our primary text will be your writing. Partici-
pants will be responsible for creating short scripts and full-length comic
book narratives across a wide range of genres. Drawing skills are un-
necessary, though if you wish to illustrate or storyboard your scripts, all
the betterbut scripts will be our focus. In both our critical and creative
work special attention will be paid to questions of gender, race, ethnicity,
and sexuality.
The class features not just readings from the likes of DC Comics but
seminal texts like Scott McClouds Understanding Comics. (McCloud is
a friend of CMS/W going back to 2006: http://cmsw.mit.edu/scott-
mccloud-making-comics.) The class is limited to just ffteen students.
You can follow Marjorie Liu on Twitter at @marjoriemliu.
Artists in Residence
Announcements from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
fall 2014 27
Ed Barretts fourteenth poetry collection,
Toward Blue Peninsula, will be published this
November. Tideline (2014), poems written
in collaboration with visual artist Grace
Colletta, was awarded frst prize in the
Howard Gottlieb Rare Book Archive com-
petition sponsored by the M.F.A. program at
Boston University. In spring 2014, his class
Communicating with Mobile Technology
(21W.789), co-taught with CMS/W Visiting
Lecturer Frank Bentley of Yahoo!, was the
frst MOOC ofered by CMS/W. 36,000
students from around the globe registered for
this class, which provided valuable informa-
tion on the potential and limitations of the
edX platform for supporting a project-based
Humanities class where grading was based on
written and oral reports and peer review. The
class will be ofered again this coming spring.
Marcia Bartusiak authored a piece for Natural
History on where black holes come from
not the phenomena themselves but the term.
And like much terminology that smooths the
path from dense theory to popular conscious-
ness, one man, Princeton University physicist
John Archibald Wheeler, has been credited
with coining the phrase, while anothers,
earlier usage predates them. Bartusiak found
evidence of black hole, in this case by a
Life magazine science editor named Robert
Rosenfeld, who covered the 1963 Texas
Symposium for Relativistic Astrophysics,
four years before Wheeler.
Taylor Beck (S.M., Science Writing, 2012) is
working as a journalist in New York, writing
freelance for magazines (Fast Company, GQ,
The Airship Daily), about neuroscience,
books, and music, Japan, technology and
medicine. He does research for writers at The
New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine,
and fact checks for the Times Syndicate and
Matter magazine, in addition to reporting
his own stories. Meanwhile, he is enjoying
taking part however he can in the sociable
world of ideas and storytelling.
In March 2014, Eugenie Brinkema published
her frst book, The Forms of the Afects, with
Duke University Press and in July 2014 she
was promoted to Associate Professor. In the
fall of 2014, she will give invited lectures
related to her new work on fnitude and the
horror flm at the University of Cambridge,
the University of Pittsburgh, and Cornell.
Lindsay Brownell (S.M., Science Writing,
2014) is currently in Heidelberg, Germany
fnishing up a summer internship for the
Science Writing masters degree. She is
working as a science writing intern at the
European Molecular Biology Lab, producing
stories about science in the Lab for print and
online. She is learning about the diferent
regional German beers, doing as much
traveling as possible on the weekends, and
eating a lot of pretzels, too! She is planning
a whirlwind tour of Europe in the month
of September before returning to Boston to
graduate ofcially, and then see where the
wind takes her. She also had a story published
in Harvard Magazine last month, based on her
MIT thesis, although much shorter: http://
mitsha.re/1B9cQyC.
B.D. Colen tackled a tough health topic with
Bostons NPR station, WBUR: the male
mammogram. Colen narrated his path from
fnding a lump, to the realization that men do
get breast cancer, to the stress every patient
feels as imaging is churned through the
medical system until a diagnosis is found. As a
photographer, Colen documented the entire
process. Read his piece and view his photos at
http://mitsha.re/1ByiIld.
Rodrigo Davies (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 2014) moved to San Francisco, where
he will be starting a Ph.D. in Management
Science and Engineering at Stanford in the
fall. He will be researching the application
of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing to or-
ganizations, particularly in the public and
non-proft sectors at the Center for Work,
Technology and Organizations. On July 4,
Rodrigo married Erica Deahl (S.M., Com-
parative Media Studies, 2014) in Lubbock,
TX, in a ceremony ofciated by Eduardo
Marisca (S.M., Comparative Media Studies,
2014). He continues to blog at rodrigodavies.
com and can be contacted via rodrigod@
alum.mit.edu.
Salon.com featured Junot Dazs course syllabi
after the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and
CMS/W professor criticized the approach of
creative writing M.F.A. programs. Despite
the challenge implied in hunting down
the reading lists, Prachi Gupta, the articles
author, described Dazs two syllabi as too
good to be true and greatness.
In May, Kevin Driscoll (S.M., Comparative
Media Studies, 2009) successfully defended
his dissertation at USC and earned a doctorate
in Communication. With Henry Jenkins
serving as committee chair and Lana Swartz
(S.M., Comparative Media Studies, 2009) in
attendance, the CMS spirit was very much
alive. After graduation, he and Lana moved
out of their apartment on Sunset Blvd. and
drove across the country back to Boston. For
the next two years, Driscoll will be living and
working in the Peoples Republic as a postdoc
at Microsoft Research.
