MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
406 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 65 ratingsFeaturing a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.
You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.
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Episodes
Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory”
April 09, 2023 00:00 - 1 hour - 108 MBHow and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did informatic theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and new-fangled cultural theories ascendant at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory,” and primary sources from the MIT archives, this talk explores how far-flung technocratic exercises i...
Francesca Bolla Tripodi, “The Propagandists’ Playbook”
February 28, 2023 00:00 - 52 minutes - 72.3 MBThe Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2018 Virginia gubernatorial race-including the author’s firsthand experience of the ...
Lupe Fiasco presents “Rap Theory & Practice: an Introduction”
December 05, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 125 MBAn exploration into the underlying fundamental functions, structures, and principles of rap. Open to the public, the talk was hosted at MIT on November 30, 2022. Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, relea...
Resilient Witnessing In The Face Of Human Rights Abuses, Distrust, And Deepfakes
October 06, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 58.4 MBSam Gregory is Director of Programs, Strategy & Innovation at WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology to protect human rights; studies relationship between emergent technologies, disinformation, media manipulation, & authoritarianism.
The Long & Ambiguous (pre)history Of Audiovisual In The Black Experience
October 06, 2022 00:00 - 57 minutes - 53.4 MBFull title: “Between freedom & oppression: The long & ambiguous (pre)history of audiovisual in the Black experience” Featuring Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Ekene Mekwunye, Jepchumba, and Russel Hlongwane. Chakanetsa Mavhunga is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mavhunga explores international history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Africa. Ekene Mekwunye is adjunct faculty at t...
The Forensic Citizen Learning From The Past, Preparing For The Future
October 06, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 61.7 MBWilliam Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to experiment with new documentary.
The Whole World Is Watching How 1968 Helps Us Frame The Present
October 06, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 65.3 MBProfessor Heather Hendershot's opening plenary from the "Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice" conference, with initial remarks by Dean Agustín Rayo and Tracie Jones, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She studies television news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. Her 2022 book is "When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America", available from the Univ...
Moving Images In Absentia Courtroom Looking In The Age Of Hyper - Mediation
October 05, 2022 00:00 - 57 minutes - 53.1 MBKelli Moore is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who examines how media and technology produce legal and political knowledge to inform public debates on visual literacy, race, and other issues.
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, “Seeing Silicon Valley”
May 05, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBVideo also available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-seeing-silicon-valley-mary-beth-meehan-fred-turner. Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, a collaborative exploration of the culture of Silicon Valley — not the culture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that we see in the press, but the lives of the men and women who inhabit ...
Charles North - The William Corbett Poetry Series 01
April 21, 2022 00:00 - 38 minutes - 52.2 MBCharles North has published twelve books of poems, three books of critical prose, and collaborations with artists and other poets. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet/painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. His New and Selected Poems What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and he has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, and a Poets Foundation Award. He lives with hi...
Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech
April 15, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBIn her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of...
Oscar Winberg, "Archie Bunker Goes to Washington"
April 11, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 117 MBThis talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s, fictive characters, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of All in the Family but also Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) of MAS*H and Mary Richards (played...
Jens Pohlmann, "Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere"
April 01, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 73.6 MBIn this talk, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States in different media environments (IT-blogs, newspapers, social media). Ultimately, h...
“Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air”, Six Muslim Women in STEM
March 31, 2022 00:00 - 42 minutes - 39.8 MBThese six poets met as undergrads at MIT, brought together by the many things they shared: the challenges of being women in STEM, their lifelong pursuits of becoming better Muslims, and the exhaustion of drinking from the academic firehose. Through sharing their poetry, they want to foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for those who don’t often see someone like them within literary spaces. The poems they share at this reading focus on family, identity, and homeland—where they come from and h...
Racquel Gates, “Reintroducing Melvin Van Peebles”
March 18, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBIn this talk, Racquel Gates presents her experience working as consulting producer on the Criterion release of Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films. A legendary filmmaker whose unique personality is just as well-known as his body of work, Van Peebles made an indelible impact on both Black film and independent cinema. How, then, to present new insights on Van Peebles in a way that built on viewers’ existing familiarity with the filmmaker and his work while avoiding cliches and hagiography? In ...
Katherine Jewell, "Party City: WMBR, Institutional Change, and Democratic Media"
March 11, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBCollege radio has long been known as the weird, wacky signals on the left of the FM dial offering music that would never be mainstream. But this wasn’t always the case—and moreover, even at stations exemplifying musical adventurousness and the community potential of college signals, institutional constraints loomed. In this talk, Katherine Jewell delves into the history of WMBR at MIT from the 1960s to the 1980s to explore how this station, with a license held by an independent non-profit cor...
