In Medias Resc m s . m i t . e d u s p r i n g 2 0 1 3

s p r i n g t a l k s c a l e n d a r i n s i d e , p a g e 2 7

power Up with taylor and HendershotTaking Film and Games Studies to the Next Level

Writing and Humanistic studies Joins cMsMedia and technology in the Farm Worker Movement

interview with ta-nehisi coates

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a Foundation for the Future James Paradis

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today’s starting lineup

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power Up! T.L. Taylor and Heather Hendershot

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ta-nehisi coates Conversation with Andrew Whitacre

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Why are Japanese cartoons a global Hit?

Peter Dizikes on Ian Condry’s New Book

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the role of Media and technology in the Farm Worker Movement of the 1960’s Rogelio Lopez

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the Hidden History of Bengali Harlem

Peter Dizikes on Vivek Bald’s New Book

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Emily Hiestand and Kathryn O’Neill on Nick Montfort’s New Book

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the Virus. the Hacker. the genius.

24 r e s e A r c h G r o U p U p d A t e s

the latest from Our eight groups

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spring 2013 talks

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personal Updates

“My class, they work extremely hard, even though it’s not science at all. One of the things people say, not just here but in general, is the humanities tend to be easier than the sciences. Which I always thought was a shame. Prac-ticing the humanities is not easy at all. If you want to be a world-class literary scholar or literary scholar of any repute, a world-class historian, a James MacPherson, it’s really hard. The humanities, I strongly feel, should demonstrate that. They should reflect that. It should not be the case that your experience in school is all that different from what you have out in the world when you try to practice that art form.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, p. 10

“The UFW’s decision to frame itself as a movement had profound effects on its orga-nizing strategies, level of public support, and media strategies. Unlike the institutional methods of others, the UFW was able to open up its ranks and welcome a diverse range of supporters, volunteers, and allies that would not have been possible through a more formal organizational structure. Just as the Civil Rights Movement inspired numerous supporters and participants from the black community, the UFW’s fight in the fields drew countless numbers of Mexican-Ameri-cans or ‘Chicanos’ from all over the U.S.”—Rogelio Lopez, p. 15

o U r t h A n k s

This past August, long-time CMS Administrative Assistant Justin Bland took on the role of Program Assistant at Virginia Tech’s Population Health Sciences Department. Karinthia Louis and Jessica Dennis have been fantastic additions to the administrative team, but there’s no denying the smidgen of panic at Justin’s departure, losing years of experience and patient handling of complex work around staffing and finance. Declining to even have his bio on the website, he was a truly great behind-the-scenes colleague. We wish him and his fiancée Amy the best and hope Blacksburg is as kind to them as he was to us and Cambridge.

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comparative Media studiesMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyE15-331Cambridge, MA 02139617.253.3599 / cms@mit.edu / cms.mit.educms.mit.edu/magazine

research Managers

Federico casalegno, Mobile Experience Labsasha costanza-chock, Center for Civic Mediakurt Fendt, HyperStudioFox Harrell, ICE Labscot Osterweil, The Education Arcadephilip tan, MIT Game Labsarah Wolozin, Open Documentary Lab staff

nicholas altenbernd Senior Administrative Assistantashley caval Administrative Assistant,Writing Across the CurriculumJessica dennis Financial Assistantsusan Fienberg Development Officershannon larkin Graduate Administratorkarinthia louis Administrative AssistantMichael rapa Technology Support SpecialistBrad seawellCommunications CoordinatorBecky shepardsonAcademic Coordinatorsarah smithAdministrative OfficerJessica tatlockEvents Coordinatorandrew WhitacreCommunications Director

Full list of CMS affiliates: cms.mit.edu/people

Cover illustration by Michael Rapa.

a B O U t i n M e d i a s r e s

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A Foundation for the FutureBy James Paradis, Director, Comparative Media Studies

W elcome to the latest transfor-mation of a unit focused on understanding and leading media change! As of July 1st

just past, CMS is, in administrative terms, a section of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Committee meetings will continue, but the key elements are in place. While this may not seem like a big deal, the new status brings with it a number of struc-tural advantages over CMS’s thirteen years as a sub-program: the ability to appoint faculty, to have a formal voice in the School’s affairs, to have a realistic budget…all long-standing goals of CMS faculty.

To make this happen, CMS has joined forces with the Writing and Humanistic Studies program in a new organizational form, not only to combine their respective approaches to the study and production of media but also to seek new ways of combining media research and creative production. This merger will make far better use of the many synergies long in place between the two groups. Most WHS faculty were already af-filiated with CMS faculty; recent CMS hires were administratively channeled through WHS; and the undergraduate CMS program cross-listed numerous WHS courses. The new unit will have two media-centered masters programs (CMS and Science Writing) and two of the largest undergraduate majors in the School (CMS and Writing). It will continue to have a robust research footprint, as well as a sub-unit with a communication education function at the Institute.

Like any start-up that makes the transi-tion to “the next stage,” we face new potential challenges aplenty. Our biggest challenge will be keeping what CMS founder Henry Jenkins

liked to call the program’s “undisciplined”(or what others might call “radically interdis-ciplinary”) character intact now that we are an MIT unit like any other. Hard-baking CMS into a fixed set of methods or reifying it with a canonical approach to the field risk undermining the imaginative dynamic that made the program so innovative. Fortunately, WHS shares this undisciplined character, and together we have an excellent shot at keeping one another on a defining edge. We face another important challenge with our faculty membership. The old CMS, lacking its own faculty, pulled in affiliated faculty members from across the School (and even the Institute). Now that we have our “own” core faculty, we need to guard against administrative or per-ceptual barriers to participation in the CMS project. In this, we have been greatly helped by our school’s dean, Deborah Fitzgerald, and her commitment to promoting collaborative joint-appointments, which will allow many long-term collaborators formal membership both in the CMS section and in their original sections. As we broaden the pool of joint ap-pointments, we look forward to maintaining the pluralism and diversity of perspectives that made CMS possible. Space will also bring its share of joys, since our current operations are centered both in buildings E15 (the Media Lab) and 14 (the Library), with research labs and service operations spread across another handful of locations. Time, as always, will help to get space into order.

A few of the more immediate changes that we can look forward to are, of course, our class of 2014. Amazing students as always, following higher application rates than ever! And the fruits of last spring’s faculty searches are ours at last, as Heather Hendershot, T.L. Taylor, and Seth Mnookin joined us. Long-time CMS friend Nancy Baym joined

us as Visiting Professor, as has Ed Schiappa, Chair of the Communication Studies Depart-ment at the University of Minnesota.

On the research front, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab wound down its 6-year relationship with Singapore and is re-booting as the MIT Game Lab. GAMBIT had a terrific run with its integrated approach to research, prototyping, and teaching, something recog-nized by the Princeton Review, which ranked MIT’s undergraduate games program #2 in North America last year. Kudos to Philip Tan and Team GAMBIT and our other talented games-savvy faculty, like T.L., Nick Montfort, and Fox Harrell. The ’12-’13 year has brought no small dose of excitement as the Lab carves a new path into the future. And the Open Documentary Lab, launched late last spring, has quickly gained momentum. Folks from Sundance, Tribeca, the National Film Board of Canada, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, and more have been streaming through. The CMS Visiting Scholar program is in full swing, with a dozen partici-pants—media faculty from across the globe—in our midst this year, along with some talented Mellon post-docs Hye Jean Chung, Gretchen Henderson, and Marcella Szable-wicz. Finally, one of the two CMS directors, the one who has traveled the longest road on this project, is on leave this year (William). This leaves the other as Head with the sporting task of running the new Compara-tive Media Studies section, with some much-needed support from Nick as Associate Head, and a lot of other very capable folks. This year is a full one!

F r O M t H e d i r e c t O r

James Paradis

cMs has joined forces with the Writing and Humanistic studies program in a new organizational form, not only to combine their respective approaches to the study and production of

media, but also to seek new ways of combining media research and creative production. this merger will make far better use of the many synergies long in place between the two groups.

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In the fall of 2008, the semester that CMS founder and co-director Henry Jenkins announced his departure for USC, we had—depending the entertainingly complex higher-ed-institutional definition of “have”—just three faculty: Jenkins, co-director William Uricchio, and Assistant Professor Beth Coleman. But with new faculty hires and the merger between CMS and Writing and Humanistic Studies all but complete, there’s suddenly an embarrassment of academic riches…which begs a question from those who haven’t checked in recently: just who are all these people? Without further ado, let’s take a look at the expanded CMS faculty.1

Vivek Bald, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital MediaBald earned his B.A. in 1987 from the University of California, Santa Cruz; a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University in 1992; and his Ph.D. in American Studies from NYU in 2009. His scholarship focuses on the field of diasporic studies, with particular attention to the South Asian diaspora. His book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden

Histories of South Asian America was released as part of Harvard Uni-versity Press’s fall 2012 list (see p. 18). Bald has extensive experience in commercial website development and also works in documentary film and video making. His two documentaries, Taxi-Vala/Auto-biography and Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music earned significant recogni-tion in the world of juried independent film festivals.

Sasha Costanza-Chock Assistant Professor of Civic MediaCostanza-Chock received his A.B. degree from Harvard College in 1999 and his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in 2010. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Costanza-Chock works in the interrelated areas of social

movements and information and communication technologies; participatory technology design and community based participa-tory research; and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights, including comunicación populár. While living in Los Angeles, he worked on a variety of civic media projects with community-based organizations, including the award-winning VozMob.net platform.

1 The full list, including the affiliated faculty and visiting scholars not shown here, is

available at cms.mit.edu/people.

Junot Díaz, Professor of WritingJunot Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut book, Drown, became a national best-sell-er, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was published in 2007 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize and The Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Díaz was a finalist for the National Book Award for his most recent title, This Is How You Lose Her and just received an MacArthur “Genius” grant.

D. Fox Harrell, Jr. Associate Professor of Digital MediaHarrell’s research explores the relation-ship between imaginative cognition and computation and develops new forms of computational narrative, gaming, social networking, and related technical cultural media based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. The National Science Foundation recog-nized Harrell with an NSF Career Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He has worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer. He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, as well as a master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunication from NYU and a B.F.A. in Art and a B.S. in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University.

Heather Hendershot Professor of Film and MediaHendershot is a media historian, textual critic, and cultural theorist who works in the fields of film and television studies focusing on the post-WWII period. She studies conservative media and political movements, film and television genres, and American film history. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Rochester after attending Yale Univer-sity (B.A. 1989). She was most recently Professor of Media Studies at Queens College. She is particularly interested in the complicated rela-tionship between “extremist” and “mainstream” conservatism and in how that relationship is negotiated by conservative media. She is editor

Today’s Starting Lineup

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of Nickelodeon Nation (2004) and the author of Saturday Morning Censors (1998), Shaking the World for Jesus (2004), and What’s Fair on the Air? (2011). She is also the editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently researching a book on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line.

Helen Elaine Lee Professor of Fiction WritingHelen Elaine Lee was born and raised in Detroit. She graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Lee is a chronicler of the lives and families of Black Americans in the Depression, in contemporary small-town America, and in prison systems. She is the author of two novels, Serpent’s Gift (1995) and Water Marked (2001). Her short stories

have appeared in Callaloo, SAGE and several anthologies, including Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor, and Ancestral House: The Black Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell. Professor Lee serves on the Board of PEN New England and is a member of its Freedom To Write Committee.

Thomas Levenson Professor of Science WritingLevenson is a science writer and docu-mentary filmmaker. He is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. He has authored four books: Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth (1989); Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science (1995);

Einstein in Berlin (2004); and Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist (2009). His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, and The Sciences. His documentaries have appeared on PBS, most often on NOVA, and his film Origins was the Winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award.

Kenneth Manning Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and the History of ScienceManning was educated at Harvard Uni-versity and joined MIT in 1974. Manning’s 1983 book, Black Apollo of Science: The Live of Ernest Everett Just, won the Lucy Hampton Bostick Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Manning’s other writings have appeared in numerous scholarly publications.

Nick Montfort Associate Professor of Digital MediaMontfort graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 with a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science. He has an unusual interdisciplinary back-ground in computer science and liberal arts and completed an S.M. at the MIT Media Lab and an M.A. in Creative Writing at Boston University. Montfort is a creator, critic, and theorist of interactive digital media, focusing on the intersection of computing and writing practice. He is an author of historical and theoretical volumes such as New Media Reader (2003), Twisty Little Passages (2005), Racing the Beam (2009), and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2012) (see p. 20) as well as a programmer of interactive fiction, poetry gener-ators, and other digital literary systems. He blogs about digital media and other topics, writes poems in unusual forms, and frequently collaborates with writer/programmers and others on online literary projects.