Sam Ford (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 07) recently published essays in the
NYU Press book Making Media Work, The
Journal of Fandom Studies, and the Spanish
journal Panorama Social. Sam and Dr. Abigail
De Kosnik also published an online annotated
bibliography on soap operas for Oxford Uni-
versity Press. He joined fellow CMS alum
Xiaochang Li (09) and others in a roundtable
discussion on Spreadable Media for Cinema
Journal this spring and a related workshop
at the Society of Cinema & Media Studies
conference. Sam has also recently published
pieces for the Journal of Digital & Social Media
Marketing, Harvard Business Review, Adver-
tising Age, Fast Company, Inc., CMO.com,
PRWeek, PR News, ODwyer PR, IABC
Personal Updates from the CMS/W Community
28 in medias res
SAM FORD, CMS 07
RECALLING THE
LINK BETWEEN PRO
WRESTLING AND MIT
Jay London, MIT Alumni Association
1
W
hen Sam Ford, S.M. 07,
found out that a class he
had taught at MIT in
2007 was featured on the
July 9 episode of Jeopardy!, he was ecstatic.
After all, how many college courses are
mentioned on national television more
than seven years later?
Maybe I should retire; what can top
this? Ford tweeted. My MIT class was
the answer to @Jeopardy last night.
Then again, the course focused on a
topic rarelyif everassociated with
MIT: professional wrestling.
Since its ofering, Topics in Comparative
Media: American Pro Wrestling has been
no stranger to the purview of pop culture.
It was profled in the Boston Globe; one
blogger declared the class the undisput-
ed end of higher education; and Mental
Floss, Buzzfeed, and the Metro all named it
among the strangest courses ofered by any
U.S. college.
One radio host called it a sign of the
apocalypse, Ford says. In reality, it
looked at the cultural and media history
of American pro wrestling. The course
brought an eclectic mix of students from
media studies, humanities, science, and en-
gineering.
Internet quips aside, the course focused
less on powerslams and dropkicks and
more on the idea of wrestling as perfor-
mance art and how it has evolved with
new media technologies. Through a part-
nership with WWE, the worlds largest
professional wrestling organization, guest
speakers included broadcaster Jim Ross,
wrestler-turned-head trauma expert Chris
1 http://slice.mit.edu/2014/07/18/pro-wrestling-mit-
wwe/
Nowinski, and author and wrestler Mick
Foley, whose Comparative Media Studies/
Writing colloquium packed a Green
Building lecture hall.
2
I never felt much need to defend the class
or explain it to anyone, graduate student
Kate James wrote in a 2013 CMS/W
blog post. It was incredibly rigorous and
visionary, using the performative medium
of professional wrestling to look at subjects
including gender dynamics, performance
tactics, good-evil duality, religion, race,
and the use of the human body in the
throes of violent enactments of cultural
paradigms. If others didnt get it, so what?
Ford, now director of audience engage-
ment at marketing frm Peppercomm, orig-
inally co-taught a version of the wrestling
course as a quadruple-major undergradu-
ate at Western Kentucky University. A
life-long wrestling fan and licensed pro-
fessional wrestling manager, both Fords
honors thesis at WKU and his graduate
application to MIT centered on WWE.
My thesis focused on three areas: Mick
Foley and the changing views on mascu-
2 The Real Worlds Faker than Wrestling. Podcast at
http://mitsha.re/1v8Vssj
linity in the 21
st
century; a business per-
spective of WWE as a transmedia empire;
and the ethnographic role that the audience
plays at live events, Ford says. Part of my
MIT application looked at how wrestling
fans trade videotapes of matches and what
the media could learn from those practices.
Ford, who maintains a research afliate
position with MIT, also taught the CMS/W
course American Soap Operas in 2008.
Now based in Bowling Green, Kentucky,
hes bringing the wrestling course back
from the mat this fall at WKU. Hes open
to bringing the class back to MIT.
It was probably the most enjoyable class
Ive ever taught, says Ford. It was def-
nitely unique subject matter. I have a great
afnity for Boston and Id love to come
back and teach it again.
For more information on Topics in
Comparative Media: American Pro
Wrestling, listen to CMS/W podcasts with
Mick Foley and Jim Ross
3
, read the courses
blog archive
4
, and revisit the course the via
MITs OpenCourseWare
5
.
3 http://mitsha.re/1v8VZu6
4 http://mitcmsprowrestling.blogspot.com/
5 http://mitsha.re/1v8W80S
Mick Foley at MIT in 2007. Photo by Eric Schmiedl, 09.
fall 2014 29
Communication World, WOMMA, The
Public Relations Strategist, PropertyCasu-
alty360, and the CMS/W site. And, this year,
he has spoken at Social Media Week NYC,
the Front End of Innovation, the Innovation
Cities Tour, and The Essay in Public Confer-
ence at Brown University, among others.
Desi Gonzalez (Comparative Media
Studies, 2015) spent her summer conducting
feldwork on museum initiatives that invite
audiences to experiment with new technolo-
gies. Last winter, she attended the Sundance
Film Festival through the support of MITs
Open Documentary Lab and the Roger Ebert
Scholarship. As a part of this experience, she
wrote a review on New Frontier, the festivals
showcase of multimedia installation and inno-
vative storytelling forms. She continued her
engagement with Sundance this summer by
reviewing applications for the New Frontier
Story Lab. She also recently presented at the
Digital Media and Learning conference in
Boston and the Digital Humanities 2014 in
Lausanne, Switzerland.
Fox Harrell authored a piece for The Root on
connecting the digital world to the senses to
experience historical events (http://mitsha.
re/YuYTf h) and was interviewed by the
Boston Business Journal about how companies
like Facebook are exploring using virtual
reality for arts and self-expression (http://
mitsha.re/YuZnly).
Mikael Jacobsson started his new Research
Scientist position at CMS/W. He is now
formally part of the MIT Game Lab as
Research Coordinator. The contract is for
three years, so he will be around for a while!
