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    Transition. It’s a recurring word at CMS. Transition is prominent in the title of one of our core graduate courses, in our biennial conferences (the Media in Transition series), and in the media developments that we study. Transition—in our cultural practices, our media technologies, our dreams and expectations—is the dynamic that gives CMS its relevance. It sounds great, of course, but sometimes it hits close to home in unexpected ways. This is the first issue of In Medias Res to appear without Henry Jenkins as CMS co-director—as tough a transition as there is. Our conjoined directorship of the program now broken, this page is no longer graced with Henry’s smiling face. He has made the transition to the Pacific coast, where he is now Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC—but more on that on page 8. Fortunately, consistent with the transit in the Latin root of transition, Henry will make regular trips back to CMS throughout the academic year, assuring that the change is not too traumatic. It’s also the first time in ten years that we will not expose a new class of first-year graduate students to the wonders of CMS and the bemused gazes of their returning second-year cohorts. The program needs time to reassess, rehire, and reboot, while at the same time maintaining the status quo in academic programs, research projects, and outreach activities for the coming year. Although we are planning to again accept applications in fall of 2010 (for admission in fall 2011), this hiatus serves as a reminder of the nature of university programs, where the continuity of change is evident in the cycle of admissions and graduations. The class of ’09 has just about made it out the door, joining the ranks of CMS alumni who are out there making a difference in the production studio, the classroom, the field, and consulting office, whether located in the US or abroad. And the class of ’10 has returned to the Institute, armed with the experiences of the summer, many of them chronicled in this issue of In Medias Res. These comings and goings open up numerous portals through which we can explore the transitional state so endemic to our media practices. The cover story of this issue of In Medias Res, derived from Audubon Dougherty’s fieldwork in rural Peru as that country gets connected, speaks eloquently to this situation—and the CMS role in it (thanks, Audubon!). It can be seen in the pioneering game development of GAMBIT and The Education Arcade; in the Convergence Culture Consortium’s interrogation of transmedia story telling and spreadability; in the Center for Future Civic Media’s intervention into the fast-changing civic mediascape; the HyperStudio’s continuing transformation of platforms and interfaces for research and teaching in the humanities; and in Project New Media Literacies' bi-coastal status, as it prepares to shift operations to USC. Heraclitus of Ephesus observed that the only constant is change. And while change is an essential component of transition, transition implies more—a direction, becoming, a move from one thing to something else. The notions of a static end point and teleological certainty don’t square well with Heraclitus’s words. Nor are they implied by the developmental logics of transition. As CMS moves into its tenth year, change—dramatic change—is certainly ongoing. But that change has logic, and the direction of the program’s transition can be found in the new faculty who are joining our community, in the ongoing research activities of our various projects, in the ever-growing network of alumni and advocates who carry on the CMS cause, and even in the emergence of CMS-West. This issue of In Medias Res charts those activities—connect the dots, and you’ll map the contours of a CMS very much in transition.

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    Transition. It’s a recurring word at CMS. Transition is prominent in the title of one of our core graduate courses, in our biennial conferences (the Media in Transition series), and in the media developments that we study. Transition—in our cultural practices, our media technologies, our dreams and expectations—is the dynamic that gives CMS its relevance. It sounds great, of course, but sometimes it hits close to home in unexpected ways. This is the first issue of In Medias Res to appear without Henry Jenkins as CMS co-director—as tough a transition as there is. Our conjoined directorship of the program now broken, this page is no longer graced with Henry’s smiling face. He has made the transition to the Pacific coast, where he is now Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC—but more on that on page 8. Fortunately, consistent with the transit in the Latin root of transition, Henry will make regular trips back to CMS throughout the academic year, assuring that the change is not too traumatic. It’s also the first time in ten years that we will not expose a new class of first-year graduate students to the wonders of CMS and the bemused gazes of their returning second-year cohorts. The program needs time to reassess, rehire, and reboot, while at the same time maintaining the status quo in academic programs, research projects, and outreach activities for the coming year. Although we are planning to again accept applications in fall of 2010 (for admission in fall 2011), this hiatus serves as a reminder of the nature of university programs, where the continuity of change is evident in the cycle of admissions and graduations. The class of ’09 has just about made it out the door, joining the ranks of CMS alumni who are out there making a difference in the production studio, the classroom, the field, and consulting office, whether located in the US or abroad. And the class of ’10 has returned to the Institute, armed with the experiences of the summer, many of them chronicled in this issue of In Medias Res. These comings and goings open up numerous portals through which we can explore the transitional state so endemic to our media practices. The cover story of this issue of In Medias Res, derived from Audubon Dougherty’s fieldwork in rural Peru as that country gets connected, speaks eloquently to this situation—and the CMS role in it (thanks, Audubon!). It can be seen in the pioneering game development of GAMBIT and The Education Arcade; in the Convergence Culture Consortium’s interrogation of transmedia story telling and spreadability; in the Center for Future Civic Media’s intervention into the fast-changing civic mediascape; the HyperStudio’s continuing transformation of platforms and interfaces for research and teaching in the humanities; and in Project New Media Literacies' bi-coastal status, as it prepares to shift operations to USC. Heraclitus of Ephesus observed that the only constant is change. And while change is an essential component of transition, transition implies more—a direction, becoming, a move from one thing to something else. The notions of a static end point and teleological certainty don’t square well with Heraclitus’s words. Nor are they implied by the developmental logics of transition. As CMS moves into its tenth year, change—dramatic change—is certainly ongoing. But that change has logic, and the direction of the program’s transition can be found in the new faculty who are joining our community, in the ongoing research activities of our various projects, in the ever-growing network of alumni and advocates who carry on the CMS cause, and even in the emergence of CMS-West. This issue of In Medias Res charts those activities—connect the dots, and you’ll map the contours of a CMS very much in transition.