David Thorburn: William Corbett Poetry Series
March 03, 2022 00:00 - 44 minutes - 64.1 MBDavid Thorburn has been a teacher of literature for 57 years, 46 of them at MIT where he is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media and Director Emeritus of the MIT Communications Forum. Generations of MIT undergraduates have taken his lecture course, “The Film Experience,” which now reaches an international audience on YouTube. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in an old farmhouse in Randolph, New Jersey. He’s written a book on Joseph Conrad and many essays and reviews on literature...
Jorge Caraballo, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
February 18, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 115 MBPodcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas, tell compelling stories, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo (’22 Harvard Nieman Fellow) will draw from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –Latin America’s most popular documentary podcast– and will highlight different ways in which storyte...
Eric Freedman, "Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans"
February 11, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 110 MBVideo game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film, television, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization, and they signal quite forcefully the colonizing influence of programming. Video game engines are powe...
Lynn Nottage’s "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" and the Making of Black Women’s Film History
February 04, 2022 17:55 - 1 hour - 109 MBLynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A play about Black women’s cinematic representation and social erasure, Nottage’s fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot...
Uplifting Us: Design Opportunities in Centering Racialized Experiences in Games
December 10, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 99.2 MBTranscript and video available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-alexandra-to-design-opportunities-centering-racialized-experiences-game. People of color have always been present in games as designers, developers, players, and critics. As Kishonna Gray further expounds, gaming is a site for “resistance, activism, and mobilization among marginalized users.” In this talk Alexandra To describes some of the game design opportunities present in centering the experiences of people of color from the beg...
Craig Robertson, “The Filing Cabinet and the Gendering of Information Work”
November 18, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBIn this talk, Craig Robertson provides a brief overview of the some of the themes of his recent book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota, 2021). He argues the emergence of the filing cabinet illustrates an important moment in the genealogy of the ascendance of modern information. He highlights a moment when information became a label for an instrumental form of knowledge, as information is connected to gendered ideas of efficiency and labor. Storing loose sheets ...
Graphic Materiality, Trauma, and Expressionist Comics: Artist’s Talk With Leela Corman
November 04, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBGraphic novel creator Leela Corman talk's and Q&A about her graphic novels and short comics on the topics of generational and personal trauma, New York City history, Polish-Jewish life, and amateur women’s wrestling. Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012) and the short comics collection We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016). She is currently at work on the graphic novel Victory Parade, a story about ...
Edward Schiappa, "The Transgender Exigency: The Role of Media Representation"
October 29, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBThis presentation defines the phrase “transgender exigency” as a situation marked by an urgent need; in this case, the need to address the political and definitional challenges evinced by the need for transgender rights. The presentation provides evidence for substantial prejudice against transgender people, as well as the dramatic increase in transgender visibility and rights in the 2010s. The collision of prejudice and visibility has led to a series of controversies that involve “regulatory...
Memorial Colloquium for Professor Jing Wang
October 21, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 87.1 MBVideo and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-memorial-colloquium-in-honor-of-jing-wang ====== Professor Jing Wang — a beloved longtime colleague, vocal supporter of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and mentor to countless students and fellow faculty — passed away at age 71 this past July. At this Colloquium, we publicly honor her life and work, featuring brief talks by some of those who knew her best. They include: Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civ...
Nick Thurston, "Document Practices: The Art of Propagating Access"
October 14, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 75 MBThis talk introduces arguments and examples from Nick Thurston’s current book project, Document Practices, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental videos, and ideas about “the document” which haunt the sociology of literature as much as documentary arts practice, Nick sketches out the project’s starting points and some of its key debates. Nick Thurston is...
Educated Viewers: Civic Spectatorship, Media Literacy, and American Schools
September 30, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 76.6 MBIn this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful instruction in media viewing and collective discussion. Cain will consider how and why these reform...
Sulafa Zidani, “Messy on the Inside: Internet Memes as Mapping Tools of Everyday Life”
September 22, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBWith the proliferation of social media, internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of everyday communication. However, the power of memes cannot be fully understood without considering their role in the complex relationship between technology, space, and politics. This talk will conceptualize memes as cultural mapping tools—tools that chart out the cultural hierarchies in relation to spatial and political relations for their makers and users. Focusing on memes made by Palestinians in mixed ...
Sandra Rodriguez, "Creating and Interacting with Virtual Entities"
May 19, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 84.3 MBVideo and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-sandra-rodriguez-creating-interacting-virtual-entities-vr-ai-human-experiences/ Drawing from recent creative experiences Chomsky vs Chomsky (Sundance 2021) and Future Rites (Creative XR, UK-Can Immersive Exchange, Philharmonia, IDFA DocLab Forum), Director Sandra Rodriguez (Canada) explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and human creativity meet at a crucial junction, to create compelling virtual worlds and characters that invite interaction...