Seth Mnookin Assistant Professor of Science WritingMnookin joined MIT last year after a suc-cessful career as a journalist and writer. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times-best-seller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top and 2004’s Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. In addition to his books, Seth blogs at the Public Library of Science and is a contributing editor at the online science e-book review Download the Universe. Since 2005, he has been a contribut-ing editor at Vanity Fair. His work has appeared in numerous publica-tions, including New York, Wired, The New York Times, The Washing-ton Post, The Boston Globe, Spin, Slate, and Salon.com.

James Paradis Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of WritingParadis, Head of CMS, is a cultural historian whose research centers on the impact of science and technology on mainstream culture. His interests include biographical approaches to cultural history, the history of rhetoric, science popularization, science fiction, science education, two-cultures controversies, and science as entertainment. These interests are highlighted in his various books, articles, and edited collections, including T.H. Huxley:

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Man’s Place in Nature (1978); Victorian Science and Victorian Values (with T. Postlewait, 1984); Evolution and Ethics (with G. Williams, 1989); Textual Dynamics of the Professions (with C. Bazerman, 1991); Samuel Butler: Victorian against the Grain: A Critical Overview (2007); and Victorian Science as Cultural Authority (with S. Anger, 2011).

T.L. Taylor, Associate Professor of Comparative Media StudiesTaylor is a qualitative sociologist working in the field of Internet and game studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from Brandeis University. Her work focuses on the interrelation-ship between culture, social practice, and technology in online leisure envi-ronments. She has spoken and written on topics such as network play and social

life, values in design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, avatars, and gender and gaming. Her book about professional computer gaming, Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Profession-alization of Computer Gaming was published in 2012. She is also the author of Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (2006), which used her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest to explore issues related to massively multiplayer online games. Her co-authored Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method came out last September.

William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media StudiesUricchio is a film and media scholar and Professor of Comparative Media History whose work considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-)con-structing representation, knowledge, and publics. He researches and develops new histories of “old” media (early pho-tography, telephony, film, broadcasting,

and new media) when they were new. He also investigates the inter-actions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments. He has held visiting professor-ships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg, and Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research. Uricchio’s most recent books include Media Cultures (2006), on responses to media in post-9/11 Germany and the U.S., and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (2009). He is currently completing a manu-script on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.

Why major inComparative

media studies?

here’s What reCent grads have to say…

“The hands-on approach.”

“The breadth of available classes.”

“Flexibility in designing my course of study.”

“The projects were things I would want to do,even if it wasn’t for a grade.”

“The professors are friendly,easy to talk to.”

“I could convince recruiters I was serious about working in entertainment, that the combination of Brain and Cognitive Science and CMS made me well-suited.”

“I’m a humanities person. I wanted a humanities major to complement my science major.”

“I could focus on game design and development while maintaining a

strong foundation in general media studies, especially in literature.”

Interested in the major, double- or joint-major, minor, or concentration? Learn more at cms.mit.edu/major

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F e a t U r e si n t e r V i e W s

Perhaps the only drawback of the Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Humanistic Studies merger was putting this very publica-tion on hold for a semester…meaning we didn’t get to properly show off our newest faculty members, T.L. Taylor and Heather Hender-shot, previously of IT University of Copenhagen and CUNY’s Queens College, respectively. Taylor, as a sociologist with a focus on the Internet and games, will play a key role with the MIT Game Lab. Hendershot, now also directing our graduate program, is well known for her work on conservative media.1

Want to add your own questions? Our shared Google Doc is open at cms.mit.edu/power-up.

1 Get to know them both as we first did too: cms.mit.edu/hendershot-podcast and

cms.mit.edu/taylor-podcast.

Andrew Whitacre: How did CMS, and MIT generally, come to seem, for both of you, like a good place to do your work?

T.L. Taylor: My research during the last decade has primarily focused on computer games, and in the past couple of years I’ve become more and more interested in folding that work into larger considerations of network culture. For me this is a bit like getting back to my roots by connecting up digital play spaces with broader themes around culture and technology, computation and expressive human action, and networked life. I’ve also become increasingly interested in how as scholars we might engage with visual forms, both in terms of our research practice and in communicating our work out to the public. CMS, and MIT more broadly, offers some great opportunities to connect with students and researchers who are working in a variety of domain areas but who have their eye on this intersection between

Power Up!Two newest professors add +1’s to CMS’s film-and-media and games studies

A (Distributed) Conversation with Andrew Whitacre

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culture, social practice, and technology. I’m also very excited for the collaboration opportunities with groups nearby like the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research (where I was a visiting researcher in the fall). Finally, there is a really exciting and vibrant game community here made up of terrific researchers and practitioners. Putting all the pieces together, and with an eye on where I’d like to take my work next, joining MIT was a fantastic opportunity.

Heather Hendershot: The critical mass of scholars in CMS interested in the intersections between culture, social practice, and technology is tremendously appealing to me. My own work is largely historical—I’ve been researching conservative and right-wing media for some time, and my current project centers on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s public affairs show, Firing Line, which aired from 1966 to 1999. I say that my work is “largely” historical because media history has a strange way of not staying put and becoming “contemporary” when you least expect it! For example, my most recently published book is on cold-war right-wing broadcasters, and the more work I did on this project the more I began to see parallels between the old anti-civil rights, anti-commu-nist broadcasters and the contemporary crowd on Fox News. Many of the issues are different today, but the one-sided, aggressive rhetoric often sounds quite familiar. When I was interviewing at MIT and presented my research, I was thrilled to see the high level of interest in the historical-but-contemporary kind of work that I do. Further sealing the deal for me was meeting the CMS masters students, a won-derfully perceptive and enthusiastic bunch.

AW: Heather, what do you expect in your role as the grad program director?

HH: As the proverbial new kid on the block, it’s hard to fully predict what my role as graduate program director will bring. I’m excited, of course, about examining the new batch of applicants. Our program is very competitive, with numerous highly qualified candidates vying for a relatively small number of spots. In addition to working with my colleagues to select our new students for next year, I’ll be making sure that our first-year students stay on track with their courses and that our second-years stay on track with their thesis-writing. And, of course, one of the major activities that our graduate students do together is attend our colloquium series on Thursday nights, so I’m involved in that. In addition, this spring I’m teaching our “Media Theories and Methods II” class, which culminates with the produc-tion of thesis proposals.

AW: Who would you guys consider your influences, whether purely academic or other people who’ve inspired you in your work?

TLT: The domains I study shift from project to project—for example, from a social virtual world to a massively multiplayer online game to professional e-sports—so I tend to not have fixed easy-to-pin-down influences or theoretical anchors I turn to for all projects. I actually lean on, and am influenced by, different literature depending on the themes that emerge from the field. So, for instance, Stebbin’s work on

serious leisure became an useful waypoint for me in my research on competitive gaming, as did a number of pieces from the sociology of sports. Where I’d say I’m more consistently influenced and inspired is via frames to approach research and the methodological implications that follow. For me this means weaving together things like a critical sociology of culture which challenges us to investigate the complex and negotiated engagements people have with media, culture, and in-stitutions, all the while making sure to keep an eye on power; ethno-graphic traditions that strive for a nuanced understanding of practice and meaning-making from the “inside”; and science and technology work that asks us to really engage with the notion that technologies may be central social actors worth careful consideration.

HH: Charting my own influences is also tricky, insofar as I have often gravitated to research topics about which there is little existing schol-arship. That means that rather than looking for scholars who have already written on a certain topic—for example, Betty Boop, Straw-berry Shortcake cartoons, direct-to-video Christian apocalyptic sci-fi movies, or Texas-based anti-communist radio broadcasters—I often have to think pretty creatively about what kinds of work will be helpful for my own research endeavors. The sources I drawn on range from archival documents to history books that have nothing directly to do with media. When I read within the field of media studies, I do find work that is directly helpful to me in terms of topic, such as Derek Kompare’s Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Televi-sion. On the other hand, one of my favorite TV studies books is Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. The topic is only tangentially relevant to much of my own research, but Spigel’s book is a strong methodological model; I read Spigel’s book while gearing up to write my dissertation, and I thought “Eureka! This is how to write about TV!” The book is not only a model of good scholarship, but it is clearly and compellingly written. I am increasingly drawn to nonfiction writers who are thoughtful about structure, narrative, and the fine art of sentence construction, such as Annie Dillard and, oddly enough, Norman Mailer.

AW: T.L., what can students look forward to in your qualitative methods class?

TLT.: While it will have some higher level conceptual discussions related to doing qualitative social science research, it will mostly be very hands-on and focused on learning various techniques, from in-terviewing to working with visual material.

AW: And Heather, what’s been your take on MIT students after being here for a semester? Is there something you’d like to develop further in the near future?

HH: My first MIT class—Silent Film—was great fun. I was tremen-dously impressed by the students’ enthusiasm and sense of intellectual curiosity. Next year I plan to teach a course in film and TV science fiction, and hopefully my course on American independent cinema as well.

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In mid-November, I visited with Ta-Nehisi Coates, 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 the 2012 election, 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. You can read Coates’ blog at theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates and hear audio of our conversation at cms.mit.edu/coates.

Andrew Whitacre: What brought you to MIT and your MLK fellowship?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Tom Levenson brought me. He was reading my blog, reading some of my writing. He asked me if I was interested in coming to MIT. I said, who wouldn’t be?

Are you teaching?

I’m teaching this semester—one class, “Writing and Reading the Essay”, which I’m greatly enjoying.

In one of your Atlantic posts about the election, you talked about the “sucker punch”. What was that?

It was about the Romney campaign, how they never saw defeat in the election coming, that they felt sucker-punched. I was and have been sort of amazed. There was this thing going on in the election where these guys who were into stats and mathematics, not just Nate Silver, who did a good job telling what was going to happen. And no one believed it—I shouldn’t say no one believed it, but there was this theory that somehow these guys were simply reflecting some kind of liberal bias. It’s one of these things where if you believe something, you tell yourself something enough times, you really come to believe it.

Do you have any sense of how those bubbles get formed? Liberals tend to think of themselves more self-critical than conservatives.

Well, we did it in ’04, with John Kerry, where people for some reason remember it as an upset for Bush. It was not an upset at all. If you go back and look at the polls, the polls said Bush was probably going to win, and that’s what happened. I think there’s some kind of righ-teousness that comes out of that, that sort of pose, this feeling that you were cheated. We have certain prejudices against information that challenges our world-view. I think that’s just true of human beings,

period. I think one of the things that has happened with liberals in the last twenty years—at least in media, where I’ve had a chance to study liberal and conservative media—liberalism has come to be about the fight. The fights within. So you can have straight-down-the-line-liberal publication like The Nation, but you also have publications like The New Republic, Slate. These are places where they cut their teeth on being counterintuitive: tell me what they other guy won’t say. Those are very different things than what’s happening in conservative media, where the media pretty much exists to fall in with the Repub-lican Party. That’s really where they are. And to the extent that you differ from orthodoxy, you find yourself pushed out. Take someone like David Frum1, who’s writing for the Daily Beast, which is not, in any respect, a conservative publication—that’s not what they’re doing. Why is he there rather than a conservative outlet?

What was your reaction, on election night, when Fox News had Karl Rove on and he refused to let the election be called?2

I was watching Fox News when that happened. I thought it was the exact phenomenon we’re talking about. I thought Rove, though—he

1 A Republican speechwriter and columnist, who has criticized Republicans for their

support of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, forcing Mitt Romney into extreme positions,

and, famously, writing that the GOP’s fight against Obamacare as the party’s “Waterloo”.

Frum’s statements reportedly led directly to his firings from conservative weekly The

National Review and the libertarian American Enterprise Institute.

2 Rove was a key fundraiser for conservative candidates in the 2012 elections but at the

same time was paid by Fox News to be an on-set political analyst.

Ta-Nehisi CoatesAn (Audio’d) Conversation with Andrew Whitacre

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had something very different: he had money at stake. He had taken all this money from billionaires, telling them “This is what’s going to happen.” He didn’t just have an interest like, “I am a conservative, so I have an interest” but interests like “I have millions”.

What do you think about growing up in Baltimore compared to where you are now?

It’s very different. I didn’t know what MIT was growing up in Baltimore. It’s incredibly different. I knew a lot about black schools around the country. That was about it. It wasn’t all that developed. I knew my parents wanted me to go to college. But I never had any particular sense I could go to a Harvard or MIT or Columbia or Yale.