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    In Medias Res, Fall 2009

    Uploaded by

    MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
    Transition. It’s a recurring word at CMS. Transition is prominent in the title of one of our core graduate courses, in our biennial conferences (the Media in Transition series), and in the media developments that we study. Transition—in our cultural practices, our media technologies, our dreams and expectations—is the dynamic that gives CMS its relevance. It sounds great, of course, but sometimes it hits close to home in unexpected ways. This is the first issue of In Medias Res to appear without Henry Jenkins as CMS co-director—as tough a transition as there is. Our conjoined directorship of the program now broken, this page is no longer graced with Henry’s smiling face. He has made the transition to the Pacific coast, where he is now Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC—but more on that on page 8. Fortunately, consistent with the transit in the Latin root of transition, Henry will make regular trips back to CMS throughout the academic year, assuring that the change is not too traumatic. It’s also the first time in ten years that we will not expose a new class of first-year graduate students to the wonders of CMS and the bemused gazes of their returning second-year cohorts. The program needs time to reassess, rehire, and reboot, while at the same time maintaining the status quo in academic programs, research projects, and outreach activities for the coming year. Although we are planning to again accept applications in fall of 2010 (for admission in fall 2011), this hiatus serves as a reminder of the nature of university programs, where the continuity of change is evident in the cycle of admissions and graduations. The class of ’09 has just about made it out the door, joining the ranks of CMS alumni who are out there making a difference in the production studio, the classroom, the field, and consulting office, whether located in the US or abroad. And the class of ’10 has returned to the Institute, armed with the experiences of the summer, many of them chronicled in this issue of In Medias Res. These comings and goings open up numerous portals through which we can explore the transitional state so endemic to our media practices. The cover story of this issue of In Medias Res, derived from Audubon Dougherty’s fieldwork in rural Peru as that country gets connected, speaks eloquently to this situation—and the CMS role in it (thanks, Audubon!). It can be seen in the pioneering game development of GAMBIT and The Education Arcade; in the Convergence Culture Consortium’s interrogation of transmedia story telling and spreadability; in the Center for Future Civic Media’s intervention into the fast-changing civic mediascape; the HyperStudio’s continuing transformation of platforms and interfaces for research and teaching in the humanities; and in Project New Media Literacies' bi-coastal status, as it prepares to shift operations to USC. Heraclitus of Ephesus observed that the only constant is change. And while change is an essential component of transition, transition implies more—a direction, becoming, a move from one thing to something else. The notions of a static end point and teleological certainty don’t square well with Heraclitus’s words. Nor are they implied by the developmental logics of transition. As CMS moves into its tenth year, change—dramatic change—is certainly ongoing. But that change has logic, and the direction of the program’s transition can be found in the new faculty who are joining our community, in the ongoing research activities of our various projects, in the ever-growing network of alumni and advocates who carry on the CMS cause, and even in the emergence of CMS-West. This issue of In Medias Res charts those activities—connect the dots, and you’ll map the contours of a CMS very much in transition.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 40

    i n s i d e : c o l l o q u i u m a n d COMMUNICA T IONS f o r u m c a l e n d a r

    In Medias Res
    cms.mit.edu fall 2009

    YouTube in the Amazon


    Comic-Con Is Serious Business Japan's Plans to Take Over the Gaming World Vivek Bald: Dub, Diaspora & Digital

    Comparative M E D I A Studies

    FA L L 2 0 0 9
    Change Is a Constant at CMS
    William Uricchio

    from the director

    24

    P RO J ECT U P DATES

    GAMBIT: Time to Play New Games


    Geoffrey Long and Philip Tan

    A B OU T IN MEDIAS RES
    In Medias Res is published twice a year by: Comparative Media Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology 14N-207 Cambridge, MA 02139 617.253.3599 / cms@mit.edu / cms.mit.edu Please send comments to Andrew Whitacre at awhit@mit.edu.

    4 8

    f e at u r e s t o r i e s

    YouTube in the Amazon


    Audubon Dougherty
    f e at u r e s t o r i e s

    26

    p r o j e c t u p d at e s

    Comic-Con Is Serious Business


    Florence Gallez

    C4FCM: Rolling Out Projects from "Institutistan" to Gaza


    Andrew Whitacre

    f e at u r e s t o r i e s

    27

    p r o j e c t u p d at e s

    Japan's Plans to Take Over the Gaming World: An Interview with Mia Consalvo
    Geoffrey Long
    f e at u r e s t o r i e s

    The Education Arcade: From Microbes to Monsters


    Scot Osterweil
    p r o j e c t u p d at e s

    Research Managers
    Chris Csikszentmihlyi, C4FCM Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio Daniel Pereira, C3 Scot Osterweil, TEA Erin Reilly, NML Philip Tan, GAMBIT