This summer, authorities (accurately)
predicted that because Miami has the juiciest
of stories, the city was vulnerable to an attack
by El Bibliobandido (or book bandit), the
story-eating bandit who terrorizes little kids
until they ofer him stories theyve written.
To help avert calamity, artist and Open Doc-
umentary Lab Fellow Marisa Jahn worked
with kids from the Overtown Youth Center
and the Perz Art Museum of Miami to create
a bookmaking bonanza attended by over
six hundred young believers. In addition,
working as part of a team that includes Sasha
Constanza-Chock, Marisa has been creating
a series of humorous and artfully designed
know-your-rights pocket-sized comics and
interactive audio episodes for the roughly fve
million legally contracted Mexican migrant
workers coming to the U.S. each year. In
August, Marisa collaborated with a local
community in Armenia to co-design a park
and a blueprint for public art.
Flourish Klink (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 2010) is continuing to lecture in
CMS while overseeing the social media and
transmedia for Season 2 of East Los High
and helping plan Season 3. She was on an
excellent panel at San Diego Comic-Con in
July, which also featured former CMS leader
Henry Jenkins III. And she is still enjoying
the bicoastal lifestyle between Los Angeles
and Cambridge.
Alan Lightman authored Our Lonely Home
in Nature for the New York Times op-ed page
on humankinds conficted view of nature,
as something that can sustain us at the same
time that natural disasters happen without
the slightest consideration for human inhabit-
ants. He writes, Nature, in fact, is mindless.
Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither ma-
levolent nor benevolent. Nature is purpose-
less. Nature simply is.
After graduating from CMS in June, Jason
Lipshin (S.M., Comparative Media Studies,
2014) spent the summer in Tokyo working
as an intern for Disney Interactive Group.
He worked on the UX and UI for three apps
that will soon be released to the Japanese
market. After his internship, Jason will also
be starting a new job as a design researcher for
TomTom in Amsterdam. He will be focusing
on TomToms new line of smart wristwatch-
es, researching the ways wearable computing
can motivate exercise and other forms of
behavior change.
Kelley Kreitz has completed her visiting
scholar appointment and recently moved
to New York, where she is starting a new
position as an Assistant Professor focusing on
print and digital cultures of the Americas in
the English Department at Pace University.
She sends a warm thank you to the CMS/W
community for all of their inspiration and
support over the past two years.
Allison MacLachlan (S.M., Science Writing,
2011) is living in Toronto and continues her
work at Owlkids, publisher of childrens
books and magazines, where she has been for
a year now. She was particularly excited to
write the feature story (The Secret Life of
Night) for the October 2014 issue of OWL
Magazine, which has just relaunched this fall
with a STEM focus for 9- to 13-year-olds.
One of the highlights of her summer was a
trip to Thailand with her partner, Derek,
which included visiting an elephant sanctuary
and a zip-line tour through the jungle. She
is always happy to meet fellow alumni if you
ever fnd yourself in Toronto.
For the past several years, Seth Mnookin been
following a family in Salt Lake City whose
son was the frst-ever diagnosed case of a new
genetic disease. In July, he published One
of a Kind, an article on that familys search
for other patients with the same disorder, in
The New Yorker. In addition to exploring how
families can use social media to circumvent
the typical research process, the piece high-
lighted an unspoken secret within genetics:
there is a fundamental confict of interest
between families who are sequenced and
the researchers who are searching for new
diseases. In other news, a piece Mnookin
wrote for The Boston Globe Magazine on the
cost of a measles outbreak was selected for the
anthology, The Best Science and Nature Writing
2014and looking forward, he is trying to
decide which of the various projects he is
working on would be a good topic for my
next book.
Nick Montforts book #! (pronounced
shebang and consisting of programs and
poems) was published by Counterpath Press
in July. On July 19 he spoke and gave the
frst reading from the book in From 1950
to #! at the Postscript Symposium, in the
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East
Lansing, Michigan. His in-town #! events
will include a reading at the Harvard Book
Store on September 18 at 7pm.
30 in medias res
CMS rising seniors Royal Morris, Stephen
Suen, and Spencer Wilson (CMS minor)
were each named Burchard Scholars for
the coming academic year. Three of just
thirty one recipients, they were honored
for demonstrat[ing] academic excellence
in the humanities, arts, and social sciences,
as well as in science and engineering. The
scholars program, named for the frst dean of
the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social
Sciences, puts recipients together with distin-
guished faculty for eight dinner seminars.
Conor Myhrvold (S.M., Science Writing,
2012) did a series for Fast Company Labs on
how to use a Monte Carlo model to fgure
out where Malaysian Airlines fight 370 most
likely ended up, in addition to several other
pieces: http://mitsha.re/1q5iUzw. He also
wrote for Nautilus, about symmetry breaking
and ants, which was their most viewed piece
of the month: http://mitsha.re/1q5iWqX. He
fnished a degree in Computational Science
& Engineering at Harvard and is now in San
Francisco, on the Data Science & Analytics
Team at Uber Technologies.
Chris Peterson (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 13) now oversees the recruitment
and evaluation of makers, entrepreneurs, and
academic superstars at MITs Ofce of Un-
dergraduate Admissions, where he continues
to lead digital strategy and communications
as well. In spring 2014 he co-taught, with
Department Head Ed Schiappa, CMS.400
Media Systems and Texts as a course on social
media research, where students analyzed
the persuasive power of Dogecoin tipping,
studied the seductive swipe mechanic of
Tinder, and developed a Buzzfeed-style quiz
to test diferent types of news headlines. The
MIT Bitcoin initiativewhich will give
every MIT undergraduate $100 worth of
cryptocurrency this fallarose out of a fnal
project for this class. Chris continues to write
and speak on the kinds of topics he studied
at CMS, and is presently trying to decide
whether to seek further graduate training,
or whether it will be more fun to sow chaos
from the sidelines.