What do you think you’ll be able to get from the resources here?

I get the most from the students. Watching them, how hard they work. It’s inspirational.

You feel that same way about their humanities work?

Oh yeah! My class, they work extremely hard, even though it’s not science at all. One of the things people say, not just here but in general, is the humanities tend to be easier than the sciences. Which I always thought was a shame. Practicing the humanities is not easy at all. If you want to be a world-class literary scholar or literary scholar of any repute, a world-class historian, a James MacPherson, it’s really hard. The humanities, I strongly feel, should demonstrate that. They should reflect that. It should not be the case that your experience in school is all that different from what you have out in the world when you try to practice that art form. So I work really, really hard to make the class count as much as I can coming in the first time.

As that first-timer, have you had to learn a lot on the fly about being a teacher?

Not really. I actually think it’s an advantage. The only thing I know how to teach is how it’s practiced. To the best of my ability I try to emulate what my relationship would be with my editor. The rigor with which you write actual essays. I try to practice the craft. I try to push them the same way. We talk about craft all the time. We talk about sentences, why some sentences are strong, why some sentences are not. They want the push. I grew to appreciate that. I gobbled it all up.

So you started at Howard University?

I did. I started there, went to college there on and off for about five years and left without graduating.

Is there a story behind that?

Yeah, I started writing! And I liked it so much. I had never been a particularly good student, and writing was the first thing I’d ever done that looked like a career path that I was ever good at.

What would you consider your first success? Submitting a first piece?

Actually, probably writing for my college newspaper. I started in with a little poetry. I had people around me that told me I should keep going. You know…writing is done on your own time. You don’t have to sit in a meeting for hours, as you do in a classroom. It’s very much a practice thing. I gravitate to the idea of doing something. It’s not very theoretical. Most of it is pretty simple; you just have to keep doing it over and over again.

What’s the structure of your class?

It’s workshop. We spend most of the first month reading other people’s essays. And in the second we still did quite a bit of that but then started workshopping our own essays. Sometimes we’ll do sentence essays in class, try to write as strong a sentence as possible. Certain home

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projects. Today we had the workshop for the second essay, which was good. It was very good.

You once described President Obama as a “conservative revolution-ary”. Is there anyone else you’d cite as an example of the same thing?

Plenty of people throughout African-American history. Malcolm X was a conservative revolutionary. Maybe not in that sense, but Lincoln…Lincoln’s a conservative revolutionary. People who preside over momentous change but do so in a really small-bore way, almost reluctantly and try to do it without upsetting society.

If the pace of change is the same in Obama’s second term, how do you think people will look back over what he did?

I think he’s been relatively effective. Quietly, but relatively effective. We’ll see. I don’t want to call that.

What do you expect for your son?

I don’t expect him to think about the world the way I think about the world. I don’t expect him to think about race or ethnicity the way I think about it. We’re raised in different times. He lives in a much more integrated world now.

Tell me a bit about your November event here with [journalist and MSNBC politics talk show host] Chris Hayes.

That was a lot of fun. I was shocked by how many people came out. We had to turn people away. I thought his message was all about the responsibility of people with access to elite institutions, education, power, etc. I thought bringing that here to MIT was incredible.

What were some of the arguments?

We talked about what is an institution, what are MIT’s responsibili-ties? Are we producing an elite that actually reflects this power/re-sponsibility thing that is of the quality it needs to be. Do we even need an elite, is something I pushed him on. The best thing was, the next day he came to my class and talked to the kids.

The election of President Obama in ’08 was a symbolic moment. What’s next? What would be meaningful to me would be if there was an African-American president that came from southeast DC. After Obama’s election, what’s next, how do you top that?

Once it happens, you find reasons to make it an exception. I think the test is, do we say we think this is an exception to the rule now—if someone had told us this in 2002, we would have been amazed that something like this would have happened—so…probably a woman. That’s very much is the next test.

Is there anything else you want to accomplish in your time at MIT? Is it just going around, meeting a lot of people? Is it just teaching

class? Do they set any expectations for an MLK Scholar?

They just want me to be a good citizen in the community. That’s what I’m trying to do. Even in my daily interactions, I get so much. Having dropped out of college and being back on campus: it’s pretty amazing how I actually feel.

Is there any way you’d describe your writing style or particular interests—or contrast yourself with some of your peers?

I’m always interested in history. In the history of this country, in par-ticular the history of race in this country that I try to work out in my work. That’ll continue. If there’s any difference, that’s a big one.

Do you feel like there’s something in U.S. history that’s been overly forgotten?

Ha, the Civil War. What actually happened. For a long time we thought about it as this whole brother-against-brother thing, two honorable sides, that that shouldn’t be forgotten. And when you look at the history, something that becomes immediately clear is that it’s not two honorable sides. In fact it’s something much, much darker, but at the same time something much more beautiful too when you find out what we were really fighting for, in the Civil War but also what came out of that.

What are the analogies you draw now from the Civil War?

It’s not direct stuff. More just an awareness of history. I try to draw lines. Long, long lines. Does everybody understand the relationship between race and citizenship? Which was what the Civil War was ul-timately about. It’s what Lincoln ultimately died for. I try to trace a long arc of history to make it clear that things don’t just grow up out of nowhere.

What kind of projects are you looking to do in the future?

I want to be able to write here’s-what-I-think pieces for a long time. I enjoy it very much.

More from Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. On Amazon: cms.mit.edu/coates-beautful-struggle.

“The first rule of being president of Black America: you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair.” Ta-Nehisi on the Colbert Report, January 21, 2013. Video: cms.mit.edu/coates-on-colbert.

“Ask Ta-Nehisi Coates Anything.” The Daily Best, December 11, 2012. Videos: cms.mit.edu/coates-daily-beast.

On Twitter: @tanehisi.

12 in medias res

Digital games…They pose greater challenges than business software projects.

Dealing with complex prototyping, testing, and platform variability, game developers are required to exercise more flexibility in software specifications and functionality. Professionals have to modify their approach-es to design and team management while keeping abreast of changes to technology such as cloud computing, mobility, and tools.

Course summaryThis is for software development profession-als aiming to understand the similarities and differences between modern software engi-neering and game development practices.

Participants will conceive develop prototype games in small teams with modern game development tools and talks and guidance from the mentors of the award-winning MIT Game Lab. (3 years on the Princeton Review’s Top 10 Game Design Programs).

Learning Objectives•  Understand the unique properties of play as a mode of user interaction•  Quickly create non-digital prototypes for testing, highlighting how critical design decisions regarding gameplay can only be made with direct user observation and feedback instead of upfront specifications•  Identify strengths and limitations of current game development technologies•  Compare game engines and APIs to identify capabilities and constraints•  Apply principles of agile software devel-opment to game development

•  Form digital game prototyping teams, exercising modified versions of agile meth-odologies adapted specifically for game de-velopment•  Understand the importance of identify-ing constraints and leveraging flexibility in expectations and polish•  Develop a small digital game under tight time and scope constraints, identifying high-priority features through user testing and rigorous cutting of features not essential for gameplay•  Practice playtesting, usability testing, focus testing, and technical testing

Participants will test their work-in-progress with other participants, the instructors of the class, and members from the MIT community to practice and understand the applicability of different test protocols at different stages of the project.

game deveLopment ForsoFtWare engineers

august 5–9, mit Campus

An MIT Professional Education short course for software engineers, technical directors, programmers, and project managers interested in or new to

professional game development.

register noW:mit.edu/proFessionaL

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I n early 1979, a cartoon series about giant robots, “Mobile Suit Gundam,” made its debut on Japanese television. It was not a hit. Scheduled to run for

twelve months, the plug was about to be pulled after just ten.

But then the show’s creators noticed something unexpected: it had a very loyal, if small, following. Fans were creating encyclo-pedias about the show and creating timelines of its events. The show was given a new lease on life—and the studio producing it took notice of which elements had proven most popular with its audience. Given a new chance and some creative tweaks, the “Gundam” shows became the basis of a sprawling series of cartoons, movies, comic books, video games, best-selling toys, and more.

“The ‘Gundam’ giant robot series was written off as a failure—except that it got picked up by a few fans,” says Ian Condry, an associate professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and head of MIT’s Foreign Languages and Literatures section. “Now it’s an ongoing thirty-year-old franchise.”

As Condry sees it, there is a lesson in the “Gundam” case for producers of culture everywhere. Japanese anime—animation, usually in the form of hand-drawn cartoons—is a wildly popular global export: According to one estimate, about sixty percent of the world’s animated television shows originate in Japan. They have become popular, as Condry asserts in a new book, “The Soul of Anime,” published by Duke University Press, by embracing what he calls “col-laborative creativity”—by accepting input from a range of artists, and, crucially, feedback and modifications from fans. And when fans get involved, Condry says, it makes a pop-culture product, like a cartoon series, “a living thing for the people who are interested.”

Creativity, “Gundam”-style

Certainly, the cultural reach of Japanese anime has been enormous. In 2004, when Japan sent water-tank trucks to help Iraq’s reconstruc-tion, Iraqis coordinating the effort felt the Japanese flag, displayed on the sides of the trucks, would likely go unrecognized. As Condry notes, the Japanese government also placed large stickers on the vehicles, of Captain Tsubasa, a popular Japanese cartoon soccer player, as a more effective way of denoting which country was providing the trucks.

While the origins of anime techniques are about a century old, the cartoons took hold in Japan only in the post-war era. Other global Japanese anime hits include the Pokemon series of video games, cards, cartoons, and toys, which, as Condry notes, are “so ubiquitous, it’s

kind of a shared language of youth.”And yet, the success of Japanese anime con-

stitutes something of a mystery. If you were to concoct a plan for entertainment-industry success in the digital age, Condry notes, it would probably not involve the painstaking development of hand-drawn cartoons.

“It’s incredibly difficult, and not very lucrative” for the artists, says Condry, who visited dozens of anime studios, workshops, and artists while researching the book over the last eight years. “It’s one of the most labor-intensive forms of media there is.” Entertain-ment companies do not necessarily make huge profits off anime, which was an issue motivat-ing Condry’s study; as he puts it, “How can things that don’t make money go global?”

The answer is that anime producers create many series and watch closely for what catches on—and then, once the characters in a series become a “platform” for audience participa-tion, may cash in through toys, games, and

other forms of entertainment.“What distinguishes anime,” Condry says, “is the degree of

openness the copyright holders have to give the fans a chance to re-work the characters” and other elements of the original cartoons. He adds: “The ‘Gundam’ producers, when shown work created by fans, just said, ‘That might be the way it is.’”

Getting More Social

One historical curiosity of anime, Condry notes, is that the dynamics making it successful emerged even prior to the commer-cialization of the Internet and the rise of social media, which in theory should make mass collaboration, today, easier than ever.

Indeed, it is possible that the history of anime, Condry says, holds “lessons we might use for new emergent industries” that can tap into crowdsourcing and collective feedback. As such, Thomas LaMarre, a scholar of Japanese culture at McGill University in Montreal, calls the book “a bold challenge to our understanding of the social side of media.”

And while anime might be a globally exported product, audience participation also makes it a highly personal form of entertainment, Condry adds. Anime might often feature seemingly soulless robots and monsters, but the “soul” of the art form, as Condry sees it, precisely comes from the investment of creative energy that its fans pour into it.

“Anime is imbued with a sense of social energy,” Condry says.

Reprinted with permission of MIT News.

Why Are Japanese Cartoons a Global Hit?Ian Condry heralds “creative collaboration” as the key to anime’s worldwide popularity

By Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office

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With the assistance of the Comparative Media Studies Professional Development Fund, I was able to visit the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, which contains one of the largest United Farm Workers collections in the country. My study on the role of media and technology in the Farm Worker Movement of the 1960’s began with an intriguing look at the many types of media that had captured these historic events, and led me to conduct an in-depth project to discover the media strategies of the 1960’s. This work provides a brief examination of my findings thus far. –R.L.