    28

    12

    Vivek Bald: Dub, Diaspora & Digital


    Florence Gallez
    f e at u r e s t o r i e s

    HyperStudio: Exploring Visualizations in the Humanities


    Kurt Fendt
    p r o j e c t u p d at e s

    30

    15

    Life After CMS


    Andrew Whitacre

    C3: Consortium Wraps Up Research


    Daniel Pereira

    Staff
    Justin Bland Administrative Assistant Rik Eberhardt Systems Administrator Mike Rapa Computer Support Assistant Brad Seawell Communications Coordinator Becky Shepardson Academic Coordinator Jessica Tatlock Events Coordinator Andrew Whitacre Communications Manager Sarah Wolozin Program Manager

    17

    news

    31

    p r o j e c t u p d at e s

    CMS in the News

    Project NML: Grant Encourages New Media in Rio Schools


    Erin B. Reilly
    P EO P L E , P L ACES , THIN G S

    18 19

    events

    JMS @ MIT
    Andrew Whitacre
    events

    32

    Alumni Testimonials

    MiT6 Delves Deep into Data Storage and Transmission


    Brad Seawell

    36

    p e o pl e , pl a c e s , t h i n g s

    Updates from Faculty and Graduate Students

    20

    events

    bc

    p e o pl e , pl a c e s , t h i n g s

    The Future of News and Civic Media Conference


    Andrew Whitacre
    events

    Pitts-Wiley Joins CMS as MLK Visiting Scholarand as MLK

    Our Evolving Look


    In Medias Res was redesigned in 2005 and is constantly evolving. The body font is Minion Pro, the headline font is Myriad Pro, and certain other splash text is set in Mrs. Eaves. This issue was edited by Brad Seawell and Andrew Whitacre.

    On Our Cover

    22

    Colloquium and Communications Forum

    "Marca" Original photograph by Audubon Dougherty Photo manipulation by Andrew Whitacre


    above

    "Simmons Hall at MIT" Photo by Mike Champion

    FROM T H E DIREC T OR

    Change Is a Constant at CMS


    By William Uricchio, Comparative Media Studies Director
    Transition. Its a recurring word at CMS. Transition is prominent in the title of one of our core graduate courses, in our biennial conferences (the Media in Transition series), and in the media developments that we study. Transitionin our cultural practices, our media technologies, our dreams and expectations is the dynamic that gives CMS its relevance. It sounds great, of course, but sometimes it hits close to home in unexpected ways. This is the first issue of In Medias Res to appear without Henry Jenkins as CMS codirectoras tough a transition as there is. Our conjoined directorship of the program now broken, this page is no longer graced with Henrys smiling face. He has made the transition to the Pacific coast, where he is now Provosts Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USCbut more on that on page 8. Fortunately, consistent with the transit in the Latin root of transition, Henry will make regular trips back to CMS throughout the academic year, assuring that the change is not too traumatic. Its also the first time in ten years that we will not expose a new class of first-year graduate students to the wonders of CMS and the bemused gazes of their returning secondyear cohorts. The program needs time to reassess, rehire, and reboot, while at the same time maintaining the status quo in academic programs, research projects, and outreach activities for the coming year. Although we are planning to again accept applications in fall of 2010 (for admission in fall 2011), this hiatus serves as a reminder of the nature of university programs, where the continuity of change is evident in the cycle of admissions and graduations. The class of 09 has just about made it out the door, joining the ranks of CMS alumni who are out there making a difference in the production studio, the classroom, the field, and consulting office, whether located in the US or abroad. And the class of 10 has returned to the Institute, armed with the experiences of the summer, many of them chronicled in this issue of In Medias Res. These comings and goings open up numerous portals through which we can explore the transitional state so endemic to our media practices. The cover story of this various projects, in the ever-growing network of alumni and advocates who carry on the CMS cause, and even in the emergence of CMS-West. This issue of In Medias Res charts those activitiesconnect the dots, and youll map the contours of a CMS very much in transition.

    William Uricchio

    Looking Ahead
    Reunion: Alums, block off the weekend of April 23, 2010, to come on back to Cambridge for a reunion! Details are still in the works, but Henry Jenkins will be back in town then as part of the Communications Forum on evening of Thursday the 22nd. Feel free to check in with Jessica Tatlock (jtatlock@mit. edu) for more information. FOE4: The Convergence Culture Consortium will host the fourth annual Futures of Entertainment conference on November 21 and 22. Colloquium and Communications Forum: See pages 22 and 23 for a full listing of this fall's colloquia and forums. Big names include: Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms; Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News as part of the " Race, Politics, and American Media" forum; Jeff Vandermeer and Kevin Smolker, who will discuss the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer's life.

    The only constant is change. And while change is an essential component of transition, transition implies more a direction, becoming, a move from one thing to something else.
    issue of In Medias Res, derived from Audubon Doughertys fieldwork in rural Peru as that country gets connected, speaks eloquently to this situationand the CMS role in it (thanks, Audubon!). It can be seen in the pioneering game development of GAMBIT and The Education Arcade; in the Convergence Culture Consortiums interrogation of transmedia story telling and spreadability; in the Center for Future Civic Medias intervention into the fast-changing civic mediascape; the HyperStudios continuing transformation of platforms and interfaces for research and teaching in the humanities; and in Project New Media Literacies' bi-coastal status, as it prepares to shift operations to USC. Heraclitus of Ephesus observed that the only constant is change. And while change is an essential component of transition, transition implies morea direction, becoming, a move from one thing to something else. The notions of a static end point and teleological certainty dont square well with Heraclituss words. Nor are they implied by the developmental logics of transition. As CMS moves into its tenth year, change dramatic changeis certainly ongoing. But that change has logic, and the direction of the programs transition can be found in the new faculty who are joining our community, in the ongoing research activities of our