Talieh Rohani (S.M., Comparative
Media Studies, 2009) has been working
on Livemocha, a free language learning
community that has been acquired by Rosetta
Stone. Lots of new interactions, community
features and game mechanics will be added to
the web app. She is also building a community
mobile app for Livemocha and other Rosetta
Stone users. In 2014, she got obsessed with
Big Data and adaptive learning technologies.
She has been working on fnding ways to
translate data into a personalized meaning-
ful learning experience for all Rosetta Stone
products. Each individual has a diferent way
of learning. Several new companies are trying
to build solutions that would make learning
a fun and an adaptive experience tailored to
individuals. Talieh is also planning to get
married in Mexico on Dec 20
th
.
Visiting scholar and MIT grad Nellie Rosario,
94, was interviewed by the MIT Alumni As-
sociation on her successful bridging of en-
gineering and the humanities. She lives on
campus, as a residential scholar: Its like a
trifecta being here: a visiting scholar, working
with the Blacks at MIT History Project, and
living at Simmons [Hall]. I get to talk to so
many students, and everyone is doing intense
work in diferent felds. Im literally living in
the sponge, soaking it all up.
After a few illuminating years working as a
writer and editor at the science/faith intersec-
tion with groups striving to increase science
literacy among evangelical Christians, this
fall Emily Ruppel (S.M., Science Writing,
2011) will be entering the University of
Pittsburghs Ph.D. program in Rhetoric of
Science as this years Provosts Humanities
Fellow. Emily is specifcally interested in how
non-aggressive, question-frst approaches to
dialogue with openly anti-science commu-
nities can improve communication eforts of
advocacy groups and others.
Steve Schirra (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 2013) recently began a new role with
Yahoo!s Mobile and Emerging Products
group as a user experience design research-
er. In April, he presented the research paper
Together alone: motivations for live-
tweeting a television series at the ACM
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (CHI 2014). The paper
was co-authored with two CMS afliates
Huan Sun (S.M., 2013) and visiting lecturer
Frank Bentley (S.B., Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science, 2002; M.Eng., Elec-
trical Engineering and Computer Science,
2003).
Jesse Sell (Comparative Media Studies, 2015)
spent this summer in Cologne, Germany
working at ESL, the worlds largest indepen-
dent eSports brand. He worked on the PR
team there, attending events such as ESL One:
Frankfurt, a massive eSports tournament
at the Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt,
and gamescom 2014 in Cologne. He is
looking forward to moving to Cambridge in
September with his fance Brynne.
Parmesh Shahani (S.M., Comparative
Media Studies, 2005) was selected as a Yale
World Fellow 2014 and will be spending
the fall 2014 semester on the Yale campus
along with ffteen other Fellows from across
the world. In addition He was also selected
as a World Economic Forum Young Global
Leader this year. The Godrej India Culture
Lab, which he founded in 2011, continues to
grow, and has now established itself as one
of the leading interdisciplinary cultural hubs
in India. In addition, his work on innovation
for Godrej Industries has been recognized
CNBC India, shot a seven episode TV series
on the Godrej LOUD (Live Out Ur Dream)
campus recruitment challenge that he helped
conceive and execute, which will be aired on
TV in India between September and October.
Postdoctoral researcher Gabrielle Trpanier-
Jobin is currently organizing a conference on
the History of Gender and Games that will
take place in July 2015 at Quebecs National
Library in Montreal. Presented in partnership
with CMS/W, this second edition of the Game
History Annual Symposium will document
the emergence of a third wave of game
feminism, while keeping open the dialogue
between academia and the game industry.
In parallel to the organization of this event,
Gabrielle is developing a computer game that
raises awareness on alternative gender identi-
ties, as well as a computer program that high-
lights gender norms in video games. After
submitting her thesis on The Role of Parody
fall 2014 31
in Denaturalizing Gender Stereotypes and
an article on The Promise and Peril of Video
Game Parodies for Criticizing Gender Rep-
resentations, Gabrielle also started to work
on her own parodies. This include oil on
canvas parodies of famous artworks, as well
as a machinima parody of video game stereo-
types that she plans to produce in collabora-
tion with CMS/W students in fall 2014.
This fall, William Uricchio will give a
keynote at the International Conference on
Interactive Digital Storytelling in Singapore,
speak at the International Documentary
Festival Amsterdam, and serve as president
of the jury for the National Film Board of
Canadas Interactive Haiku competition.
Mostly, though, hell be working with the
members of the Open Documentary Lab to
explore the synergies between digital jour-
nalism and interactive and participatory doc-
umentaries, thanks to a research grant from
the MacArthur Foundation.
Jing Wang spent two months in China
this summer. She and her NGO2.0 team
members held the tenth social-media training
workshop for Chinese grassroots NGOs. She
also initiated a collaborative agreement with
Frog Design to start holding nonproft tech-
nology salons in Shanghai. On the home
front, she fnished NGO2.0 and Social
Media Praxis: Activist as Scholar, an article
solicited by the Chinese Journal of Communica-
tion for a special issue ICT in Rural China
that is due at the end of this year.
