Using the tools of online textual annotation -- the platform Rap Genius, its spinoff site Poetry Genius, or MIT's own Annotation Studio -- readers can collaborate on annotating or interpreting a work, make their annotations public, and respond to interpretations by others. We will be joined by creators, facilitators, and users of these sites to discuss how online annotation is changing practices of reading, enriching practices of teaching and learning, and making newly public a previously privat...
Apr 29, 2014•1 hr 58 min
The standardization of color television in the US during the postwar era was, in large part, discussed and determined in relation to historical developments in color theory (philosophical, psychological, and physical), colorimetry, color design and industry, psychophysics, psychology and, of course, what had already been established industrially, culturally, and technically for monochrome television. In this presentation, Susan Murray explores how these various threads of scientific, aesthetic, ...
Apr 14, 2014•1 hr 29 min
Hanya Yanagihara’s first book, the widely celebrated The People In The Trees, is loosely based on the life and work of Nobel Prize-winner physician and researcher D. Carleton Gajdusek. She joins author and physicist Alan Lightman, who was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities, to discuss the unique challenges of respecting the exacting standards of science in fictional texts. Forum Co-Director Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus, moderat...
Apr 06, 2014•1 hr 48 min
Journalist and author Barry Werth has been writing about the business and practice of the pharmaceutical industry for more than two decades. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his 1995 book on Vertex Pharmaceuticals, was named one the “75 Smartest Books We Know” by Fortune. His sixth and most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big Pharma, revisits Vertex, offering unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to a company that that went from cash-starved startup to a triumph of American bio-tech ...
Mar 19, 2014•1 hr 33 min
Against inexorable machinations of data surveillance, analysis, and profiling, data obfuscation holds promise of relief. Whether it can withstand countervailing analytics is an intriguing question; whether it is unethical, illegitimate, or, at best, ungenerous cuts close to the bone. Yet, as NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum will argue in this talk, obfuscation is a compelling “weapon-of-the-weak,” which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges countered and mitigated. Helen Nissenba...
Mar 08, 2014•1 hr 26 min
Legendary former MIT professor and housemaster Henry Jenkins, now the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, returns to the Forum for a conversation about his time at the Institute and the founding of CMS as well as his path-breaking scholarship on contemporary media. Forum Director David Thorburn, Jenkins’ longtime friend and colleague, will moderate the discussion. Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communi...
Mar 08, 2014•1 hr 58 min
We live in the era of computation and play. Everywhere we look, there is a computer, translating the world around us into patterns for production of labor or consumption of entertainment. And now more than ever, we play everywhere: our work should be playful, as it should be our dieting, our love life, and even our leisure. We play as much as we can, in this world of computers. In this talk Sicart will look at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computer...
Feb 12, 2014•1 hr 38 min
Courtesy of The New York Public Library. www.nypl.org Re-use is subject to the New York Public Library's non-commercial use permissions: http://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/legal-notices/website-terms-and-conditions Original event and recordings: http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/toni-morrison-junot-d%C3%ADaz
Dec 13, 2013•1 hr 32 min
Some have called long-form journalism an endangered species. But ground-breaking articles requiring months of research and writing continue to appear. Why is such work important? How is it created? James Fallows and Corby Kummer of The Atlantic chart the journey of a major feature story from conception to publication and speculate about the future of long-form writing in the digital age.
Dec 06, 2013•1 hr 57 min
MIT Students: Are you curious about how to get a job in the game industry as an MIT graduate? What kind of jobs can MIT prepare you for? What should you expect from your first job? The MIT Game Lab has invited a number of local MIT alumni in the game industry to talk about their experiences entering the industry. Panelists include: Ethan Fenn Fire Hose Games Ethan graduated in 2004 with a double major in Courses 18 and 21M. Soon after graduating he joined the team at Harmonix, where he worked as...
Dec 03, 2013•1 hr 38 min
Mary Flanagan pushes the boundaries of medium and genre across writing, visual arts, and design to innovate in these fields with a critical play centered approach. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her collection of over 20 major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited...
Nov 20, 2013•1 hr 37 min
Sonia Livingstone is a full professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is seconded to Microsoft Social Research for fall 2013 as well as being a faculty fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her talk is based on her current book project, “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age”, based on her ethnographic research with the MacArthur Foundation-funded Connected Learning Research Network. With a focus on...
Nov 11, 2013•1 hr 42 min
The culture of fighting games — digital games of competitive martial arts-style combat—is one of the most interesting and contentious of gamer subcultures. This talk examines the influences and norms of that community, including its spiritual and physical roots in the arcade, common gameplay practices, and how issues of ethnicity and gender collide with gamer identity in the ‘FGC’. Todd Harper is a researcher at the MIT Game Lab with a background in mass communication and cultural studies. His c...