    fall 2009 3

    FEA T URE S T ORIES

    YouTube in the Amazon: Rural Perus Transition to the Internet


    By Audubon Dougherty, SM 10

    e arrived in Cajamarca in northern Peru just in time for an information and communications technology (ICT) training session for local internet entrepreneurs from rural villages across the country. The training site was picturesque a large house surrounded by cows, streams, mountains, dirt. The minister of technology was in attendance, as was the project manager from FITELa public fund distributing subsidies to national telecommunications companies to set up wireless internet in thousands of villagesas well as representatives from various NGOs. I had come to film some of the training sessions and to try to get a sense of how technology for development was being implemented. All this was part of a documentary I was making on the use of new wireless internet in extremely rural areas of the Peruvian Andes and Amazon, a project funded in part by the Carroll Wilson Award via MITs Entrepreneurship Center. An old friend of mine had become the chief project manager for Rural Telecom, a Peruvian company based in Lima. The company had won a government subsidy to provide internet and basic tech and business management training to people in 2,000 rural villages, locals who volunteered to become entrepreneurs and start their own internet cabinas or cabins. The idea was that cabina proprietors would independently finance the purchase of a few computers (often by selling cattle or taking out bank loans), and Rural Telecom would build a wireless tower to provide internet access and sometimes public pay phones, then conduct an initial training with end users in the community. Entrepreneurs would charge a small hourly fee for local internet users, often young people, which they would use to pay monthly connection fees (about $40 USD) to the telecom. The project, dubbed Banda Ancha Rural, began in 2007, and I had come to assess its progress and the impact the internet was having on communities. Due to safety and language concerns, I hired Maurice,

    Original photographs by Audubon Dougherty. Photo manipulation by Andrew Whitacre.

    4 in medias res

    FEA T URE S T ORIES

    a bilingual Peruvian photographer and videographer, to accompany me on the trip and help conduct interviews in Spanish with entrepreneurs. He was an invaluable asset, but neither of us really understood what we were getting into. Over the course of six weeks, we spent endless hours on buses, planes, taxis, four-by-fours and hiking on foot to visit communities in Andean regions (Cajamarca, Huancayo), rural areas outside Lima (Caete, Huaral) and tribal areas in the Central Amazon (Satipo, Pangoa). I had expected to find mixed reactions by villagers: perhaps the adults are wary of the internet and computers, I thought. Perhaps they dont feel its valuable for agricultural societies. Perhaps some entrepreneurs have gained advanced skills from the technology trainings and are now using the internet to sell their goods online and improve their local economy. Perhaps theyve learned to blog but dont want to write about their village because theyre not interested in encouraging tourism. I was wrong about all that. What we did find were communities that had embraced internet implementation, understood its value and its potential for education and business development, but who had not received enough training to fully utilize internet services and most often had huge problems with the wireless connection. We visited over 40 villages, more than half of which had slow or broken connections. But telecom representatives had no idea there were problems because the government subsidy they received was not sufficient to cover further technical assessments or in-person trainings for every internet cabina, especially since these communities were often difficult or impossible to access by public transportation. And the communities that did have working internet still needed help promoting its use since their financial intake was usually barely enough to break even after paying for electricity and internet. To counter this, Rural Telecom has endeavored to forge private contracts with NGOs, universities and technology corporations interested in supplementing funds for the project. They also hold ICT trainings a few times a year for groups of internet entrepreneurs who have the time and money to attend. Presently they are beginning a pilot project to provide online trainings (via the open source platform Moodle) to 120 entrepreneurs with reliable internet connections.

    Alejandro, a Huancayo artisan, plans to sell his painted gourds online. Photo by Audubon Dougherty.

    The children of a local internet entrepreneur outside Huancayo. Photo by Maurice Cateriano.

    Critical Hub for Learning


    What struck me was how internet proprietors see themselves: sure, they are entrepreneurs running a business, but they also see themselves as contributing to the cultural and technological development of their community. A majority of cabina owners define themselves as educators, responsible for training children and young adults in media literacy. Most villages have one local school, usually without internet, and no library; the internet cabina therefore becomes a critical hub for learning. Cabina proprietors help kids with their homework online, teach them how to search for information and make sure they dont visit questionable websites. Although many adults lack the time or literacy level to use computers, some farmers come to research agricultural

    prices; mining areas often receive business from engineers and other professionals who rely on the internet for communication; and some local adults learn to use email and chat for communicating with family members in other areas. It was striking to see how important computers became for cabina proprietors whose standard of living was otherwise extremely low. In one village outside of Cajamarca, we visited a cabina that was part of the entrepreneurs house. It had dirt floors, thatched roofs, chickens everywhere and an outhouse several meters away. But for the proprietor, keeping the computers in his home was a top priority. This man had studied computer science and was also an elementary schoolteacher; local kids saw him as a resource, and began to rely on the internet cabina as a place they could go to get help online with math or history lessons. The proprietors six-year-old son worked quietly at one computer as we interviewed his father. When the interview was finished, I asked the child what he was doing on the internet. Im looking for my favorite video, he told me in Spanish, inputting the word dinosaur (in English) into YouTubes search field. This is it, he said, clicking on an animation about dinosaurs and hooking up external audio speakers

    fall 2009 5

    FEA T URE S T ORIES

    The daughter of an internet entrepreneur outside Huancayo became fascinated by Dougherty's camcorder. Photo by Maurice Cateriano.