I n the spring of 1966, a group of sixty seven farmworkers from Delano, California, began their journey northbound towards the state’s capitol in Sacramento. Led by the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe and united under the banner of peregrinación,

penitencia, y revolución, this mix of men and women prepared to embark on a 280-mile pilgrimage to improve their working and living conditions as some of America’s most exploited and vulnerable agri-cultural workers. With the proclamation of El Plan de Delano, these sixty seven brave souls, most of them of Mexican descent, outlined the long history of their struggle for equality as a racial minority in the United States and their reasons for seeking social justice. Juxtaposed to rows of grapevines and dirt roads of California’s Central Valley was a throng of television crews, local radio professionals, journal-ists and photojournalists, and filmmakers standing by with their new technology; tape recorders, portable film cameras with synchronized sound. These media professionals meant to capture the commence-ment of the March to Sacramento, as it would come to be known, but

instead captured a row of helmeted, club-wielding police officers ready to thwart the pilgrimage as an unlawful parade without a permit even though no law had been broken. Evoking imagery reminiscent of Af-rican-American struggles in Alabama only months prior, the media professionals present were able to bring the confrontation between farm workers and police to national attention. In the end, through the harnessing of media forces, the farmworkers were able to continue their journey to Sacramento and alter the course of their own history and that of countless others.

Organizing Farm Workers in the United StatesThe March to Sacramento in 1966 was the first of many demonstra-tions that would later be known collectively as the Farm Worker Movement. Various efforts to unionize farm workers date back to the early 1900’s, but few cases were of national interest and rarely garnered media attention. In the 1930’s the plight of Anglo farm workers in Cal-ifornia reached the United States population through media such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

By the 1940’s, however, California’s agricultural field workers were overwhelmingly comprised of Mexicans, Filipinos, and African-Americans, and discriminatory race relations in the U.S. left these groups vulnerable to exploitation by Anglo employers. Due to these changes in demographics, the headline potential of these stories in mainstream media diminished, as agriculture shifted from “Okies” to “ethnics”. Furthermore, in 1942 the U.S. enacted the Bracero Program, a guest worker program between the U.S. and Mexico, in order to alleviate labor shortages during World War II. The Bracero

The Role of Media and Technology in the Farm Worker Movement of the 1960’s

Rogelio Lopez, ’13

Image courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

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Program ensured the flow of cheap labor from Mexico into the United States’ agricultural industry for over twenty years. With the Bracero Program in place, agricultural business “growers” had little incentive to increase the wages and improve living conditions of citizen farm workers, which contributed to unsuccessful efforts at organizing.

The decade of the 1960’s presented a new hope for organizing for several reasons. For one, the sixties were the decade that established the United States as a “television nation.” By 1962, 92% of U.S. house-holds owned a television, as compared to less than 10% only a decade earlier. It was largely due to television that Americans were able to understand the scope and scale of national issues, such as social unrest and political protest, through visuals and imagery. By the early 1960’s, tumultuous race relations gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement in the American South, which shifted public discourse towards conver-sations regarding racial discrimination and socioeconomic inequal-ity. Moreover, Cold War politics eventually led to the demise of the Bracero Program, as the United States government was no longer able to justify the creation of jobs for Mexican nationals while U.S.-citizen racial minorities were living in squalor. As such, the Bracero Program officially came to an end in 1964, and with that end came a new beginning for the Farm Workers Association.

The United Farm WorkersThe Farm Workers Association (FWA), later known as the United Farm Workers (UFW), was co-founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, among others, in 1962 in Delano. The FWA was distinct because Chávez included not just farm workers, but their families as well into organizational processes, especially decision making.

The Peregrinación to Sacramento previously mentioned was part of the Delano Grape Strike that the FWA helped organize. It was highly successful in generating public interest and support, especially through various types of media. By the end 1966, the FWA succeeded in unionizing grape workers in Delano, but this was only the first

battle in a long string of battles against growers to organize farm workers and improve their wages and living conditions.

Building a Social MovementWhat distinguished the UFW’s efforts as a social movement, instead of a labor dispute, was the intentional framing and organizing strate-gies that came from within the organization. Drawing much inspi-ration from the Black Civil Rights Movement, César Chávez saw a similar opportunity in Delano to highlight the intersection between economic plight, political disenfranchisement, and racial discrimi-nation. Chávez and other leaders of the UFW were able to shift the conversation about increasing wages and working conditions to the elevation of the entire Mexican-American community in the United States through community empowerment, education, and political engagement. As such, the fight in Delano became “el movimiento” (the movement), the fight for racial equality became “la causa” (the cause), and the Mexican-American community became “la raza” (“the people,” of Mexican ancestry).

The UFW’s decision to frame itself as a movement had profound effects on its organizing strategies, level of public support, and media strategies. Unlike the institutional methods of others, the UFW was able to open up its ranks and welcome a diverse range of supporters, volunteers, and allies that would not have been possible through a more formal organizational structure. Just as the Civil Rights Movement inspired numerous supporters and participants from the black community, the UFW’s fight in the fields drew countless numbers of Mexican-Americans or “Chicanos” from all over the U.S. Waves of supporters led to a centralized networked organizing strategy that extended across the United States, and even across the world. At the same time, the UFW was able to effectively develop a diverse range of media strategies, largely with the assistance of students and youth who were artistically and technologically inclined.

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Media Practice in the Farm Worker MovementA combination of literature reviews and archival investigation was most informative when defining “media” during this study. The easiest to define from the 1960’s are still used today: television, cameras, phones, newspapers, and radio. However, other forms of technol-ogy were included because they seemed relevant. Some of these tech-nologies include typewriters, walkie-talkies, radio telephones, tape recorders, and even a novel flatbed truck modified with loudspeakers.

Daily Media PracticeThe day-to-day media practice of the leadership and staff of the United Farm Workers in the 1960’s occurred as most would expect: frequent

phone calls, writing and typing letters, reading daily newspapers, listening to local radio stations, and sending telegrams for very urgent matters. A typical day of media practice for César Chávez involved much phone use, but phone communication was relatively expensive in the 1960’s and accounted for a sizable amount of the UFW’s monthly expenses. The UFW headquarters in Delano often used typewriters when creating documents that were official or needed to be replicated in large quantities. But for the most part, letters and meeting notes were handwritten. The UFW also had its own newspaper called El Malcriado (“the bad boy”) that circulated on a regular basis, and by 1966 they began to purchase radio spots from local radio stations. Furthermore, the UFW relied heavily on telegrams to quickly and ef-ficiently deliver urgent messages to its staff and members at different locations.

Media StrategiesThe UFW’s internal media strategy consisted of “contextualiz-ing [media and press] in cultural tradition” among those directly involved in the movement while the external media strategy involved the “development of the story” for those not directly involved in the movement. In short, the internal strategy involved strategic media use that occurred among organizers, leaders, and regular partici-pants. Conversely, the external strategy involves strategic media use among media professional and specialists working in media industry or business. Internal and external media strategies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and some overlap does indeed occur, especially as relationships are built with media professionals.

Internal Media StrategyOne example of internal media is El Malcriado, an important in building a sense of community among farm workers. One of the most striking characteristics of El Malcriado was its heavy use of satirical

imagery and visuals, especially in the form of political cartoons. Inspired by the Mexican intellectual and political cartoonist Eduardo “Rius” del Río and his “Los supermachos,” El Malcriado included the talents of cartoonist Andy Zermeño. Zarmeño created a variety of satirical characters that represented the figures of the Farm Worker Movement in a mocking nature, such as “Don Coyote,” and they were loosely based on the Supermachos characters “Calzonzin” and “Don Plutarco.” The UFW also worked closely with The Farm Workers Press, Inc., a printing press corporation that published materials related to the Farm Worker Movement since the early 1960’s. The UFW acquired controlling stock of The Farm Workers Press, Inc. in 1967, however the corporation was officially dissolved by 1970 due to inactivity.

Media FramingThe UFW was intentional about framing their movement around cultural and religious symbolism, which was reinforced through media practice. Especially important symbols included the UFW “black eagle,” September 16th (Mexican Independence Day), and December 12th (Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe). The symbolism of the Farm Worker Movement was often replicated in the media that was produced, such as through religious imagery and in music. The UFW was also careful to avoid certain terminology due to cultural connota-tions, such as the term “union” or “campesinos” to describe the orga-nization and the farm workers, respectively. Instead, Chávez and other leading organizers chose the term “association” in the National Farm Workers Association, and the joint terms “trabajadores campesinos” (farm workers instead of peasants) to describe those that worked in the fields, because the term “campesinos” means “peasants” in Mexico.

External Media StrategyMuch of the external media strategy of the United Farm Workers was influenced by the practices of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi didn’t do things “for the press,” but instead “opened a window for the press” so that they can see what movement actors are doing. This approach was thus against the creation of “photo-op” moments and largely involved “turning reporters into our storytellers”. During the mid 1960’s, for example, Chávez would not hold press conferences and instead preferred on-site coverage, specifically during picket lines. As such, the UFW was to take a non-adversarial stance when dealing with media and focused on building relationships with reporters in the press.

Professional and Citizen Media PracticeSimilar to media ecologies today, media creation in the 1960’s required varying levels of media literacy. In many cases, the UFW relied on

through teatro campesino, luis Valdez was able to reach out to farm workers and other allies by portraying the plight of Mexicans and Mexican-americans in the fields. these performances often occurred at the site of strikes and demonstrations, and they served to both build consciousness of

issues and to diffuse tense situations through laughter.

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outside industry professionals to create media that was beyond their level of expertise. For example, there were several documentaries created about the Farm Worker Movement during the 1960’s. One such documentary was Huelga!, which was created in collaboration with the filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris. Other examples include the involvement of filmmakers turned movement actors, such as Jesús Salvador Treviño as told in his book Eyewitness. The UFW would often hire photographers to document marches, demonstrations, and other events, such as photographer George Ballis. However, eventually the photographers were able to emerge as part of the UFW’s internal strategy, and they often looked to the work of Dorothea Lange as inspiration for documenting the Farm Worker Movement. Further-more, there were media professionals that could be considered part of the internal media strategy of the UFW, including the staff of El Malcriado, and the UFW Press Secretary Terry Cannon.

While the overall media ecology of the 1960’s did not particu-larly foster the creation of citizen media as it does today, there were several citizen media makers that emerged directly from the Farm Worker Movement. The phrase “citizen media maker” here refers to amateur or hobbyist media creators, not citizenship status as it relates to national boundaries. The UFW’s organizational model allowed for its members to express their creativity whenever possible, and this extended to media. For example, the UFW would often dispatch or-ganizers to major cities around the United States, and even around the world, in order to build campaign support. While the campaigns were centralized at the UFW headquarters, organizers were also given freedom to exercise their media strategy creatively. A notable example of this involved the use of balloons with the words “Boycott Grapes” and the UFW black eagle. These balloons would be given to children outside of supermarkets that were targeted for boycott, and on some occasions, the balloons would be released inside of stores in order to gain the attention of shoppers.

One of most notable example of citizen media practice, however, came through the involvement of Delano native Luis Valdez. Valdez may be known today for his major motion pictures Zoot Suit and La Bamba, but he is perhaps most esteemed for his Teatro Campesino, or Farm Worker Theater. Teatro Campesino was a theater troupe led by Valdez that combined performance, comedy, and satire with political and social commentary. Through Teatro Campesino, Luis Valdez was able to reach out to farm workers and other allies by portraying the plight of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the fields. These per-formances often occurred at the site of strikes and demonstrations, and they served to both build consciousness of issues and to diffuse tense situations through laughter. Teatro Campesino played a central role at the UFW’s “friday night meetings,” which were carried out in a festive spirit that involved, music, dancing, food, performance, and laughter, all with the purpose of building community. Valdez’s influence on media practice was not limited to Teatro Campesino either, as he was involved with the creation of the Huelga! documenta-ry. Furthermore, along with Andy Zermeño, Valdez helped create “El Mosquito Zumbador” (The Buzzing Mosquito), which was the title for a series of daily illustrated leaflets that were distributed during demon-strations. “El Mosquito Zumbador” eventually became a creative radio

spot series in addition to leaflets, also under the direction of Valdez. The influence of Luis Valdez shows that citizen media did indeed have a profound effect on the Farm Worker Movement. However, it must be noted that citizen media practice did occur less frequently than it does today.

FindingsThe Farm Worker Movement seems to complicate the rhetoric of newness that is often associated with (new) media activism and social movements. For one, the actors and organizers of the Farm Worker Movement, specifically the UFW, were actively and consciously using media strategies in their activism campaigns. Second, the UFW utilized every type of media and technology available at the time, in a multitude of ways. With recent preoccupations with new media in social movements, it seems that new tools often overshadow the practices behind them. If my study of media practice in the Farm Worker Movement has taught me anything, it is that our practices today are not drastically different from those of the 1960’s, which has led to me be suspicious of the overemphasis on new tools instead of the continuity of media practice over time.