Jonathan Sterne, "Diminished Vocalities: On Prostheses and Abilities"
April 24, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 119 MBVideo and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-jonathan-sterne-diminished-vocalities-on-prostheses-and-abilities/ In this talk, Jonathan Sterne provides a brief overview of some of the themes of his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, December 2021) and a deeper dive into the approach to the voice he develops therein. Impairments are usually understood as the physical or biological substrates of culturally produced disabilities, but in the book, St...
Promotional Narratives, Science Fiction, and the Case for Mars Colonization
April 06, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 80.8 MBVideo and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-james-wynn-promotional-narratives-mars-colonization. Given the enormous impact that colonialism has had, and continues to have, in the United States, scholars frequently look to our colonial past to understand the American present. This focus on the past, though valuable, has discouraged attention to newly emerging colonial enterprises. Perhaps one of the more conspicuous neo-colonial projects has been the push towards planting human colonies o...
Measuring Equity-Promoting Behaviors in Digital Teaching Simulations: A Topic Modeling Approach
March 12, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 77.6 MBDigital simulations offer learning opportunities to engage and reflect on systemic issues of racism and structural violence against communities of color. This talk examines how natural language processing tools can be used to better understand participants’ experiences within simulated environments focused on anti-racist teaching and identify changes in participants’ behavior over time. As K-12 schools increasingly reckon with our country’s long history of racist teaching practices, digital s...
Charisse L’Pree: "What is a Media Psychography? A 20-year Methodological Journey"
February 23, 2021 00:00 - 1 hour - 117 MBWhat is your relationship with media technologies? When we say things like “I love television,” “I hate the internet,” or “I can’t live without music, ” we implicitly answer this question without explicitly asking it. In her new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love (Routledge 2021), Dr. Charisse L’Pree (MIT SB ’03 CMS, SB ’03 Course 9) addresses the strange love that we have with communication technology – specifically over the past 150 years – and how these relati...
Reworking the Archive: The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project
December 04, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 89.8 MBWhat are some unexplored ways that online environments can help us rethink “the archive”? How might i-doc storytelling tools expand what an archive can be as well as public engagement with history itself? This presentation explores these questions through a demonstration of the online Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. The project is based on a collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum, a small volunteer-led museum in a diverse former steel mill region. The d...
#BlackInTheIvory: Academia’s Role in Institutional Racism
December 03, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 127 MBhttps://commforum.mit.edu/blackintheivory-academias-role-in-institutional-racism-96af14c37f5f For many Black scientists and researchers, working in academia means weathering systemic bias, micro-aggressions, and isolation. Dr. Shardé M. Davis, a communications researcher at the University of Connecticut, created #BlackInTheIvory this past summer as a platform for discussing the experiences of Black academics. Dr. Davis joins Dr. Mareena Robinson Snowden, a nuclear engineer at the Johns Hopki...
BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail
November 20, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBIn 2018, the United States enacted a “zero tolerance” policy which criminalized the act of seeking asylum. In June 2019, the inhumane conditions in detention camps across the border were revealed, and several weeks later the BORDERx project was established. BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is a comic anthology that examines the border crisis from a variety of points of view and narrative formats, featuring 70 contributors from all over the world. Proceeds from the project go to South Texa...
Beyond the Living Dead: Treasures from the George A. Romero Archive
November 12, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 86.7 MBWarning: contains spoilers and strong language. With his 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero helped to inaugurate a new era of both horror film and independent cinema, and introduced the world to the zombie as we know it today: re-animated corpses, stumbling towards the living in search of flesh, a ghoulish new kind of monster that has, in the subsequent half-century, become an essential part of the world’s cultural imaginary. From that moment on, Romero would become known ...
Patricia Saulis, “Two-Eyed Seeing in Environmental Justice and Media”
November 05, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 78 MBTwo-eyed seeing has been a contemporary concept by two Indigenous Mikmaq Elders in Cape Breton Canada. Through the use of Indigenous Oral Tradition, Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Dr. Murdena Marshall have participated in many recordings of their concept and teachings. Their appearances at conferences across Canada and the United States provided many venues to share their work. In this presentation, Patricia Saulis will feature clips of the Elders speaking and provide some perspective on how...
Lana Swartz, "New Money: How Payment Became Social Media"
October 29, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 117 MBLana Swartz, ’09, is joined by Aswin Punathambekar, ’03, to discuss Swartz’s new book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale University Press). New Money frames money as a media technology, one in major transition, and interrogates the consequences of those changes. Lana Swartz is an Assistant Professor in Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a 2009 graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies master’s program. Prior to New Money, she published Paid: Tales o...
Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media
October 22, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBMedia Distortions is about the power behind producing deviant media categories. It shows the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what it means to our broader understanding of, and engagement with media. The book synthesizes media theory, sound studies, STS, feminist technoscience, and software studies into a new composition to explore media power. Media Distortions argues that using sound as a conceptual framework is more useful due to its ability to cro...
Race and Representation of Syrian, Palestinian, and Norwegian Refugees in the News
October 16, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBThis talk will discuss contemporary US feelings towards Syrian and Palestinian refugee resettlement and expectations for “appropriate” refugee attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Laura Partain’s findings come out of a generalizable experimental analysis conducted with native-born US citizens in December of 2019. Putting these views into an historical context, she explains that what might immediately be perceived as unexpected experimental results are actually the logical evolution of the 20th...
Eric Gordon, "Towards a Meaningfully Inefficient Smart City"
October 07, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 117 MBMainstream “smart” city discourse offers a technocentric, efficiency-driven utopian fantasy that elides or exacerbates many urban problems of the past and present. Significant critical literature has emerged in recent years that highlights the importance of lived experience in smart cities, wherein values of equity, quality of life, and sustainability are prioritized. This literature has focused on models that center people in the design and implementation of smart city plans. Instead of maxi...
Jing Wang, "Walking Around Obstacles: Nonconfrontational Activists In Gray China"
October 02, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 42.1 MBIs there digital activism in China? What is it like to be an activist running a grassroots NGO in a land of censors? Is the state-public relationship in China antagonistic by default as our mainstream media would like us to believe? Are citizens of illiberal societies brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear? This talk challenges some of the binary assumptions we make about activism and China by bringing our attention to the gray zones in China where n...
Justin Reich, "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education"
September 25, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 103 MBIn the 2000s and 2010s, education technology evangelists promised that new learning media would transform schooling and education. Then, a pandemic shut down schools all over the world, and online learning face a pivotal moment, and left a global public mostly disappointed. Instead of adaptive tutors, artificial intelligence, MOOCs or other new technologies, most learners got digital worksheets on learning management systems and ZOOM lecturers. "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t ...
Kishonna Gray, "Exploring the Black Cultural Production of Gamers in Transmediated Culture"
September 16, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 121 MBWith this presentation, Dr. Kishonna Gray illustrates a framework for studying the intersectional development of technological artifacts and systems and their impact on Black cultural production and social processes. Using gaming as the glue that binds this project, she puts forth intersectional tech as a framework to make sense of the visual, textual, and oral engagements of marginalized users, exploring the complexities in which they create, produce, and sustain their practices. Gaming, as ...
Shawna Kidman: "The Infrastructure of the U.S. Comic Book Industry"
March 06, 2020 00:00 - 31 minutes - 43.1 MBThis talk discusses the history of the American comic book industry during the 20th century. This medium has dominated the film and television landscape in recent years, and has come to define contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business. Dr. Kidman argues that the best way to understand the immense influ...
Marina Bers, “Coding in Early Childhood: Storytelling or Puzzle Solving?”
February 28, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 113 MBComputer programming is an essential skill in the 21st century and new policies and frameworks are in place for preparing students for computer science. Today, the development of new interfaces and block-programming languages, facilitates the teaching of coding and computational thinking starting in kindergarten. However, as new programming languages that are developmentally appropriate emerge, it is not enough to copy models developed for older children, which mostly grew out of traditional ...
Desmond Upton Patton: “Contextual Analysis of Social Media”
February 21, 2020 00:00 - 51 minutes - 70.8 MBWhile natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. Columbia University’s Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach considers and critiqu...
Creative Agency: Making, Learning, and Playing towards Understanding Computational Content
February 14, 2020 00:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBPeople often learn complex computational content most easily and deeply when they have “creative agency” – the social network, ability, skills, resources, and support to collaboratively and playfully make creative computational content in feedback-rich environments. This talk will present a lens on how we can create environments where learners are supported in developing creative agency, and how we might assess or evaluate success. Matthew Berland covers his projects in museums, computer scie...
Can Journalists Save the Planet?
December 02, 2019 00:00 - 1 hour - 103 MBThe Amazon is burning. Coral reefs are dying. Glaciers are melting, and as Earth gets pushed to its brink, journalists who can translate the impact of climate change and hold the powerful accountable are more needed than ever. Climate reporters Kendra Pierre-Louis (New York Times) and Lisa Song (ProPublica) head to the MIT Communications Forum to discuss the media’s role in illuminating environmental issues, promoting environmental justice and ethics, and the future of climate journalism. Bet...