    into the hard drive so he could hear the narration. A few minutes later, he was searching for juegos, online games, from an educational gaming site in Spanish. Although the proprietor joked with me about his sons technological prowess, it spoke to a crucial need for ICT projects in rural communities: sustainability. Many entrepreneurs start internet businesses but then leave the area to pursue job opportunities elsewhere; conversely, older cabina owners rely on their children to run the business, only to be left without managerial or technical skills once their kids go elsewhere for college or to find employment. Training the younger generation is essential, the proprietor told me, not just for their own

    education but for the continuation of the business itself, and to enable villagers to communicate with the outside world. A few hours away was another teacher who doubled as an internet entrepreneur. She complained about the inconsistent internet connection and the competition from cheaper internet cafs in the nearby city of Cajamarca but explained that young customers from the village still preferred to come to her cabina because of the personal assistance they received. She envisioned turning her small cabina into a library of sorts, not with books but with online references and one-to-one teaching. She wanted to learn VoIP applications like Skype to allow users to make free calls online, as well as upload news and information

    6 in medias res

    FEA T URE S T ORIES

    about her community to a website. Although Rural Telecom offers a section of their website for entrepreneurs to upload information about their village, many proprietors dont receive enough training on the web interface or dont fully understand citizen journalism and the incentive for publicizing their village.

    Paying for Access


    The downside of garnering a loyal clientele is that internet users become upset when the connection goes down. We met young users, now used to relying on the internet for information and communica-

    tion, who will commute to the nearest city to find an internet cafa trip that is often long and unsafe. A few proprietors we met have begun to supplement internet services with offline gaming consoles, such as Playstation, so that thy can stay open and make a little money even when the internet connection breaks. One woman used the revenue from gaming to pay her electricity bill, which had gone up with the installation of new computers. Someentrepreneurs we met were also artisans, hoping to sell their stone carvings or painted crafts online, although still without the tech knowledge to do so. Alejandro Cipriano lives in a mountainous area outside Huancayo and runs a family business making traditional painted gourds (mates burilados). He became an internet entrepreneur after a friend in Lima started taking orders for his crafts via email, which came in from as far away as Japan. Although his internet connection has been down for months, he still hopes to eventually have his own website and sell his goods directly to international consumers online. We also heard about a nearby Andean village that had transformed their economy through online self-education. A governmental ICT manager told us how the community made money from selling fresh river trout but could only sell the fish to local buyers. With the arrival of the internet, they found online resources outlining the process for canning trout. This revitalized their industry, allowing them to sell preserved river trout as far away as Lima. The Peruvian jungle presented a completely different context. Native tribes still live throughout the Amazon, and despite tribal protests over land disputes that blocked roadways for weeks, we were able to visit two native villages where internet had been set up. Although leaders from both villages were wary of tourism and wanted to preserve their traditional way of life, culture and language, they saw technology as a critical means through which to develop their communityto further education for children, to stay informed about the latest prices for agricultural products, and to communicate with people in other areas. We spoke to a teacher in one native community who emphasized the need for more governmental support for technology education, including more computers and lower rates for internet connections. I would also like my school to have a video camera like yours, he told me, so the students would be able to put footage from this village online. Perhaps if I embarked on this project five years from now, I would be able to focus on the innovative uses of internet and communication technology in areas previously cut off from all forms of communication. But the rural internet project is still in development. Until the government or private telecoms can increase funding to secure stable, affordable wireless connections and expand training for entrepreneurs, there is little progress. While pressing needs for basic services in extremely rural areas remainfor better education, phone lines, improved roadsthere still exists a great desire by rural Peruvians to develop their communities through technology. Cell phones, for instance, have become the primary means of communication in remote areas. Perhaps the next time I visit Peru, internet will be in wider use through mobile devices, and I can make an entirely new documentaryfrom my phone.

    fall 2009 7

    FEA T URE S T ORIES

    Comic-Con Is Serious Business


    By Florence Gallez, SM 10
    ts a continent away from Comparative Media Studies headquarters in Cambridge, but the CMS spirit was palpable at Comic-Con in San Diego this year. The international pop culture convention, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this July, was the perfect place to witness civic media-enhanced community communication in action. And CMS founder and former co-director Henry Jenkins had a front-row seat. Jenkins, who left CMS this summer to take a position as Provosts Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, geared his second-ever Comic-Con visit to comics-related events and appeared on a panel centered around comics studies. Always on a quest to find the best ways to support comics studies and use comics as an educational tool in the classroom, Jenkins appeared on a panel titled The Comics Arts Conference Session #8: The Institute for Comics Studies. The recently launched non-profit institute, on whose board of advisors Jenkins has agreed to serve, is devoted to promoting the study and appreciation of the comics medium, especially in teaching and research at the college level. Such an appreciation, Jenkins said, can spring from taking a multidisciplinary approach to comics studies and learning from other fieldsjust as the CMS program seeks to do for its various course offerings, from film to games studies.

    Program founder and former co-director Henry Jenkins at Comic-Con, showing off last spring's In Medias Res. Photo by Florence Gallez.