These topics covered in this work are a few of the most important findings that emerged from my visit to the Walter P. Reuther Library, which perhaps could not have emerged without direct archival in-vestigation. In terms of the amount of information that I was able to acquire from my visit, I was able to record over thirty audio memos (over twenty pages transcribed), several pages of typed memos, and 71 photographs (@ $0.25 each). This information will largely inform a report on the Media Practice of the Farm Worker Movement, and a Comparative Study between the UFW and contemporary Immi-grants’ Rights Movements.

Suggested ReadingGanz, Marshall. Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organiza-tion, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

¡Huelga! Dir. Skeets McGrew. Prod. Mark J. Harris. King Screen Pro-ductions, 1968. Film.

Huelga. Prod. Mark J. Harris. King Screen Productions, 1966. Film.

Lewels, Francisco J. The Uses of the Media by the Chicano Movement: A Study in Minority Access. New York: Praeger, 1974. Print.

Treviño, Jesús Salvador. Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement. Houston, TX: Arte Público, 2001. Print.

“UFW: The Official Web Page of the United Farm Workers of America.” UFW: The Official Web Page of the United Farm Workers of America. Web. 08 Apr. 2012. <ufw.org>.

“Farmworker Movement Documentation Project.” Web. 08 Apr. 2012. <farmworkermovement.com/medias/videos/>.

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S outh Asian immigrants were not legally allowed to enter the United States between 1917 and 1965. But many came anyway: working on British steamships, then deserting in American ports and carving out new lives for themselves.

Consider Habib Ullah, a Muslim from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) who in the 1920’s left a ship in Boston and found his way to New York. Ullah settled in East Harlem, and by the 1940’s was running a popular restaurant, the Bengal Garden, in Manhattan’s Theatre District.

Like Ullah, other South Asian Muslims—from present-day Ban-gladesh, India and Pakistan—settled in the United States at the

same time, often marrying into African-American and Puerto Rican families. Today, many African-Americans, and Americans of Puerto Rican descent, also have South Asian ancestors.

While it is commonly known that a wave of well-educated South Asians arrived in the United States after 1965, this earlier saga of im-migration and assimilation has largely been overlooked. Until now, that is: A new book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, by MIT assistant professor Vivek Bald, illuminates this thread of history in unprecedented detail.

“Without these stories, the history of South Asians in the U.S. is incomplete,” Bald says.

One reason the subject has particular resonance for the present day, Bald believes, is that many of the immigrants in question were Muslim. “I wanted to make clear the depth and the persistence of the South Asian presence in the U.S.,” he says, “and specifically the South Asian Muslim presence in the U.S., at a time when Muslims are being portrayed as newcomers, enemies and outsiders.”

Making Waves

The genesis of Bengali Harlem, published in January by Harvard Uni-versity Press, comes in good measure from conversations Bald had with Alaudin Ullah, a New York-based actor and playwright and the

son of Habib Ullah. Hearing about the Ullah family’s odyssey sparked Bald’s curiosity.

“I wanted to see if Alaudin’s father was just one anomalous person or part of a much larger history that we had completely overlooked,” says Bald.

After all, as he notes, “the predominant understanding of South Asian immigration to the U.S. was one in which the doors to immigra-tion closed in the late 1910’s and early ’20’s, and then opened up again in 1965,” Bald explains. Because of the way the 1965 Immigration Act was crafted, he notes, the South Asians who came to the United

States in its wake were predominantly highly skilled professionals. But Ullah’s story suggested to Bald that there was a longer history of striving, working-class South Asian immigrants in America.

Bald, who had previously made two documentary films about South Asians in the United States and Britain, launched an ambitious research project, scouring census records and historical archives, con-ducting interviews, and even locating one autobiographical account written by an Indian Muslim seaman who jumped ship in New York in 1918.

Bald found two waves of early South Asian immigration to America that had been overlooked. The first, which began in the late 1800’s, consisted of peddlers who sold embroidered goods made in their home region of Hooghly in West Bengal. Many settled in the Treme neigh-borhood of New Orleans. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, it became more common for South Asians, such as Habib Ullah, to jump ship and live in eastern and northern cities, including Baltimore and Detroit.

In the process, many Bengalis, who lived in close proximity to Af-rican-Americans and Puerto Ricans, found themselves marrying into those communities. For instance, Habib Ullah’s wife, Victoria Eche-varria Ullah, was a Puerto Rican immigrant who helped him run the family restaurant.

“This began as a story about the South Asian diaspora, but it quickly became clear that this was also a story about African-American and

The Hidden History of Bengali HarlemVivek Bald’s new book details the overlooked waves of South Asian immigrants to the U.S.

By Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office

Bald found two waves of early south asian immigration to america that had been overlooked. the first, which began in the late 1800’s, consisted of

peddlers who sold embroidered goods made in their home region of Hooghly in West Bengal; many such immigrants settled in the treme neighborhood

of new Orleans. in the 1920’s and 1930’s, it became more common for south asians, such as Habib Ullah, to jump ship and live in eastern and northern cities,

including Baltimore and detroit.

spring 2013 19

F E A T U R E S

Puerto Rican neighborhoods, and the families and friendships and communities that South Asian Muslims formed there when they were not openly welcomed into the nation,” Bald says. The trajectory of these migrants underscores “the importance of working-class com-munities of color in the larger story of immigration to the U.S.”

Crowdsourcing Future Research

Bald hopes Bengali Harlem will be read both by scholars and by a general audience. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, has called it “me-ticulously researched, movingly told, and absolutely timely.”

The book is just one element of a larger project on the topic that Bald has been pursuing. He is also collaborating with Alaudin Ullah on a documentary film on the subject, In Search of Bengali Harlem1, and has created a website where the descendants of other early South

1 bengaliharlem.com

Asian immigrants to the United States will be able to relate previously unknown stories.

“My hope is that through the book and through the documen-tary, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants will come forward to tell their stories,” Bald says.

Bald suspects there was more Bengali Muslim immigration to Detroit, among other places, than he has yet been able to document. Further detailing the history of Bengali immigrants, and in so doing providing a link to the present, will likely be a group effort.

“The project aims to provide a collectively produced digital archive for contemporary working-class and Muslim South Asian communi-ties, which have grown in the U.S. and are continuing to grow,” Bald says. “I hope it begins a larger process of recovering and documenting these groups’ historical experiences in the United States.”

Reprinted with permission of MIT News.

Photo courtesy of Habib Ullah, Jr., and Harvard University Press. Vivek Bald

20 in medias res

F E A T U R E S

“Like a diary from the forgotten past, computer code is embedded with stories of a program’s making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. Every symbol

within a program can help to illuminate these stories and open historical and critical lines of inquiry.”

— from 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

A Special Line of Code

T his collaboratively written book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the book’s title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing

and the way computer programs exist in culture. As a book title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT

Press, 2012) does not exactly roll off the tongue. But as computer code, it has the quality of concrete poetry in the eyes of Nick Montfort, associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

The lead author of the book we’ll just call 10 PRINT, Montfort iden-tifies code as a culturally significant human language, as deserving of close critical analysis as other products of culture. “No one would be startled to ask why this word was used [in literature]. Why can’t we do that with a line of code?”

Written for the Commodore 64, one of the earliest personal computers (released in 1982), 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 is a line of code in BASIC, the first widely popular programming language designed for use by non-scientists. When executed, the code randomly—and repeatedly—generates either a / or a \, filling the screen with a pattern that resembles a maze.

“The emergent complexity from this deceptively simple work is part of its interest,” says Montfort, noting that while not all code can be considered poetic, 10 PRINT is special. “I believe it is a concrete poem, a found poem. It’s a cultural artifact.”

Ten Authors on 10 Print | Co-authored Scholarship

10 PRINT the book emerged from an online workshop organized by the Critical Code Studies Group, a collaborative conference focused on applying critical theory and hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code. Invited to contribute code for discussion,

Montfort submitted the one-line 10 PRINT code, which he remem-bered from his childhood.

His post sparked a lively discussion among a wide range of experts—in art, writing, digital media, computer science, and even library science. Montfort, who previously co-authored Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), quickly recognized the potential for a book on the topic.

He therefore tapped key contributors to join him in what he terms “massively co-authored scholarship.” In total, 10 PRINT has then authors: Montfort, Patsy Baudoin (MIT Libraries liaison to the MIT Media Lab), John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas (S.M. 2001, Media Arts & Sciences),

F e a t U r e s

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10Nick Montfort and Colleagues Reveal the Stories in BASIC Code

By MIT SHASS Communications:Emily Hiestand, Editorial and Design Director, and Kathryn O’Neill, Senior Writer

spring 2013 21

F E A T U R E S

Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter (S.M. 2006, Ph.D. 2011, Media Arts & Sciences).

Even so, the book is not a collection of essays by ten different people but one coherent narration, told in one voice. “We had a wiki and wrote it together. Certain people would be lead writers for certain chapters, and there was an internal review process,” Montfort says. “It was a very complex process.”

Language That Executes

Despite the title, 10 PRINT is not a technical book of interest solely to programmers. Instead, the code is used as a launch pad for examining a wide range of humanities questions, including the role the maze in Western culture and of randomness in computing and the arts.

The authors even plumbed the depths of the code by examining it in translation—trying it out in other programming languages (a process called porting). They discovered, for example, that in some languages the characters from different lines don’t touch each other, and so no maze is formed. “This allows us to see why this is a particularly pleasing program on the Commodore,” Montfort says.

Going to such lengths to examine one small piece of code is a valuable exercise, Montfort says, because “code is a language that executes. It can have various kinds of significance, from artistic to economic to political.”

He points out that the content of code has already made headlines: for example, when the source code for Diebold voting machines was leaked and when hackers unveiled code from Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Great Britain, fueling reports that an-thropogenic climate change was a hoax.

“We’re arguing that code is culturally significant—and that larger scale models of scholarship can be brought to bear on [fundamental] questions,” Montfort says.

This work is central to the new wave of research called “digital hu-manities,” he adds. “The intersection of digital and humanities is not just in new modes of presenting scholarship, it’s not just in ways computer techniques can be used to study materials—it’s also in un-derstanding the ways computation and digital media have been trans-forming the culture.”

Suggested Links

Nick Montfortcms.mit.edu/people/#nickm

10 PRINT is available in print from MIT Press and as a free PDF through Creative Commons. Book royalties are donated to Playpower, a nonprofit that supports affordable, effective, fun learning games on inexpensive computers in the developing world:

•  mitpress.mit.edu/books/10-print-chr2055rnd1-goto-10-0

•  playpower.org

10 Print Authors

•  Nick Montfort is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT and the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009).

•  Patsy Baudoin is the MIT Libraries liaison to the MIT Media Lab.

•  John Bell is Assistant Professor of Innovative Communication Design at the University of Maine.

•  Ian Bogost is Professor of Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, and the coauthor of Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press, 2010) and other books.

•  Jeremy Douglass is a postdoctoral researcher in software studies at the University of California, San Diego, in affiliation with Calit2.

•  Mark C. Marino is Associate Professor (Teaching) and directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at the Univer-sity of Southern California.

•  Michael Mateas is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

•  Casey Reas is Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA and coauthor of Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press, 2007).

•  Mark Sample is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University.

•  Noah Vawter is a sound artist.

“the digital/humanities intersection is not just in new modes of presenting scholarship, not

just in ways computer techniques can be used to study materials—it’s also in understanding

the ways computation and digital media transform the culture.”

C M S I N T H E N E W S

22 in medias res

c M s i n t H e n e W s

seth Mnookin won the 2012 National As-sociation of Science Writers “Science in Society Award” for his book The Panic Virus, following the history of how a discredited paper nevertheless convinced thousands that vaccines cause autism. Mnookin received the award at a NASW meeting this October.

the education arcade’s partner—the Learning Games Network—received $2 million from the Gates Foundation to expand Xenos, its flagship integrated social learning environment gaming platform for adults learning English as a second language.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with the Education Arcade’s scot Osterweil about the intrusiveness of commercial apps aimed at children, in particular how they can bypass the filter of parents themselves. “You’ve now got the ability to invade the kids’ space much more aggressively than ever before,” he said.

Graduate student Molly sauter become the media’s go-to source to analyze its own por-trayals of hackers, telling the audience at South-by-Southwest Interactive how “such coverage, from Sneakers to photo galleries of Fawkes-masked Anonymous protests, in-fluences policy on subjects from intellectual

property and communications regulations to information security and cyberwar.” Most recently she published an article in The Atlan-tic’s tech blog titled, “If Hackers Didn’t Exist, Governments Would Have to Invent Them,” and in late December she appeared in Der Spiegel, which covered her talk in Hamburg on the ethics around distributed denial of service attacks.

