Hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for. Panelists include: Andres Lombana-Bermudez, ’08, a researcher and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, youth, and learning. Andres holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from UT-Austin, an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Literature f...
Nov 18, 2016•1 hr 7 min
In 2005, a little-known author was invited on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his book, an almanac chronicling fake histories ranging from the story behind Theodore Roosevelt’s fictional lobster canal to the disappearing 51st US state Hohoq. Since then, humorist John Hodgman has parlayed his wit into New York Times best-selling books, a Daily Show correspondent position, a Netflix stand-up special, and his own podcast. Hodgman brings his razor-sharp wit to MIT for a moderated discussi...
Nov 16, 2016•2 hr 15 min
The 2016 presidential election has been historic for the ways that social media has been used to drive the news agenda and rally supporters to the cause. Jennifer Stromer-Galley describes the large scale collection and machine learning techniques she and her team have used for the Illuminating 2016 project to study the ways the presidential candidates and the public have used social media. She provides some of the major trends they’ve seen this election cycle and talk about why this matters for ...
Nov 04, 2016•1 hr 11 min
Even though people age nine through twelve have always been with us, the same cannot be said for the category “tween.” When did this category emerge and why? How are “tweens” represented in popular culture, including music, television, and YA literature? And how does this relatively new age category intersect with–or elide–issues pertaining to race, class, and gender identity? Speakers: Tyler Bickford is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is completing two book...
Oct 24, 2016•1 hr 57 min
International best-selling author and science historian James Gleick discusses his career, the state of science journalism, and his newest book Time Travel: A History, which delves into the evolution of time travel in literature and science and the thin line between pulp fiction and modern physics. This Communications Forum event was moderated by author and physicist Alan Lightman, the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. Speakers James Gleick...
Oct 18, 2016•1 hr 24 min
How has mobile media changed the ways that nomadic communities receive and send information, engage state actors, and participate in international deliberations? Allison Hahn examines the ways that two pastoral-nomadic communities, Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and Mongolians of Mongolia and China, are utilizing new media and social media platforms to challenge power hierarchies and deliberative norms. Many governmental policy makers presume that this technological adaptation indicates a determin...
Oct 07, 2016•1 hr 15 min
As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT, Douglas O’Reagan will study how the digital humanities can best aid the specific strengths, mission, and broader community around MIT. In this talk, O’Reagan updates the audience on his efforts and invite suggestions and ideas concerning the future of digital humanities at MIT. O’Reagan completed his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. His dissertation was a comparative history of the Allied powers’ atte...
Sep 30, 2016•1 hr 7 min
The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) is a transmedia exploration of the traumatic effects of the loss of the steel industry in Southeast Chicago, the impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States more broadly, and how Americans talk – and fail to talk – about social class. The project includes an award-winning book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) authored by Christine Walley, as ...
Sep 24, 2016•1 hr 18 min
The present age is one of growing faith in machinic knowledge. From state surveillance to self-tracking technologies, we find lofty promises about the power of “raw” data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making. But new claims to knowledge invariably entail a redistribution of uncertainty, of those in the know and those left ignorant, of proofs “good enough” and “negligible” risks. Today, the U.S. government struggles to “prove” the efficacy of its own surveillance programs. The calcul...
Sep 19, 2016•1 hr 43 min
CMS/W alum Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, ’07) has spent most of the last decade exploring points of connection and contention between the media and marketing industries and media studies. Starting last year, that work has taken him to Univision’s Fusion Media Group (a portfolio of media companies which includes Fusion, Univision Digital, Univision Music, The Root, Flama, The Onion, A.V. Club, Clickhole, Starwipe, and El Rey), leading a team that has been building the conglomerate’s approach to experiment...
Sep 09, 2016•1 hr 48 min
(This is obviously better enjoyed as a video! Watch this talk and the accompanying visuals at http://cmsw.mit.edu/video-virtual-reality-meets-documentary) +++++++++++ The goal of this panel is to talk with some of the leading creators in the VR space and better understand VR’s potentials and implications for documentary and journalism. This will help us to disambiguate some of the major strands of VR and in so doing consider the inherent tensions in VR between documentation and simulation, the c...
May 04, 2016•1 hr 42 min
Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles ...
May 03, 2016•1 hr 20 min
The algorithmic infrastructures of the internet are made by a weird cast of characters: rock stars, gurus, ninjas, wizards, alchemists, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors can all be found sitting at computers in otherwise unremarkable offices, typing. These job titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries. They mark jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. But is that all they do? In this...
Apr 20, 2016•1 hr 26 min
“Mooning Texas” – an adventure story involving social energy + art + Emile Durkheim’s “take” on Mauss + Hubert’s “take” on mana + the creativity of gossip. Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, was dubbed by the New York Times as “Anthropology’s Alternative Radical.” Taussig has been doing fieldwork since 1969. He has written on the commercialization of peasant agriculture; slavery; hunger; the working of commodity fetishism; colonialism on “shamanism” and folk heali...