    Social Media in SoCal


    Jenkins noted the power of networked, comics consumers all meeting face-to-face and in virtual spaces to celebrate a common passion. When you gather 125,000 hardcore fans, many of whom are bloggers or twitterers, in one location, the media industry pays attention and sends its top directors (Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, James Cameron) and performers (Johnny Depp, Sigourney Weaver), not to mention entire casts of popular television series, he said in an email interview after the conference, adding that Entertainment Weekly had devoted most of its last two issues to Comic-Con. The four days garners the attention of the national media. The television networks also previewed all things comics in the hope of a strong start in the fall season, Jenkins observed. He predicted that the reception of upcoming shows will be defined by their relationship with fans, with The Prisoner getting the most buzz for delivering what its followers hoped to see. In a world where fans exert much greater impact on the production decisions of networks and studios, Comic-Con is the central mechanism for sampling their interests, Jenkins said. Such fan influence has led to the rise of women to the forefront of the convention, which only a few years ago was very much a male affair. He attributed much of this change in demographics to Twilight, already a hit last year. Long term, this can lead to greater visibility for female fan interests, whereas in the recent past, fan-boy tastes ruled in San

    Diego, he said. Comics Studies as a field takes roots in a range of different academic disciplines, each asking their own questions about this medium, some of which require them to dig deep into the history of graphic storytelling as a specific medium of expression, others of which encourage them to go broad and deal with the ways comics have impacted other forms of media, Jenkins said. But the devoted comics fan and expert has always included the medium in his teaching. And he plans to keep doing so at USC. I will be using a number of graphic novels as part of the mix of resources in the transmedia storytelling and entertainment course I will be teaching this fall. My undergraduate students will also be reading thesis work from CMS alumni Sam Ford, Geoffrey Long, and Ivan Askwith, as well as interacting with people weve brought to MIT through the years as part of our Futures of Entertainment conferences. Word of Jenkinss upcoming classes at USC has spread fast and demand for them is high. I can say that I am already hearing from students from all over USC who want to be doing thesis and dissertation projects on comics and have had trouble finding informed committee members, he said. Despite remaining hurdles for teachers to win over skeptical and traditionally minded administrators and integrate comics into the curriculum, the signs are good, Jenkins said. The comics industry is at least as responsive to academics as any of the other media industries," he said. Weve had great luck bringing comics creators to MIT through the years with our colloquium speakers, including both alternative and mainstream comics creators. Many of the comics publishers have shown a deep commitment to supporting the educational distribution and deployment of their titles.

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    Japan's Plans to Take Over the Gaming World: An Interview with Mia Consalvo
    By Geoffrey Long

    Mia Consavlo. Photo by Jennifer Consalvo.

    his fall, the Comparative Media Studies program and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab are proud to welcome back Dr. Mia Consalvo as a visiting associate professor. GAMBIT researcher and communications director Geoffrey Long recently sat down with her to welcome her to campus and to discover what she plans to accomplish during her stay at MIT. Geoffrey Long: First of all, welcome! Where are you coming from? Mia Consalvo: Im coming from Davis Square, but I most recently come from Ohio Universitys School of Media Arts and Studies. Im an associate professor there, and I teach classes in new media, media criticism and analysis, and videogame studies. I wrote a book with MIT Press in 2007 about cheating in videogames, and right now I have two big projects going. One is on the role of Japan in the formation of the game industry and its status now, and the other relates to casual games and casual game players and casual game player culture and those kinds of things.

    GL: What stage are you in with these projects? MC: Ive written a few smaller pieces that have been articles or chapters for other things that are eventually going to be collected into a book. One of the pieces, which I wrote when I was here at MIT last summer as a visiting scholar, was on the business aspect of Japanese videogame industries and how theyre trying to push more for globalization. Interestingly, even though Nintendo kind of resurrected the videogame industry in the 1980s after it went bust, and most Western kids grew up playing Nintendo, once Western companies got back up and going there was a decline in sales of Japanese games, so that now Japanese games arent quite as dominant in the West. In Japan, its still almost completely Japanese games on the top sellers list, but in North America and Europe its much more split, and you see Japanese companies trying to figure out how to get that global dominance back. They have plans for different kinds of localization, transnational products, those kinds of things. GL: When youre talking about the East and the West, youre not

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    talking about just Japan and the United States. What is the game sale breakdown like in the rest of the world? MC: There are three major game markets that companies look at: North America, Europe (and mostly thats Western Europe) and Japan. Korea has its own special thing with online games, but otherwise theyre kind of too small. North American bestseller lists are clearly mixed as to what games are made where, and Europe is the same. There are few local European products that wouldnt sell somewhere else, like football games, and the Germans prefer PC games over console games, particularly strategy games. In Japan, theres been this dominance of Japanese companies. When I was there in 2005 for a few months, it took me a while to realize, looking at the bestseller lists, Wait a minute, there are no Western games here! There were a few, like Halo and The Sims, but it was almost completely dominated by Japanese game developers. Now, because of the downturn in the economy and the declining birth rate in Japan, theyve seen some declines in their sales, and Japanese companies are more motivated to look globally for other markets. GL: Why has the West had such a hard time getting into the Japanese bestseller lists? MC: There are a few reasons. One is that globalization is challenging to do well, and if you have something thats produced by natives and something thats produced by foreign-born speakers, youre going to have an advantage if youre a company from that country. Its not just language but things like interests in play styles and play difficulty and genres of games. I think the North American market has always been big enough, especially when combined with Europe, that some Western developers havent seen the need to try. Another reason is that Japan is a lot more tightly organized in terms of distribution and advertising. In major Japanese videogame magazines, you rarely see an ad for a Western game. You can go online and find information if youre really motivated to, but the Japanese market has what Mimi Ito calls the media mixa lot of games are spun off from manga and anime and things like that, and the Western products dont have those easy tie-ins. A third reason is that some of the big, big games that might have the budget to cross over easily are things that dont translate well, like the Madden games. First person shooters like Halo dont go over well. The first Xbox did terribly. For the second one, Microsoft got smarter and got Hironobu Sakaguchi to do games for it. Its getting better, but its still a tough nut to crack. GL: How many copies have to move to get onto a Japanese bestseller chart versus an American bestseller chart? MC: It depends on what chart youre talking about, because NPD has their weekly releases, monthly, yearly and all time. Summer is an easier time to get on the charts due to the seasonal slowdown, but in both regions right before Christmas is the big time to sell stuff. Youre talking about at least several hundred thousand units to several