“spacewar!”, developed at MIT and generally considered the first video game, celebrated its 50th anniversary with Philip Tan and a team of Game Lab students doing some “digital ar-cheology,” as CBS News called it, to create a public, playable version of the game’s original hardware, Digital Equipment’s PDP-1 mini-computer.

Last April, Professor and ICE Lab director Fox Harrell discussed virtual self-identities—his specialty—with WGBH’s Innovation Hub, while this January, he was included in an Artforum Top 10 list by Arthur and Marilou-ise Kroker. “[Harrell], working at the interface of the humanities and artificial intelligence, has rewritten the codes of computer gaming to combat social stigma, bias, and prejudice, as well as to reveal biographies yet untold—those still unwritten stories about the dis-appearance of identity in the digital haze of network culture.”

The Boston Globe discussed electronic fiction with nick Montfort, who praised work coming out of his field, highlighted by “The Silent History,” fiction in the form of an app that ties stories to locations, including Cam-bridge’s Central Square, while outlets from Slate to Reddit shared reviews of Montfort’s collaborative book 10 PRINT. As of early December, 10 PRINT had reached the top 1,500 books on Amazon, and the Creative Commons-licensed PDF had been download-ed over 12,000 times.

CMS alum sam Ford (’07) described to the Boston Globe the “gee-whiz shiny new object mentality” that sets companies up for disaster when they don’t understand how new tech allows untended audiences to get their hands on a message.

Less than a month after the release of his book This Is How You Lose Her, Junot díaz was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur “Genius” grant. He was also featured in a published conversation with writer Paula M.L. Moya. The two were classmates in graduate school, so the interview, published in last June’s Boston Review, is appealingly personal—and, to those outside academic discussions of fiction, a great look in.

In his hometown paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, William Uricchio praised his second home, Utrecht, and the Netherlands in general for engineering ways to be one of the happiest places on earth. “The European socialism so feared by the American Right has resulted in a nation with a first-rate infra-structure, whether in terms of public trans-portation, health and education, or industry. The Netherlands contains some of Europe’s top universities, yet tuition is next to nothing ($2,250 per year). Its medical care is among the world’s best, using a system that combines reasonably priced commercial insurance with state regulation.”

The Nieman Journalism Lab helped introduce the Open Documentary Lab. Nieman’s

The Virus. The Hacker. The Genius

c M s i n t H e n e W s

spring 2013 23

Andrew Phelps spoke with Uricchio and Doc Lab director sarah Wolozin, who told Phelps, “People are always telling the stories, I just think now we can create the campfire again because we have the Internet, because we can actually have a way to listen to other people’s stories that we didn’t have before. Before it would happen in a living room. Now it can happen in a virtual living room.”

The Princeton Review named MIT #2 for undergraduate games teaching—a cur-riculum largely developed by the Mit game lab—while Animation Career Review, in its run-down of the top 100 schools for animation, gaming, and design, ranked MIT #18 for its overall games studies environment. “MIT media grads, like almost all MIT grads, are in demand—especially in video game design jobs. [The] only catch to this program: you have to get accepted to MIT first.”

Meanwhile, the Lab’s game “a slower speed of light”—which models an intuitive way to understand special relativity—caught the media’s imagination, earning kudos from Gizmag, BoingBoing, Popular Mechanics, Discovery News, and Slashdot, among others.

clara Fernández-Vara spoke with Electron Dance as part of its series “The Academics Are Coming”. The interview covered one of

our favorite topics: how does someone turn their passion into an academic career? “I’ve realized I just changed the subject of study, from theatre and film to games, and brought all my methods along,” Fernández-Vara said. “I focus on story-driven games because of my literary background, and work on adventure games because it is one of my favorite genres, and I know how to design and program them best. So basically I wanted to stay in academia, having a subject of study that was challenging and engaging. Although I have less resources than I’d have working in the industry, staying in academia gives me the liberty to make games about themes and using mechanics that commercial games would usually not tackle.”

ian condry helped Wired understand the phenomenon that is Hatsune Miku, the in-fluential Japanese pop star who is, in fact, entirely virtual. His course on Japanese pop culture includes a section on Miku, with Condry describing her to Wired as “a platform people can build on. She becomes a tool of connection who, through people’s par-ticipation, comes alive.”

parmesh shahani was named by the Financial Times one of “25 Indians to Watch”. A CMS grad, he leads an innovation lab at Godrej group, an Indian conglomerate.

Following Hurricane Sandy, the New York Times spoke with sasha costanza-chock about new models of disaster preparedness, including the quickly-organized “Hurricane Hackers” event. “We were looking at ways to support and build together, even people from a distance,” Costanza-Chock said. “Disaster preparedness is about more than stocking up on bottled water, packaged meals and fresh batteries. It’s also a matter of pooling technical resources to solve the problems that can arise quickly, like how to move supplies to those in need and relay reliable information about shelters and food.”

Also in the Times, Sam Roberts featured the new book by Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, in his December 29th review of best new titles. The New York Daily News followed up in January with a more detailed piece, including an interview with Bald and photos used in his book.

In November, Movienews.ie reported that Sony Pictures had chosen a director to lead production on “Seasons”, part of the 1985 sci-fi short story collection Dealing In Futures by Joe Haldeman.

For CMS updates, including all of the past semester’s podcasts and videos, visit cms.mit.edu/news.

From the MIT Game Lab’s “A Slower Speed of Light”.

R E S E A R C H G R O U P U P D A T E S

24 in medias res

I t was an amazing and busy semester at the center for civic Media—espe-cially for CMS students. Continuing to develop its group-based mobile sto-

rytelling platform, the Vojo team organized workshops and webinars. Denise Cheng and Rogelio Lopez co-facilitated workshops with Cambridge Community Television, while Alex Gonçalves promoted meetings and talks with Boston’s Brazilian community.

Other initiatives also thrived. Lopez spent time with DREAMtech, a network where undocumented immigrants can share skills, collaborate, and coordinate efforts towards media and technology projects, problems, or interests.

In addition to her compelling work on Dis-tributed Denial of Service actions in activism, Molly Sauter helped to organize an upcoming workshop on digital activism in the develop-ing world, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, in late February. Sun Huan has been engaged in the Global Brand Study, a com-parison of Chinese and English speakers’ perceptions of the twenty most populous countries. She has also been working on a project mapping out the NGO networks on Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging service.

Chris Peterson engaged undergraduates in the Center’s work. In addition to his partici-pation in the Mapping Banned Books project, he also became involved with Hurricane Hackers and helped coordinate the local Cri-sisCamp held at the Media Lab.

The Center has been in the news too. Cheng wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times on the growing case for literacy in the face of information overload. Rodrigo Davies’ essay on the impact of Internet memes on the 2012 presidential election campaign was published by the Indian think tank Centre for Internet and Society, and he was interviewed by the UK’s Sky News on the same topic, while Gonçalves was interviewed by two Brazilian local radio stations about Vojo.

civic.mit.edu

T he education arcade continues to explore ways in which educators can use

games to support instruction. With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a team is busy building a virtual world—the Radix Endeavor—that will serve as the basis for a massively multi-player online game where high school students will explore math and science concepts. CMS students Eduardo Marisca Alvarez, Steve Schirra, and Lingyuxiu Zhong have been drafting the game’s narrative that will provide the context for students’ experience. Other team members have been diligently refining the game design, building and testing both paper and digital prototypes.

Initial feedback from local high school students and teachers has been encouraging yet informative. The team has worked hard to integrate concerns and suggestions into the general game design as well as the building of specific quests tied to the relevant Common Core State Standards in math and Next Generation Science Standards in biology. The Radix team is excited to send partner Filament Games into full production mode starting in late January in preparation for late spring player testing.

A new partnership with the Hewlett Foundation kicks off this spring. Central to the partnership is the question of how ap-proaches to teaching and learning that have been shown to successfully promote deeper learning make their way into an education-al system. “Deeper Learning: A convening to explore deeper learning models—past, present, and future” will bring together a small group of educators, content develop-ers, researchers, and public policy experts to examine existing models of deeper learning materials and curricula as a basis for imagining how such materials might be

brought to scale and succeed in the current educational environment that is geared more than ever toward standardized curriculum and assessments. Specifically, the team will explore three factors that will influence the eventual achievement of deeper learning goals:

1. Ecology of schools including content and resource distribution, adoption, and usage

2. Deeper learning models that have worked on a small scale

3. Technological innovations that may facili-tate future systemic change.

A January Game Jam with partners BrainPOP and the Learning Games Network, brought together teachers and game designers to address the prospect of games as assess-ment. The game jam sparked some great yet challenging conversations, brainstorming, and ultimately resulted in two promising ideas. The Education Arcade looks forward to helping to push the envelope on this issue that continues to be a challenge for the game-based learning field.

educationarcade.org

MIT CENTER FOR

CIVIC MEDIA

Image from Radix.

spring 2013 25

R E S E A R C H G R O U P U P D A T E S

M IT has established new game research facilities in the Karl Taylor Compton Labora-tories (Building 26), where

MIT’s first computer game, “Spacewar!”, was developed fifty years ago. The Mit game lab inaugurated its premises with a symposium on September 21st, “Games in Everyday Life and Why That Matters to You”. The symposium brought together academics, students, and professionals from varied industries such as games, healthcare, and finance to discuss the role of research in game development and vice versa. Since then, the MIT Game Lab has been busy with developing OpenRelativity, an open source engine for creating relativis-tic effects in 3D environments and will soon be releasing Spacewarduino!, a port of the original Spacewar! to the Arduino Uno and Gameduino platform. In January, the MIT Game Lab hosted the Global Game Jam for the fifth time, this year partnering with the Education Arcade and the Learning Games Network, to help over a hundred partici-pants create twenty seven games in a single weekend. Games created to bring light to a political, environmental, or social issue will also be featured at the Games for Change website (MIT was one of 10 sites around the world dedicated to helping participants un-derstand and create games for learning and games for change).

gamelab.mit.edu

H yperstudio is developing “An-notation Studio,” a web-based annotation application that in-tegrates a powerful set of textual

interpretation tools behind an interface that makes using those tools intuitive for un-dergraduates. Building on students’ new media literacies, this open-source applica-tion develops traditional humanistic skills including close reading, persuasive writing, and critical thinking. Initial features of the Annotation Studio prototype, supported

by an NEH Start-Up Grant, include aligned multi-media annotation of written texts, user-defined sharing of annotations, and grouping of annotation by self-defined tags to support interpretation and argument de-velopment. In the implementation phase of this project, we will add functionality that supports document versioning and juxtaposi-tion; cross-document annotation; exporting texts with annotations; annotation of image, video, and audio documents; annotation vi-sualization and navigation; and a media re-pository that allows users to create special-ized collections. We will also identify best practices among faculty using Annotation Studio in a broad range of humanities classes across the country.

The project is defined by its user-driven design—developed in an ongoing conversa-tion with faculty and students—and its focus on advancing humanities pedagogy.

Annotation Studio brings the humanistic tradition of annotation into contemporary electronic media, with an emphasis on its role in the classroom and its extension into digital space. Students using Annotation Studio will develop new approaches to critical thinking while honing the foundational skills of close reading, writing, and humanities research.

hyperstudio.mit.edu

S ince its public debut with the New Arts of Documentary Summit last March, MIT’s Open documen-tary lab has been busy conducting

research, advancing scholarship, experiment-ing with new documentary forms, offering courses, and collaborating with institutions in the field of digital storytelling. The Lab presented its work at the Sundance Film Festival, South by Southwest, the Camden In-ternational Film Festival, the National Film Board of Canada, and the International Docu-mentary Festival Amsterdam (among others), and in November, it launched Moments of In-novation (momentsofinnovation.mit.edu)

to rave reviews. CMS students Katie Edgerton and Julie Fischer took part in the Creating Critics program at the Sundance Film Festival, a collaboration between our Lab, Sundance’s New Frontier program, and Indiewire to train new critics to write about emerging digital storytelling in the context of film festivals. You can see their work at Indiewire.com. The Lab’s speaker series has included documentarians and industry professionals such as Jigar Mehta (18 Days in Egypt), the production team behind the Tribeca Film Institute award-winning project Hollow, and Stephanie Pereira, Art Program Director for the crowdfunding site Kick-starter. Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Katerina Cizek and Gerry Flahive (of the collaborative documentary Highrise) visited MIT for a week, and Cizek will return next year as a visiting artist. OpenDocLab col-laborators Christine Walley and Chris Boebel continue to work on their cross-media project ExitZero, and Vivek Bald is completing his interactive project Bengali Harlem, a patici-patory database documentary. OpenDocLab co-principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock and his Vojo mobile storytelling tool team partnered with Housing Is a Human Right and participatory storytelling website Cowbird to record the personal narratives of people affected by Hurricane Sandy. The resulting participatory documentary, Sandy Storyline, is online and growing.

opendoclab.mit.edu

T he fall 2012 semester was a produc-tive one in the imagination, com-putation, and expression labora-tory (ICE Lab), as we launched and

refined ongoing projects, expanded develop-ment within the NSF-supported Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project, and prepared to publicly release several existing works on the web for the first time.