Genevieve Wanucha (S.M., Science
Writing, 2009) continues to report on
ocean and climate science for the publica-
tion Oceans at MIT and the Program in At-
mospheres, Oceans, and Climate in MITs
EAPS. Also, she recently started working
as the staf science writer for the Fronto-
temporal Disorders Unit at Massachusetts
General Hospital. But change is coming, as
she gears up for a cross-country move and a
chance at her dream career. In the summer of
2015, she will start working as the dedicated
science writer for the University of Washing-
tons Memory and Brain Wellness Center in
Seattle, which specializes in multidisciplinary
Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and related brain
disorder research. There, she will launch a
new platform for communicating important
research fndings to the public.
Christopher Weaver was the subject of a
recent episode in the That Was Me series as
a videogame pioneer and has been working
on a new book Games as Tools with James
Portnow. He contributed to Intro to Game
Design for edX and is slated to host a new
series about novel uses for game technology
in the U.S. and overseas. He looks forward to
teaching his CMS.610 course in the spring.
Andrew Whitacre left the previous issue of
In Medias Res unfnished just days before it
was due to the printer, after a son, Michael,
arrived on January 30. (Many thanks to
Center for Civic Media associate director and
publishing industry veteran Lorrie LeJeune
for completing the job.) Several of Andrews
Boston-area friends had children within the
same few months, leading to plans for Infant
Fight Club or bouncey-seat bumpercarsany
collective activity that might give the parents
time to step aside and talk like normal adults.
In the ofce, Andrew is developing a project
around videography in the humanities and
working more regularly with MIT Alumni
Association staf on relationships with past
CMS and Writing majors.
After working at the London School of
Economics for two years, where she edited a
blog on Indias politics and economy and
helped the School launch a South Asia Centre,
Huma Yusuf (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 2008) has made a big career shift: she
is now a senior South Asia analyst at Control
Risks, a political risk consulting frm based in
London. She works with corporate clients to
help them strategize ways to minimise risks
when investing in emerging markets, partic-
ularly those with high levels of political insta-
bility and corruption and unpredictable
security environments. Her love for media
research continues unabated though: she
published two policy reports on Pakistans
media landscape in the past year, one with
BBC Media Action on media and democracy,
and another as part of Open Society Founda-
tions sixty-country Mapping Digital Media
project.
BECOME
A CMS
VISITING
SCHOLAR
As part of its mission of working across
disciplines, cultures and communities,
CMS/W runs a Visiting Scholars program
to facilitate the residency of a distin-
guished scholars from other academic in-
stitutions or accomplished professionals.
Visiting Scholar positions accommodate
the scholars research and enrich the CMS
research community.
Visiting scholars are expected to provide their
own support from research or study grants
obtained from a foundation, university, or
other agency, or through personal funds.
CMS/W provides access to its seminars,
colloquia, and conferences, as well as library
and email facilities.
Please send the following information:
A letter describing the kind of work you
would like to do while at MIT and the partic-
ular research group or faculty member whose
research interests coincide with you own.
Also include the dates you would like to visit.
A curriculum vitae.
Three letters of recommendation.
At least one publication or writing sample.
The application and all its parts (letters,
etc.) should be addressed to CMS/W Head
Ed Schiappa, and mailed or e-mailed to the
following address at least 90 days prior to
desired start date:
Jessica Tatlock
Comparative Media Studies/Writing
77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14E-303
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
jtatlock@mit.edu
R E S E A R C H G R OU P U P DAT E S
32 in medias res
The Center had a busy spring and summer,
on both its CMS/W and Media Lab sides.
On the latter, technologist Rahul
Bhargava, who specializes in community
education and collaboration around tech,
unveiled a wonderful way to communicate
local-level data on food security to both
residents and decision-makers: visualiza-
tions laser-etched into vegetables. (Check out
http://mitsha.re/1q2kDsQ for his photo of a
cucumber illustrating how 70% of Somer-
ville Public School students receive free or
reduced lunch.)
Media Lab graduate students with the
Center, meanwhile, are developing proto-
types for tools analyzing gender representa-
tion in the media. Open GenderTracker is
a tool that can scan content onlinenews
articles in particularand identify names of
authors and sources, matching them against
databases of common male and female names.
The theme of representation came in the
physical variety too, as CMS grad student
Chelsea Barabas helped develop the Peoples
Bot, a telepresence robot allowing those who
cant attend conferences in person to time-
share the robots screen, camera, and controls.
In June, the Center held its annual con-
ference, co-hosted with the Knight Foun-
dation, with this years theme being The
Open Internetand Everything After.
Watch the videos at https://vimeo.com/
album/2930356, which include demos of
Center projects by CMS graduate students.
Part of the underlying theme of the con-
ference was to introduce the work of former
senior Boston Globe reporter Matt Carroll,
who has joined us as a research scientist.
Carrolls research will focus on re-viewing
journalistic methods, including how to better
incorporate journalists into hacker culture.
Last, the Center for Civic Media and
director Ethan Zuckerman were announced
as recipients of the Lewis Mumford Award,
in the category of Peace, through creating
global communications.
civic.mit.edu
Creative Communities
Initiative
The Creative Communities Initiative, a new
research lab in CMS/W, uses ethnographic
research to explore the connections between
online and ofine worlds to fnd new
solutions to old problems. Led by Professors
Ian Condry and T.L. Taylor, we work in col-
laboration with the Center for Civic Media.
In 2013-14, we fnished our frst year
of research, with Chelsea Barabas as CCIs
dedicated Research Assistant, and three other
masters students: Desi Gonzalez and gradu-
ating masters students Eduardo Marisca and
Denise Cheng.