    million units in both markets. Japan is a smaller market in total size, but publishers there still expect similar numbers of units sold. When developers talk about a AAA title, theyre talking about 2-3 million at least. GL: Does the sheer size of one market motivate one side to go over to the other, as opposed to the other way around? MC: I think developers are really careful. I went to a localization seminar at the Game Developers Conference this past year and it was mostly for Western developers looking to localize for other markets. They can do some pretty sophisticated cost-benefit analysis supermath to figure out if its worth it, what are the projected sales based on similar genres and titles in those markets based on whats done well in the past, what production costs are going to be, and so on. Theyre increasingly moving toward what they call sim-ship, or simultaneous shipping, so that everything releases on the same day globally. Some of them are releasing simultaneously in over 20 countries. GL: So whats the perceived market in China? MC: Its huge. Because China has such a huge population, even a small percentage of households with game systems means a large number of potential players. The problems are the government controlling access for people, and piracy is still a real problem. You dont want to sell a boxed game, because you can get the copied one for free, so developers have to figure out ways to get monthly revenue from online games. Console makers are trying to figure that one out. I think China is also a little bit like Korea, which has internet cafs as opposed to people having consoles in their houses. Like I said, the Chinese government is also pretty strict. Youll get in trouble if your game asks the player what region theyre in, and it includes Taiwan as a country. Theyre kind of touchy on that subject. GL: You mentioned two books. Is the state of the transnational games industry the main thrust of your research while youre here, or is there something else youre working on? MC: The other thing is the casual game stuff. That started when I was visiting here last December, just hanging out due to the quarter system in Ohio, and I decided to write a paper on the game culture surrounding this casual game called Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst. Lots of people figure that most casual game players are very casual in how they play, that casual games are supposed to be easy to pick up and easy to put down with no real sense of commitment, but I saw this really intense, interesting activity surrounding the release of this game. I presented that paper at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference this past April. Since then Ive started on a couple of other small projects, one of which is looking at hidden object games. A developer mentioned to me that hidden object games are the romance novels of videogames, by which he meant that theyre eagerly and quickly consumed, but their replay or reread value is very low. You go through it, you find the stuff,

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    you figure out who did it (theyre very often mysteries), and then you go on to the next one, which for game developers is awesome because its not like Civilization where people buy it and then just play that one game forever. Im playing the games to figure out if this holds up or if theres another layer of analysis to make. It was a detour based on some of the games I was playing. Im not sure if thats going to be anything bigger, or if its just going to be a series of small projects. GL: Have you noticed how casual games are fitting into larger franchises? MC: More television shows of various sorts are trying to do it. Top Chef has a game, Hells Kitchen had a game. Syfy said that theyre redoing the whole games section of their website, which will definitely be more casual game-related. Theres all this spillover right now as people are trying to figure things out, like whats a casual game versus whats a social game. Theres a lot of interest and excitement and people arent quite sure whats going to happen or how theyre going to make money. Places like Big Fish succeed because theyre a publisher that releases a game every day on their portal, in addition to developing a few high production value games of their own. Increasingly you hear publishers talking about how they buy these games that are produced by developers or development teams in Eastern Europe who can produce them a lot more cheaply than westerners can, and weve seen the price point go down too, so that those games now cost seven dollars. So how do you make money? You see these interesting crossovers, too. Frank Lantzs Area/Code did the alternate reality game for CBSs TV show Numb3rs. As part of it, they produced a minigame called Drop 7, which then took on a life of its own. You can buy it now for the iPhone, and its pretty addictive. Looking back, I think the Drop 7 game was the most successful part of the whole thing. GL: Are you planning on teaching while youre here? MC: Yep. Ill be teaching a class in the fall and a couple in the spring. One will be on gender and the Internet, and hopefully at least one of the others will be game studies related. GL: Are you looking at gender in games? MC: As part of it, yes. Ive been trying to stay away from a specifically gendered analysis this time because Ive done a lot of work on women in games before, including a paper on women MMO players and their attitudes towards avatars and gear. What everyone forgets is that men have a gender too. I havent seen a lot of interesting research yet on masculinity and videogames. My early work also explored various links between gender and popular culture. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, in their department of Mass Communication. I didn't do anything related to videogames at that point; instead I wrote about relationships between the body, technology and gender in popular culture. Really, I studied the Borg. My geek credentials go way back.

    Kainan President Kao Plans MIT Visit

    Kainan University President An-Pang Kao (left) and MIT Literature Professor David Thorburn extended the MIT-Kainan Cultural Exchange program for another five years at a signing ceremony held in January 2008 on the Taipei, Taiwan campus.