Our team grew in the fall, as we welcomed new graduate researchers Dominic Kao

p r O J e c t U p d a t e s

R E S E A R C H G R O U P U P D A T E S

26 in medias res

(EECS Ph.D.) and Erica Deahl (CMS S.M.), and project manager Mikael Jakobsson, Ph.D., into the lab. With this semester’s infusion of new energy, we were able to make strides on multiple projects. An updated version of the Living Liberia Fabric—an interactive narrative memorial for the victims of Liberia’s fourteen-year civil war—will be presented at the 19th Annual International Symposium for Electronic Art, to be held in Sydney in June. As part of the ongoing AIR Project, we released a public beta of Mimesis—an inter-active narrative game exploring subjective phenomena associated with subtle, everyday acts of social discrimination. You can play it here: icelab.mit.edu/mimesis.

Over the coming months we’ll be postinh public versions of several interactive narrative and poetry generation projects.

icelab.mit.edu

T he trope tank remained immersed in creative computing and the material, formal, and histori-cal aspects of computation and

language, supporting development of a Hayden Library exhibit “Games by the Book” that visiting scholar Clara Fernández-Vara curated. The Lab also provided equipment for exhibits at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery and the MLA Convention. Last semester also saw the start of a major new Trope Tank research project in computational creativity, Slant, a story generator integrating elements of the GRIOT system for conceptual blending and narrative generation (by Fox Harrell of the ICE Lab), the plot generator MEXICA (by visiting scholar Professor Rafael Pérez y Pérez of UAM-Cuajimalpa), and the interac-tive fiction and interactive narrating system Curveship (by Lab director Nick Montfort). The Lab also supported the completion and hosting of 10 PRINT and continues to support new investigations in MIT Press’s Platform Studies series, edited by Montfort and Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech. Those interested in the material history of computing and video games are welcome to contact Montfort to access the Lab’s collection of systems, con-trollers, displays, and software.

trope-tank.mit.edu

F or the past several years, the Mobile experience lab has been exploring various ways that emerging forms of media

can be used to create meaningful ex-periences between people and spaces. One of the foremost examples of this has been the Locast project, which is focused on using location-aware web and mobile applications to enable new types of mediated interaction with social and cultural topics. Locast projects are designed to encourage the consump-tion and production of media content as people travel through physical space and have been implemented within a wide variety of domains such as tourism, civic engagement, nutrition, and social sustainability.

In the past year, the Mobile Experi-ence Lab designed and implemented two additional Locast projects: Memory Traces and the UNICEF Youth-led Digital Mapping project. Memory Traces (locast.mit.edu/memory) is an interactive documentary based around the memories and experiences of Ital-ian-Americans in Boston. The project was done in collaboration with the Italian Consulate of Boston in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy.

Memory Traces consists of high-quality clips taken from interviews with twenty seven prominent Italian-Americans in the Boston area, such as Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, Larry Luccino, President and CEO of the Boston Red Sox, and Catherine D’Amato, President and CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank. Each clip is based around a specific memory tied to a location in the city and is visualized on a map-based interface.

The UNICEF Youth-led Digital Mapping Project was developed using a similar platform as Memory Traces but purposed towards a much different end: to be used by UNICEF during mapping workshops in the favelas of Rio De Janeiro. These workshops trained youth community members to use the Locast-based web platform and companion mobile application in order to create geo-tagged photographs about various types of risks present in the favelas, such as sanitation

issues and walking hazards.The Mobile Experience Lab is also working

with Alcatel-Lucent to create a class around real-time video, which will involve the design and development of demos and prototype ap-plications using a web-based video platform developed by Alcatel-Lucent.

And last, the Sustainable Connected Home: as the physical structure of the home is finished, work has been progressing on the communication aspects—the home contains various controllable components, most notably a window-façade composed of numerous actuated windows. A web-based control system is being implemented in parallel with a mobile interface. This system will allow inhabitants to adjust the tem-perature, light levels, privacy and airflow of the house—in this way, the Sustainable Connected Home is designed not just to be sustainable in its construction, but also to promote sustainable living by providing automated and intelligent systems to help minimize energy usage.

mobile.mit.edu

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Feb 7 | 5:00 PM | E14-633Nostalgia for a Not-So-Distant Youth: Digital Games and Affect in Urban ChinaMarcella szablewicz, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies, discusses the first Chinese generation to come of age with the Internet and how online games have come to form an integral part of the youth experience.

Feb 19 | 5:00 PM | E14-633 | Communications ForumConvergence Journalism? Emerging Documentary and Multimedia Forms of NewsHybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, docu-mentary film, and digital video are a notable feature of today’s online journalism. How is this access to the power of the visual changing our journalism? Jason spingarn-koff is series producer of Op-Docs, an initiative at the New York Times for short documentaries. alexandra garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post.

Feb 28 | 5:00 PM | Bartos Theater | Communications ForumA Conversation with Nate SilverThe 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.

Mar 7 | 5:00 PM | E14-633Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle Against Irony, Letterman and Leyner?d.t. Max, staff writer at the New Yorker, will look at David Foster Wallace and irony, with an eye especially on his 1990’s attacks on David Letterman and the novelist Mark Leyner. When did David Foster Wallace become obsessed with irony and why? What made him so sure it was corrosive to civil culture or initiative?

Mar 14 | 5:00 PM | E14-633The Pain of Playing Video GamesIn video games, as in tragic works of art, we want to experience un-pleasantness even if we also dislike it. Jesper Juul (NYU Game Center and author of The Art of Failure) argues that the paradox of failure pervades games on many levels. The issue of failure is also central to recurring controversies of what games can, or should be, about.

Mar 21 | 5:00 PM | E14-633 | Communications ForumMOOCs and the Emerging Digital ClassroomOnline learning could disrupt traditional classroom education—or help us better exploit learning spaces. This Forum examines the migration of analog practices into digital forms, looking at how digital technologies are transforming teaching and learning both on and off campus. Features anant agarwal (edX), alison Byerly (Middlebury College and MIT), and daphne koller (Stanford University).

Apr 4 | 5:00 PM | 4-231The Cultural Feedback of Noisedavid novak of UC-Santa Barbara with look at the cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances of noise and how it captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, despite remaining deeply underground.

Apr 11 | 5:00 PM | E14-633 | Communications ForumThe Press in Modern Political CampaignsSome commentators have argued that new truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future? ta-nehisi coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle, and political advisor Mark Mckinnon will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S.

Apr 18 | 5:00 PM | 4-231Size Is Only Half the Story: Valuing the Dimensionality of BIG DATAMary 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”.

Apr 25 | 5:00 PM | 4-231Film Preservation in the Age of DigitalityMuch of the general public believes that every film and television program ever made has already been digitized. But digitization is still massively expensive, there is no such thing as a digital preserva-tion medium, and even the migration of digital films is fraught with technical difficulties, says chris Horak Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

May 9 | 5:00 PM | 4-23110 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 1010 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 was an unusual project in several respects. The book focuses on a single line of now-unfa-miliar code of the sort that millions typed and modified in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The book contributes to several threads of contemporary digital media scholarship, including critical code studies, software studies, and platform studies. The book was written in a single voice by ten people. The writing of 10 PRINT is offered as a new mode of scholarship, very suitable in digital media but capable of being applied throughout the humanities. Co-authors, including CMS professor nick Montfort will discuss the nature of their collaboration.

A May 16 talk is still to be confirmed. A current schedule, including conferences and special events, is available at cms.mit.edu/events.

Miss an event? Catch up at cms.mit.edu/podcast.

Spring 2013 Talks

may 3-5 at mit

CaLL For papersAttendance is freePaper submissions accepted until March 1cms.mit.edu/mit8-papers

Take up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity. New notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, the underly-ing concerns are rooted in deep historical practice. Consider the ways media challenge or reinforce notions of the public or the private and the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between.

possibLe topiCs inCLude•  Media traces: cookies, GPS data, TiVo, and Kindle tracking•  The paradoxes of celebrity and the public persona•  Representing anxieties of the private in film, TV, literature•  MMORPGs / identities / virtual publics•  Private consumption in public places•  Historical media panics regarding the private-public divide•  When cookies shape content, what happens to the public?•  Creative commons and the new public sphere•  Big data and privacy•  Party lines and two-way radio: amplifying the private•  The fate of public libraries in the era of digital services•  Methodologies of Internet and privacy studies•  Creative commons, free software, and the new public sphere•  Public and civic WiFi access to the Internet•  Surveillance, monitoring and their (dis)contents

MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific attention to textual practice, users, policy and cultural implications. We encourage work from across media forms and across historical periods and cultural regions.

apriL 15 &16 at mit

disCount ends 1/31Early-bird registration, $595After Jan. 31, $695sandboxsummit.org

The 2013 Sandbox Summit@MIT will delve into the ways imagination shapes ideas both in and out of the digital world. From a simple line drawing to conceptualizing in the fourth dimension, the way content is envisioned, presented, and received affects the way kids play, learn, and communicate. Is it a product or a pixel that launches creative thinking? Does a virtual space have the same impact as a physical place? Can imagination be collaborative?

At Sandbox Summit, questions are the new answers.

Keynote speaKerAndy Clayman, Creative DirectorAvenues: The World School

When Andy Clayman joined founders Benno Schmidt, Chris Whittle and Alan Greenberg in 2009 as Creative Director of Avenues, the school had a long list of “didn’t have’s”.

What it did have was a discriminating parent body being asked to entrust their most prized possessions to a school that did not yet exist. After hundreds of hours observing curriculum and attending building design sessions, Clayman became a major contributor to the thinking that would become Avenues: The World School. The result was not only an effective marketing and branding campaign interpreted across multiple media, but a way to translate and introduce creativity to the school, making it an integral part of its culture.

Clayman’s insights will illustrate the importance of building creativity into any product—especially one for children—from the foundation up.

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Have a personal update for the CMS community? Let us know at cms@mit.edu, and stay in touch professionally through our 600-member-strong LinkedIn group: cms.mit.edu/linkedin.

Faculty, Scholars, and Lecturers

ivan abarca is working on two articles drawn from his Ph.D. dissertation. They both address cognitive and political dimen-sions of the Mexican presidential campaign of 2000. One focuses on the implications and inferences that a religious artifact had in the election. The second explores the images of historical figures and cultural narratives in the same campaign.

nancy Baym joined the faculty of CMS as Visiting Professor and Microsoft Research New England as Principal Researcher. She published a new open-access article in Participations on audience/artist relation-ships, “Fans or Friends?: Seeing Audiences as Musicians Do”. With danah boyd she co-edited a first-time-ever open access special issue of the Journal of Broadcasting and Elec-tronic Media on the topic of socially-mediated publicness, “Socially-Mediated Publicness” and gave the opening plenary at Brazil’s ABCiber conference.

ian condry’s new book The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story came out January 29th (see p. 13). The book explores anime’s global success from an ethnographic perspective, focusing on anime studios in Tokyo and the ways fictional characters become creative platforms connecting manga, animation, toys, and fan productions. The book’s in-troduction is available for free on Scribd: cms.mit.edu/soul-of-anime.

laura Forlano received a grant from the Urban Communication Foundation on “Designing Digital Networks for Urban

Public Space” last June, while the month prior, she presented, “Designing in the Wild: Amplifying Creative Communities in North Brooklyn,” co-authored with Lara Penin and Eduardo Staszowski at Cumulus (Helsinki, Finland) and participated in a workshop and panel discussion on “Research and In-novation in the Culture Field,” at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Laura is writing up the results of her National Science Foundation-funded research on design collaboration, which includes over sixty interviews with designers and design educators in the United States, Spain, Canada, and Australia. The research includes papers on digital materiality, design pedagogy, critique as collaboration, and changing professional identities in design. More details about this project can be found at designingorganizations.org.