This sponsored research focused on an
online platform for pregnant moms called
Baby Center, in particular understanding in-
ternational diferences in the uses of online
forums. By using ethnographic comparisons
of English and Spanish language sites, Barabas
identifed diverse uses of the forums, from
curious comparisons (does your baby do
this?) to outright panic in emergency rooms,
with moms seeking others information and
support. In Spanish language sites, we were
surprised to fnd people using the forum to
deal with grave shortages of food and supplies
in the context of civil unrest in Venezuela
and Argentina. Online forums are examples
of emergent communities that ofer possibili-
ties for creative problem-solving, often well-
beyond the intended uses of the sites.
During the summer, CCI members
conducted ethnographic research a variety of
areas, including new business models in music
(Condry), streaming video game worlds
(Taylor), tech education for minority youth
(Barabas) and participatory art museums
(Gonzalez).
In the coming year, CCI will welcome
two new grad student RAs, Lilia Kilburn and
Lacey Lord, and if people are interested, we
welcome other participants as well.
cmsw.mit.edu/cci
This spring The Education Arcade
launched the pilot for The Radix Endeavor.
The online multi-player includes quests for
high school genetics, evolution, ecosystems,
and human body systems as well as quest lines
for geometry, algebra, and statistics. Graduate
students Eduardo Marisca and Jesse Sell
developed supports for the nearly 7,000 users
including promotional trailers, quest walk-
throughs, and tool tutorials to enhance the
game experience for students and teachers.
We also modifed the existing Xenos game
to support the development of academic
literacy in students in the middle grades. Scot
Osterweil, Jesse Sell, and Carole Urbano
developed a proof of concept version, Xenos
Literacy, to test the theory that the underly-
ing architecture was easily adaptable to new
serve new instructional objectives. Grade
seven through nine students in local middle
and high schools participated in the pilot.
We co-hosted the Sandbox Summit, an
annual gathering of those engaged in the
creation and distribution of childrens media,
toys, and games. Video of presentations can
be found at http://bit.ly/smartfromstart.
A new, two-year project, Using Popular
Games for Serious Learning, will kick of this
fall. With the support of the Arthur Vining
Davis Foundation, Scot Osterweil, Carole
Urbano, Philip Tan, and graduate students
Jesse Sell, and Kyrie Caldwell will research
and test the use of commercially available
games in high school humanities classrooms.
We will collaborate with local school districts
and high school teachers to develop lesson
plans, teacher materials, and other resources
to support the use of selected games.
We are also launching, EdTechX (see page
24), a series of online courses in education-
al technology. Two of the courses ofered
through edX are now open for registration:
Design & Development of Educational Tech-
nology (http://bit.ly/EDTechXDesignand-
Dev) and Introduction to Game Design
(http://bit.ly/EdTechXGameDesign).
educationarcade.org
fall 2014 33
Over the past six months, HyperStudios team
has been busy working on several projects
and presenting the results at various venues in
the U.S. and abroad.
In July, Jamie Folsom, HyperStudios lead
developer, Research Assistants Desi Gonzalez
and Liam Andrew, and HyperStudios
Director Kurt Fendt gave a well attended pre-
conference workshop on Annotation Studio
at the annual Digital Humanities Confer-
ence in Lausanne, Switzerland. In time for
the fall semester, we are readying version 2.0
of Annotation Studio, an easy-to-use online
a tool for humanities education, funded by
two grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. Since January, Rachel
Schnepper, HyperStudios Communication
Ofcer, has supported a constantly growing
number of national and international in-
structors in using Annotation Studio in their
humanities classes. Please see some of these
innovative uses on the projects website: an-
notationstudio.org.
Desi and Liam, both graduate students
in the Comparative Media Studies class of
2015, have been the driving force behind our
most recent project, the Boston art discovery
project ArtX (preliminary title). Designed as
a mobile app, ArtX uses sophisticated server-
side data scraping, text analysis, and content
linking mechanisms to create individual-
ized suggestions for Bostons art exhibitions
and events, all presented through an elegant
mobile interface. The project will reach beta-
testing stage in a few weeks.
At the International French Theater
Studies Conference, held in October in New
York, French theater scholars will present the
results of their extensive analysis of 17
th
and
18
th
century theater performance data using
HyperStudios Comdie-Franaise Registers
Project.
We are excited to welcome Andy Stuhl as
HyperStudios new Research Assistant.
hyperstudio.mit.edu
The Game Lab maintained MITs standing
within the Princeton Reviews top ten
schools for undergraduate or graduate study
of game development for a ffth year running
via its research and development based-cur-
riculum. The Lab has raised $1 million in
endowment donations, providing a founda-
tion of funds to stabilize the operations of the
Lab. The Lab has also led workshops on in-
novative game development for organizations
such as the National Film Board of Canada
and National Geographic Learning, connect-
ing them to the research conducted by CMS
graduate students and Game Lab researchers.
The Game Lab continues to host events
connecting the MIT community with com-
munities of research, professional game de-
velopment, and play. The Lab invited Philip
Jones, the director of the documentary
Gaming in Color (http://cmsw.mit.edu/
philip-jones-gaming-color) to speak at the
CMS/W colloquium series about the queer
gaming community. The MIT Game Lab
collaborated with a local meetup, the Game
Makers Guild, to improve board game de-
velopment in the local area by ofering
workshops and hosting the Cardboard Game
Jam in April. The Lab has also hosted other
meetups at MIT, including Boston Indies and
the Boston Unity Group, to better connect
MIT undergraduates with practicing profes-
sionals in game and software development.
The Lab will kick of the academic year by
hosting the third Boston Festival of Indie Games
on September 13. The festival is a celebration of
independent game development with emphasis
on the New England and neighboring regions.