Oct 29, 2013•1 hr 16 min
New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco will consider the critical responses to the original Planet of the Apes films, focusing in particular on the interpretation of the films as critiques of American race relations during the 1960′s and ’70′s. She will also discuss her interest in exploring the strategies used in early sci-fi cinema, the ways that films such as Planet of the Apes employed speculative fiction to generate social critique. Moderated by Professor of Writing J...
Oct 23, 2013•1 hr 46 min
Social media-fueled protests in many countries have surprised observers with their seemingly spontaneous, combustible power. Yet, many have fizzled out without having a strong impact on policy at the electoral and legislative levels. In this talk, Tufekci will discuss some features of such protests that may be leading to this boom and bust cycle drawing upon primary research in Gezi protests in Turkey as well as “Arab Spring”, Occupy and M15 movements. Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at...
Oct 17, 2013•1 hr 52 min
How is the generation born in the digital age different from its analog ancestors? Are those born digital likely to have different notions of privacy, community, identity itself? How do educators approach this generation to help prepare them for scholarship and for citizenship? Speakers: John Palfrey, Head of School at Phillips Academy and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives; and Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media, a collaboration be...
Oct 10, 2013•2 hr 1 min
Liveblog text: http://cmsw.mit.edu/liveblog-ethan-zuckerman-digital-cosmopolitanism-cognitive-diversity/ New media technologies have sharply increased the number of people who are able to create and disseminate content. But they may not be leading to a more diverse media environment, as tools that allow us to tailor what content we see and what we ignore are becoming more powerful and more personal. The framework of cosmopolitanism suggests a way through this challenge – by examining perspective...
Sep 27, 2013•1 hr 55 min
When a big news story breaks, Twitter goes crazy. Keepr tries to make sense of these periodic bursts by implementing natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms to surface topics, eyewitnesses, and amplifiers. A live demo will be followed by a discussion of the capabilities and limitations of computational newsgathering, along with reports of how it is being used in newsrooms. Hong Qu is a digital toolmaker. He has led teams at YouTube and Upworthy. He enjoys building soci...
Sep 18, 2013•1 hr 41 min
From http://rosalindwilliams.com/2013/09/introduction-a-podcast-conversation/ Annotations by Rosalind Williams.
Sep 15, 2013•39 min
What's In a Slash? by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sep 11, 2013•1 min
A generation of great journalists cut their teeth at alt-weeklies, and The Boston Phoenix produced some of the best of them. When the Phoenix announced it was closing last March, the city lost a powerful cultural force and a vibrant source of information. We discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston. Panelists are author and essayist Anita Diamant, who started out answering the editor’s phone in the mid-1970s; Charles Pierce of Esquire and NPR, and a staff wr...
Sep 11, 2013•1 hr 43 min
Roderick Coover, Temple University Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck Molly Sauter, MIT Dan Whaley, hypothes.is Moderator: James Paradis, MIT
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 21 min
Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside and at the margins of consensus discourse. Counterpublics can be spaces of political opposition - sites of resistance, civil disobedience, disruption - or spaces of play and self-fashioning, enabling the emergence of alt-, sub-, and fan cultures and alternative forms of community and identity. How is digital technology - and social media in particul...
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 27 min
It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations and have created powerful new instruments to monitor individual behavior. Do the ramifying systems for observing and recording our routine activities fundamentally threaten our privacy and freedom, as many have argued? In an era of dating mining and smart algorithms, is our awareness that we are being monitored, converted to bits and distributed a...
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 24 min
Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users of social media) are not respecting the traditional boundaries of privacy and are choosing to share "too much information." Do these people's technical skills outstrip their social skills? Are they unaware of how information can persist and potentially damage their reputation? Or are the stern adults who question this behavior clinging to an outmod...
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 37 min
Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of "big data" in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of "big data". Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of "big data". She argues for attending to different di...
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 35 min
In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologie...
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 53 min
The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver will discuss his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps the most influential political blog in the world -- and the ways in which statistics are changing the face of journalism in a conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 57 min
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic; author of a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, about his father's influence during his childhood in Baltimore; and, this year, an MLK Scholar at MIT. We talked about his impressions of MIT students and his growth as a writer, and we touched upon his research of the Civil War, the setting for an upcoming book.
Jun 21, 2013•16 min
The fate of narrative. What is happening to our culture’s stories and story-tellers? What has been the impact, what is the future import of the proliferation of audiences, creators and of ways to communicate on unstable platforms? Public spheres. How are new technologies transforming our public discourse? Are newspapers dead or merely reinventing themselves digitally? What skills will be essential for journalists of the digital age? Who will be the journalists of the digital age? What hybrid for...
Jun 12, 2013•2 hr 15 min