Joe Haldeman finished writing his latest novel, Work Done for Hire. It will appear in about a year from Ace Books. He has just begun his next novel, Phobos Mean Fear, and a story collection, The Best of Joe Haldeman, will be out soon.

gretchen e. Henderson published a new novel, The House Enters the Street (Starche-rone Books). At the 2013 Modern Language Association conference, she delivered two papers on the Galerie de Difformité and Dis-ability Studies.

This past fall, she was invited to speak at the NY Art Book Fair at PS1/MoMA and to give the keynote address for a symposium at the Five Colleges on “Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Age of E-Books” (whose ac-companying exhibit featured the Galerie de Difformité as well as work from MIT by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, Amaranth Borsuk, Jie Qi, and Natalie Freed).

New creative and critical writings have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Ploughshares, Eleven Eleven, At Length, and the art history anthology, Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (Tauris). Gretchen will be teaching a course on “The

Literary Hybrid” at this summer’s Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop.

kelley kreitz and her husband Weston Smith welcomed their son, Theodor Albert Kreitz Smith, on January 15th. He arrived healthy and is now doing well at home. Kelley spent the winter break alternating between writing and adjusting to parenthood.

In December, seth Mnookin finally moved from a rental in Cambridge across the river to Brookline. It proved to be somewhat more exciting than anticipated: within two weeks, a sewer line leaked in the basement. Other than that, he is working on designing a new course on 21st century journalism that hopefully will debut in the fall. He is also continuing work on developing strategies to confront vaccine hesitancy and skepticism and is working on what he hopes will be a new book project about genetic diseases.

This semester, nick Montfort will teach 21W.750 Experimental Writing and a new treatment of the CMS.951 Workshop II course, focused on using programming to explore, sketch, and think about questions in the arts and humanities. He is serving this academic year as associate head of CMS/WHS, helping Jim Paradis with the newly merged program by working with the unit’s writing groups. In early 2013 he’ll be present-ing about the 10 PRINT book and program, about his creative work, and on other topics at Microsoft Research in Redmond, UW-Both-ell, UCLA, USC, Vassar, Rutgers, the AWP conference, the Library of Congress, and the University of Maine, leading up to the May 9th CMS Colloquium presentation with several 10 PRINT collaborators.

thea singer’s article “The Vitamin D Complex,” an exploration of the latest research on whether Vitamin D supple-ments can help those suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), appeared in the September 27th issue of Nature Outlook, a supplement of Nature. Her

Personal Updates

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article “Cholesterol Confusion,” about a new study showing that a protein may turn “good” cholesterol “bad,” appeared in the September issue of Scientific American.

Her most recent dance criticism for the Boston Globe includes a review of the Boston Ballet’s new “Nutcracker” at the Boston Opera House, an October review of Anna Myer’s “Hoop Suite” at the Institute of Con-temporary Art, and a July review of choreog-rapher Rashaun Mitchell’s restaging of Merce Cunningham’s “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run,” and a presentation of Mitchell’s own work in progress, “Interface”.

She served as moderator of a panel discuss-ing the film “Let’s Dance!” (Norma Produc-tions) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival in November.

Around her book Stress Less (Viking/Hudson St. Press 2012), Singer was an invited Speaker at the General Session of the Annual Conference of Geriatric Care Managers, Western Region. The topic was “The Science Connecting Stress, Aging, and Health”.

On-leave doesn’t mean off duty…this fall, William Uricchio gave the opening keynote on the topic of demand creation and the digital archive at eCommons3 in Amsterdam. Other highlights include keynotes at the Impakt Festival (on the ecosystem of trans-national television formats), the Salzburg Seminar (on the implications of media change for American Studies), and DREAM [Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials] (on media and memory institutions). He gave the Lecture of Excel-lence in Denmark on the algorithmic turn in culture and a series of lectures at various Danish universities.

The Open Doc Lab’s Moments of Innova-tion opened as an installation at the Inter-national Documentary Festival Amsterdam, where he also gave several lectures. Thanks to the magic of broadcasting, his keynote at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal on the future of the documentary form reached colleagues from coast-to-coast. William is spending the spring semester at the institute for advanced study at Goettingen University (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), ensconced in Gauss’s early 19th century observatory and writing about television.

lydia Volaitis was certified as a Restorative Justice Facilitator, in a course sponsored by MIT’s Office of Student Citizenship during IAP. Restorative justice has been gaining ground in university settings as an effective process for resolving conflict among harmed persons, from cases ranging from student misconduct to policy violations. As an alter-native to conventional—and often punitive—process, Volaitis strongly advocates re-storative justice when addressing cases of academic integrity.

christopher Weaver rebuilt a shed, contrib-uted a chapter to Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked World, was a subject of Gamers at Work, and wrote a chapter in Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques and Frameworks.

He is currently preparing for his upcoming spring term class on Media Industries and Systems.

Graduate Students

rodrigo davies has been working on the development of a web platform for building telephone-based (IVR) services like the acclaimed hotline New Day New Standard, and will be implementing it over the course of the spring semester.

Last semester his essay on the impact of Internet memes on the 2012 presidential election campaign was published by the Indian think tank Centre for Internet and Society, and he was interviewed by the UK’s Sky News on the same topic. His current research focuses on crowdfunding as a form of civic participation and a means of democ-ratizing public planning processes.

ayse gursoy has been busy with her thesis work on the development of video game criticism but has recently taken time to hop over to North Carolina for a conference on data curation.

At HyperStudio, she is continuing her work on Annotation Studio—reaching out and supporting faculty with the tool.

In ICE Lab, she contributed to Chimera, the product of last semester’s new ICE Lab Studio course. In other news, she recently partici-pated in her first Global Game Jam right here at MIT, and her team’s game can be found at globalgamejam.org/2013/field-view.

chris peterson has been continuing his important work mapping delicious ham-burgers at BurgerMap.org, buying scented candles by the dozen at Target, and seeing how many things he can order off Amazon Prime before his family and friends stage a desperate intervention. He still plans to graduate this coming spring, assuming he can improbably pass, like Gandalf, through a literal hell mountain of used books and Scrivener drafts to turn in his thesis on time.

Alumni

r.J. Bain (S.M., CMS, ’04) is now Co-Execu-tive Producer on Reelz Channel’s new reality series Beverly Hills Pawn, which is scheduled to begin airing in the spring of 2013.

Jim Bizzocchi (S.M., CMS, ’01) is now tenured at Simon Fraser University and has begun his sabbatical year.

For the 2012 fall semester he decided to re-visit his intellectual roots with six weeks at CMS. The essence of MIT hasn’t changed at all, he said. “The place is still an intellec-tual firehose, with more ideas and intellectual events than one could possibly keep up with. The CMS core philosophy hasn’t changed either, but the program certainly has grown! I was impressed with all of it—the original and the new faculty members, the merger with Writing, the continued excellence in teaching, the explosion of the research agenda, and in particular, the quality of the CMS graduate students.”

He spent the rest of the fall at USC, recon-necting with CMS founder Henry Jenkins.

“He hasn’t lost a thing—I felt like a bright young grad student again—but with no papers to write! Intellectual heaven. Henry, USC, the Cinema School, the Annenberg In-novation Lab, and the L.A. scene made for a great overall experience.” His plans for the next eight months are to do some scholarly writing, to reconnect with his own grad students, and mostly to dive into his own video art. “It’s time to be a filmmaker once again.”

kevin driscoll (S.M., CMS, ’09) is in the middle of his fourth year as Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California.

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He passed his qualifying exams and earned the dubious “ABD” distinction. His disserta-tion project offers an alternative history of the Internet that emphasizes the cultural and technical contributions of hobbyists, espe-cially the users and administrators of FidoNet BBSes. (He would love to hear from anyone with related personal experiences to share.)

He also recently published an article that may be of interest to the CMS community titled, “From Punched Cards to ‘Big Data’: A Social History of Database Populism.” It article appeared in the first issue of communi-cation +1, a new open-access journal.

Since completing his final semester last spring, garret Fitzpatrick (S.M., Science Writing, ’12) traveled to India to work a summer writing internship at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

In Bangalore, he composed freelance articles about the Indian space program and met with leaders in academia, government, and industry. After the internship, he traveled for three weeks, mainly in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Upon returning to the United States, he drove from Boston to San Francisco, stopped in Chicago to see family and propose to his girlfriend (who said yes), and explored 5,000 miles of American highway.

Shortly after arriving in the Bay Area, he and his fiancée found an apartment, and he resumed working for NASA (he had been on one year of academic leave to come to MIT) at the Ames Research Center. He is now the Project Engineer on a cell biology payload which will be launching to the International Space Station in 2014.

Brian r. Jacobson (S.M., CMS, ’05) began a new position as Lecturer of Film Studies and Director of Postgraduate Taught Studies at the University of St. Andrews.

His dissertation (USC, 2011) has been awarded this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award, and he is currently revising it as a book entitled Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technol-ogy, and Early Cinema. He is also working on new projects about the history of indus-trial filmmaking in France, architecture and animation, and early cinema in contempo-rary film/video art.

geoffrey long (S.M., CMS, ’07) and his wife Laura are proud to announce the arrival of their first child, Zoe Eowyn Long. In much less important news, Geoff published an essay, “(Sp)reading Digital Comics”, as one of the online companion pieces to Spreadable Media from Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, and the release of the first two books in the Playful Thinking series Geoff is co-editing for MIT Press with William Uricchio and Jesper Juul is imminent.

In his day job in the Narrative Design team at Microsoft Studios, Geoff is still working on things he can’t tell you about yet.

After finishing her internship with the Annals of Improbable Research, lauren Maurer (S.M., Science Writing, ’12) is staying on part-time as AIR’s Master of E-Bookery—converting both current and back issues of the magazine into e-book format—as well as having a hand (or two) in the Ig Nobel Awards ceremony this September.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Lauren got engaged to her longtime boyfriend and fellow “Doctor Who” enthusiast Noel Trew, and they are living together in Colorado Springs, where Noel is a professor at the Air Force Academy.

When not doing Things Improbable, Lauren is freelancing, and aiming to continue pursuing her interest in psychedelic research, which she explored for her thesis. She’ll be attending the Second International Psyche-delic Science conference in Oakland in April.

karen schrier (S.M., CMS, ’05) and her husband moved to Pleasant Valley, NY, just before she gave birth to a daughter, Alyssa Leia, born on August 20th.

She is an Assistant Professor at Marist College, where she helped develop the new major in Media Studies and Production. She is leading the interactive media/games con-centration in that major.

It has been a whirlwind of activity for parmesh shahani (S.M., CMS, ’05). His think tank has been getting resonance globally and in India. It organized a one-day-only pop–up museum—that blew the city away. He was pleasantly surprised to be named a Financial Times UK “25 Indians to Watch” for his work on innovation in India. He was also selected as the Utrecht University Impakt Fellow and

gave a series of talks there, managing to hang out with CMS/Utrecht professor William Uricchio.

kenrick Vezina (S.M., Science Writing, ’07) is a writer and editor with The Genetic Literacy Project, a website dedicated to helping science trump ideology on all matters genetic. He’s also freelancing as a science writer, editor, and educator in the Boston area. He dreams of opening a natural history museum.

Staff

clara Fernández-Vara and rik eberhardt produced with Boston Indies the Boston Festival of Indie Games on the MIT campus near the new Game Lab offices. Over two thousand people came to play games chosen for the festival by a top-notch crew of curator judges (including folks from The Education Arcade, Game Lab, and Trope Tank as well as other local game developers and academics). They are currently gearing up for another (bigger) festival next fall.

shannon larkin spent her free time in the fall and early winter singing, as usual: she sang with the Orpheus Singers and the Handel and Haydn Society and appeared as a soloist in the Arcadia Players’ performance of Messiah.

In the spring, she will be part of a concert with the Labyrinth Choir, in which they will collaborate with the MIT Ballroom Dance Team and an organist and violinist in a chamber recital.

andrew Whitacre continues to develop some home improvement skills, finally remem-bering, after painful failures, to turn off the power before replacing fixtures. He has also begun to hand-make furniture (as long as it’s all right angles) and to experiment with Arduino, with two projects in mind: to heat pasta while using a waterproof thermometer to activate an .mp3 of a James Brown “h’yow!” to let him know the water in boiling, and building that flame-throwing Jack-o’-lantern he saw on Instructables.

His wife is an archivist at Boston College, where professors she advises are looking into possible uses of HyperStudio’s Annotation Studio tool.

They live in Arlington, close to many MIT colleagues and Blue Ribbon BBQ.

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