Giving students and families direct access to
practitioners of game development, the festival
will bring over two hundred developers and
studios to MIT to showcase new independent
digital and tabletop games. Attendees will also
have the opportunity to attend talks, panels,
and workshops on indie game development and
the future of the game industry.
gamelab.mit.edu
During the 2013-2014 academic year, the
ICE Lab developed and disseminated its work
in a number of ways. Notably, in fall 2013,
Professor Harrells book Phantasmal Media:
An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and
Expression was published by the MIT Press,
encapsulating much of the research philoso-
phy and approach driving the lab.
The major initiative of the ICE Lab has
been the National Science Foundation-
supported Advanced Identity Representa-
tion (AIR) Project. A central AIR project
activity has been the development of the
Chimeria Engine, an artifcial intelligence-
based approach to modeling the dynamics
of membership in social groups. This is the
core of the Chimeria Platform, a narrative
authoring toolset that enables users to author
their own interactive narratives and games.
Both systems have resulted in notable pub-
lications and conference presentations. The
paper Authoring Conversational Narratives
in Games with the Chimeria Platform was
selected as an exemplary paper at the 9
th
In-
ternational Conference on the Foundations
of Digital Games conference held in Ft. Lau-
derdale, Florida. The Chimeria Engine was
demonstrated at the 2013 Computational
Models of Narrative conference in Hamburg,
The Chimeria Platform was demonstrat-
ed at both the 7
th
Workshop on Intelligent
Narrative Technologies and the 2014 Elec-
tronic Literature Organization conference,
and at the 2014 Digital Humanities confer-
ence held in Lausanne. A presentation on
pedagogy of the AIR Project was conducted
at the 2013 Digital Humanities Conference,
along with a presentation on a computer
game developed to combat discrimination
developed using the ICE Labs own Gestural
Narrative Interaction Engine (GeNIE)
itself an outcome of a National Endowment
for the Humanities: Digital Humanities
Start-Up Grant, Gesture, Rhetoric, and
Digital Storytelling.
icelab.mit.edu
34 in medias res
The MIT Mobile Experience Lab, directed
by Federico Casalegno, now Associate
Professor of the Practice, seeks to improve
peoples lives through the careful design of
new social spaces and communities. This past
year, MEL designed and tested applications
on wearable computing: using Google Glass
as the main device, researchers explored how
this new technology can provide a diferent
experience both in the urban environment
and inside museums. MEL also completed
a research project called Personal Financial
Management. Sponsored by the Italian bank
UBI, MEL researchers designed and imple-
mented a new media system that helps users
to plan, learn, and manage their fnances.
MEL organized two design workshops:
one on the theme of rethinking energy
system and media, in Moscow, within the
MIT Skoltech Initiative; the other with the
Faculdade de Cincias e Tecnologia Uni-
versidade Nova de Lisboa, promoted by the
U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, researching how
to design innovative media experience with
Google Glass for the food industry.
A fall 2013 class, Designing Interactions,
sponsored by the Massachusetts Bay Trans-
portation Authority, explored how new
media technologies can be used to connect
public transit passengers to MBTA station
services. New experiences were designed to
redefne the ridership experience and make
it more pleasant, enjoyable, and produc-
tive. Finally, in collaboration with Marriott
Hotels, MEL deployed Six Degrees, a
prototype social network designed for the
hotel lobby. Through Six Degrees, guests
can discover how they are connected to one
another, and can socialize with one another
in events planned by Marriott. The platform
highlights the connections that already exist
between guests, while encouraging new con-
nections to form. The system is composed by
an ecosystem of media: a mobile app, a visu-
alization screen, and an interactive table.
mobile.mit.edu
In its second year, the Open Documentary
Lab continued its goal of fostering innova-
tion and critical dialogue around interac-
tive and participatory documentary. William
Uricchio taught the OpenDocLab fagship
course, New Documentary Techniques and
Technologies, during the spring semester.
With support from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the lab created and launched
Docubase, at docubase.mit.edu, a curated,
interactive database of the people, projects,
and tools transforming documentary in the
digital age.
The lab inaugurated a competitive fel-
lowship program comprised of distinguished
artists, human rights activists, and journalists
interested in experimenting with documen-
tary techniques and technologies to further
their goals. Fellow Karim Ben Khelifa in-
corporated cutting edge research in neu-
roscience and artifcial intelligence from
MIT faculty to create his installation-based
project, The Enemy. The Enemy takes us
on an extraordinary odyssey through some
of the most contested conficts of the world
to acknowledge peoples humanity. Fellow
Andrew Lowenthal led his research on best
practices for measuring the social impact of
human rights video. To learn more about our
fellows, go to http://opendoclab.mit.edu/
category/2014-2015-fellows.
In partnership with the MIT Game Lab,
ODL hosted the National Film Board of
Canada and facilitated a one-week paper
prototyping workshop. The OpenDocLab
continued to host public events through-
out the year intended to inform and inspire
faculty, students, researchers, and the local
Cambridge and Boston community. Guest
speakers included Emerson Professor Paul
Turano, who presented his transmedia
project, Wander, Wonder, Wilderness, a flm,
smart phone app, and interactive website
exploring urban wilds.
opendoclab.mit.edu
Trope Tank researchers presented a raft of
research at the 2014 Electronic Literature Or-
ganization conference and the preceding In-
telligent Narrative Technologies 7 workshop
in Milwaukee in June. Nick Montfort and
graduate student Erik Stayton presented
their paper (written with Andrew Campana)
Expressing the Narrators Expectations,
documenting advances in the Slant project.