Apr 14, 2016•1 hr 22 min
Last December, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. In March, he added that “I think Islam hates us.” MIT alumna and Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley join engineering masters student Abubakar Abid to explore how this type of hateful, discriminatory rhetoric influences public opinion, discuss its impact on the daily lives of Muslim-Americans, and examine strategies for combating it. Layle Shaikley is an MIT alum, co-fou...
Apr 12, 2016•1 hr 13 min
Although the popular press primarily uses the negatively connoted phrase “binge-watching,” Lisa Glebatis Perks employs the label “media marathoning” to describe viewers’ rapid engagement with a story world. Rather than positioning these media experiences as mindless indulgences, the phrase media marathoning intimates engrossment, effort, and purpose. These media engagement efforts can be rewarded with pleasurable experiences, but they can also lead to feelings of disappointment. Perks draws from...
Apr 04, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin discusses why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form. Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My...
Mar 13, 2016•1 hr 47 min
What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn. David Thorburn...
Mar 03, 2016•1 hr 44 min
Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative...
Feb 27, 2016•1 hr 18 min
Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ resp...
Feb 24, 2016•1 hr 30 min
Traditional media outlets have been facing budget cuts and layoffs for years, with specialized reporters often among the first to go. And yet last year, Boston Globe Media Partners made a significant investment in launching STAT, a new publication that focuses on health, medicine and scientific discovery. STAT's leadership and reporting team will discuss the publication’s progress and how the field of science journalism is changing. Speakers Rick Berke is the executive editor of STAT and former ...
Feb 19, 2016•1 hr 41 min
Beginning in the late 1990s, the technology and even mainstream press opined extensively on the coming death of television. A decade later—and a time that found television still very much alive—that theme evolved to instead pronounce the coming death of cable. Rather than demise, the emergence of broadband-distributed television has both reinvented the medium and revealed how extensively our expectations and understandings of television are based not on the medium of television but on logics dev...
Feb 09, 2016•1 hr 20 min
John Jennings is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York. He is the co-author of the graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture, Vol. 1 and the art collection Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture (both with Damian Duffy). Jennings is also the co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book F...
Feb 04, 2016•1 hr 18 min
Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, discusses his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit. The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and t...
Jan 24, 2016•57 min
"Each spring, the CMS side of CMSW catapults ten more master’s program graduates into the world. And each fall, we invite a bunch back to talk with prospectives. Of the five grads we feature in this podcast, four stayed close. In fact two helped start research groups in our department. And another two skipped to other parts of campus. One joined a Ph.D. program a few buildings down, and another kicked off the Media Lab’s new digital currency initiative. Margaret Weigel, '02 and one of our earlie...
Jan 12, 2016•16 min
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, we hosted five alums of our master's degree program in Comparative Media Studies. They discussed their lives from MIT to their careers today. Here's who we featured: Margaret Weigel, ’02, who works in digital education: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3427777 Dan Roy, ’07, widely known for his games for learning projects: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2512953 Ilya Vedrashko, ’06, who does big data-driven consumer...
Nov 21, 2015•1 hr 13 min
Our information sessions bring prospective master's students to campus to meet our faculty and students, who discuss the program, its research, what it's like to apply, and the experience of studying at MIT for two years. The 2015 infosession was led by graduate program director Prof. Heather Hendershot and program administrator Shannon Larkin, and it featured research group directors like Ethan Zuckerman of the Center for Civic Media and Sarah Wolozin of the Open Documentary Lab; several curren...
Nov 17, 2015•1 hr 58 min
Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet TV shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral curve to give us our first female president(s). What messages about women and power do these fictional representations of female politicians send? What connections (if any) can we draw between representation and reality? What challenges do real-life women politicians face as they represent themselves to voters and to the press? Mary Anne Marsh is a Boston-based political c...
Nov 11, 2015•1 hr 48 min
MIT professor of science writing Tom Levenson discusses his new book, The Hunt for Vulcan…And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe. For decades, scientists discovered, dismissed, and rediscovered a hidden planet — Vulcan — thought to be responsible for the wobble in Mercury’s orbit. But in war-torn Berlin, in 1915, Albert Einstein proposed that gravity wasn’t as Newton saw it but was space itself, warped: what became his general theory of rel...
Nov 05, 2015•1 hr 24 min
Net Vitality is a new analytic approach to examine ways to sustain long-term Internet vibrancy, both in the United States and around the world, and helps inform future government policies that impact the deployment and adoption of broadband technologies. Unlike other comparative studies that rank countries quantitatively based on a simplistic assessment of broadband speeds, Stuart N. Brotman’s Net Vitality Index, released earlier this year, also measures countries qualitatively to determine how ...
Nov 03, 2015•1 hr 18 min