Piotr Marecki presented The Formation of
the Field of Electronic Literature in Poland;
Stayton presented his collaboration with
Montfort, Computational Editions, Ports,
and Remakes of First Screening and Karateka;
and Montfort presented New Novel
Machines: Nanowatt and World Clock. The
Electronic Literature Organization Media
Arts show will included The Postulate
to Hyperdescribe the World by Marecki
and Aleksandra Maecka and Round by
Montfort. There were also presentations by
Trope Tank alumnae Natalia Fedorova and
Clara Fernndez-Vara, 04.
Fernndez-Vara, now on the faculty of
the Game Center at NYU, has a new book,
Introduction to Game Analysis, partly written
during her time at the Trope Tank. Mont-
forts book of programs and poems, #!, was
also published this summer.
The frst conversation in the new Render-
ings project, which focuses on translating
highly computational and otherwise unusual
literature into English, took place in July.
Award-winning literary translator and three-
time U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky joined
us for the meeting.
The Trope Tank continues to host monthly
meetings of the Peoples Republic of Inter-
active Fiction (the local IF club), to support
teaching and research discussions using the
labs material resources, and to facilitate
creative computing in other ways.
trope-tank.mit.edu
E V E NT S
fall 2014 35
Sep 11 5pm | E14-633
Social Infuence and The Dynamics of Online
Reputation
MIT Sloans Sinan Aral will argue that a new science of online
identity could help guide our business, platform design, and social
policy decisions in light of the rising importance of online reputation
and social infuence.
Sep 18 5pm | E14-633
Media Impact Assessment and Beyond:
Thoughts on the Treacherous Task of Quantifying
Journalistic Performance
Philip Napoli of Rutgers examines ongoing researchin this age of
funded initiativesthat seeks to defne and assess the feld of media
impact assessment.
Sep 25 5pm | E14-633 | Co-sponsored by MIT Literature
By Design: Or, What Remote Controls Can Teach Us
about the Nature of Control
Georgetowns Caetlin Benson-Allott on how the technical and design
evolution of remote controls reveal how the seemingly most inconse-
quential of media devices have shaped the way users cohabit with mass
media, consumer electronics, and each other.
Oct 2 5pm | E14-633
Resisting Datas Tyranny with Obfuscation
NYU Media, Culture, and Communication professor Helen Nissen-
baum will argue obfuscation is a compelling weapon-of-the-weak,
which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges
countered and mitigated.
Oct 9 5pm | 66-110 | Communications Forum
Teens and Media
dana boyd and Marah Gubar on young people as producers and
consumers of media content.
Oct 16 5pm | E14-633
Welcome Back, to the Humanities as Civic
Engagement
Doris Sommers new book revives the collaboration between aesthetic
philosophy and democratic development. From the top and from
below, creative projects and their interpretation fuel positive change
and renew humanists opportunities to make civic contributions.
Oct 23 5pm | E14-633
CMS Alumni Panel
Rekha Murthy, 05, Director of Projects and Partnerships at Public
Radio Exchange. Parmesh Shahani, 05, Head of Godrej India
Culture Lab. Sam Ford, 07, Director of Audience Engagement at
Peppercomm.
Oct 30 7pm | 4-231 | Communications Forum
Ultimate Truths: Comparing Science and the
Humanities
In this Communications Forum special event James Carroll, Alan
Lightman, Rebecca Goldstein, and Robert Weinberg will explore
the diferences and similarities in the kinds of knowledge available
through inquiry in the science and humanities, and the ways that
knowledge is obtained.
Nov 6 5pm | E14-633
Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia
Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement
A book release party for Sasha Costanza-Chocks new book, out
from MIT Press. The bookabout media, community organizing,
and immigrant rightsreveals that the revolution will be tweeted,
but tweets alone will not the revolution make.
Nov 13 5pm | E14-633
Paul Levitz
Paul Levitz is a comic fan (The Comic Reader), editor (Batman, among
many titles), writer (Legion of Super-Heroes, including two New
York Times bestsellers), executive (30 years at DC, ending as President
& Publisher), historian (75 Years of DC Comics: The Art Of Modern
Myth-Making (Taschen, 2010)) and educator (including the American
Graphic Novel at Columbia). He won two consecutive annual Comic
Art Fan Awards for Best Fanzine, received Comic-con Internationals
Inkpot Award, the prestigious Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award,
and the Comics Industry Appreciation Award from ComicsPro. He
is currently working on a book on Will Eisner and the birth of the
graphic novel for Abrams Comic Arts. Levitz also serves on the board
of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Nov 20 5pm | 4-231
Town Meeting
A closed event for the CMS/W community.
Dec 4 5pm | 66-110 | Communications Forum
Making Computing Strange: Cultural Analytics and
Phantasmal Media
Lev Manovich, the author of the seminal The Language of New Media,
MITs Fox Harrell, who recently published Phantasmal Media: An
Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, and MITs Nick
Montfort will examine the ways in which computational models can
be used in cultural contexts for everything from analyzing media to
imagining new ways to represent ourselves.
A current schedule, including conferences and special events, is available at
cmsw.mit.edu/events.
Miss an event? Catch up at cmsw.mit.edu/podcasts.
Fall 2014 Talks
MIT Comparative Media Studies | Writing
Building 14E, Room 303 & Building E15, Room 331
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 02139
MIT STUDENTS
cmsw.mit.edu/education
PROSPECTIVE GRAD
STUDENTS
cmsw.mit.edu/apply
DONORS & FOUNDATIONS
Contact Jill Janows
Grants Developer and Administrator
jjanows@mit.edu
VISITING SCHOLARS
cmsw.mit.edu/scholars
Whether youre looking to major, join us as a graduate student, fnd partners for your own research,
or support our work with a donation or sponsorship, our staf is ready to help

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