    Dr. An-Pang Kao, president of Kainan University in Taiwan, will visit MIT and the CMS program on October 15 to mark the fifth year of the MIT-Kainan Cultural Exchange program. This project, directed by David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and CMS, brings Kainan students to MIT each academic term and sends MIT scholars to the Taipei-based school for a bi-yearly conference. During the one-day visit, Kao is scheduled to meet with several MIT notables including Chancellor Phillip Clay, Humanities Dean Deborah Fitzgerald, Foreign Languages and Literatures Head Shigeru Miyagawa and Department of Economics Head Ricardo Caballero. Also on the itinerary is a visit to the Athletics Department where Kao will meet with Athletics Director Julie Soriero and Larry Anderson, head coach of the mens basketball team. In 2006, the Engineers traveled to Kainan University to compete in a tournament that MIT won with a victory over Taiwans SBL professional team. Kao, who has been president of Kainan University since 2007, earned an undergraduate degree from Taiwans National Chengchi University; masters degrees from Chengchi and the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He specializes in political economy, applied microeconomics and environmental economics. The MIT-Kainan Cultural Exchange was conceived by Thorburn, director of the MIT Communications Forum, who visited Kainan in 2005 to lecture on new media. The exchange program is a partnership between Kainan, CMS and the Communications Forum. Courses in CMS and literature form the core of the visiting students' curriculum.

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    Vivek Bald: Dub, Diaspora & Digital


    By Florence Gallez, SM 10

    Fun-da-mental. Photo by Sir Cam. Online at fun-da-mental.co.uk

    rom dub music to the South Asian Diaspora, to political theory and a Ph.D. in American studies, and onto digital mediathe colorful professional trajectory of Vivek Bald has led him from his former base in New York to MITs Comparative Media Studies program. Bald was invited last fall to join the faculty of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies (WHS), an affiliate of CMS, as part of the programs expanding engagement with digital media arts and practices. The California-born documentary filmmaker has captured this panoply of life-long interests on digital video to best cement their socio-political messages. Over the coming years, he will be devoting his time and talents to an innovative web-based social history project that seeks to expand the traditional form of the social documentary, to embrace the interactive narrative techniques offered by the internet. It is based on the idea of working with young people in a particular neighborhood to interview the elders in their area over an extended period of time and build a dense local history that would be accessible to the public on the web via a searchable database of video clips, Bald said. The idea is to see how the form of the social documentary might be expanded beyond the standard form of a 60-90 minute single-author narrative through localized, community-based production and the interactive possibilities of the web. In Balds spring course, Communicating with Web-based Media, he and his students developed a prototype for this project. A lot of students might not know this, but alongside creative writing and science writing, WHS now offers digital media as one of its core areas of study for undergraduate major, Bald said. As assistant professor of digital media, he is one of three recent arrivals in the programs expanded territory in the digital arts, including Nick Montfort and Beth Coleman, in an effort spearheaded by WHS Senior Lecturer Edward Barrett. While these professors each bring their own different skills and perspectives to the field, his contribution comes from his background in digital video production.

    The project-based course focuses on the analysis, design, implementation, and testing of various forms of digital communication through group collaboration. Bald described what he envisioned for the course: We will be working collectively to create the prototype for a Digital Social History websitespecifically, a searchable video database in which users can access and view segments of interviews with residents of a particular Boston neighborhood in which the residents relate the history of their community. Last term, his experiences as an independent documentary filmmaker who has studied and filmed the social movements of his own South Asian Diaspora were of immediate relevance to his class The Social Documentary: Analysis and Production. The course introduced the history of the social documentary from the 1960s through the 1980s and explored how socially engaged documentary film production emerged and soared as a genre following the social upheavals of the times and the adoption of more portable film cameras. Despite being substantial in theory, the course offered plenty of practical, hands-on experience. After screening and analyzing key films from the period, students then worked in groups to produce their own short documentary using digital video and computer-based editing. This is what Bald, who completed his Ph.D. in American studies at NYU just before joining MIT, has done throughout his professional development: combining his academic knowledge with concrete projects, always keeping his camera handy and his eyes open for good ideas and sources for a social documentary (he also holds a B.A. in politics from U.C. Santa Cruz and a Master of International Affairs degree in international media and communications and South Asian Studies). He set out to put on film what he had studied and observed and went on to produce two feature-length documentaries about distinct aspects of the South Asian Diaspora:Taxi-vala/Auto-biography, about South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York, andMutiny: Asians Storm British Music, about South Asian youth, music, and politics in

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    1970s-90s Britain. From these professional endeavors, the idea for further graduate study grew. At the time that I was finishingMutiny, he said, I was just starting to conceptualize another documentary project with a friend of mine, the New York-based writer and performer Alaudin Ullah, about his fathers experience as one of the earliest Indian men to migrate and settle in New York, back in the 1920s. As I was beginning that project, I decided I wanted to pursue a Ph.D., both in order to deepen my practice as a documentary maker and teacher and as a means to explore, through more sustained scholarly research, the largely unknown history of early Indian migration to the U.S. This history, Bald said, is the subject of his dissertation. It centers primarily on men from East Bengalthe region which is now Bangladeshwho were working on British steamships in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, doing the heavy industrial labor of firing and stoking engine room furnaces, who jumped ship in U.S. ports like New York, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Philadelphia in search of better work onshore. After exploring this larger history, from the 1890s-1940s, the dissertation focuses on one group of exmaritime workers who settled in Harlem and intermarried within the Puerto Rican and African American communities there. The documentary film, which is tentatively titled In Search of Bengali Harlem, will also pick up from this point, delving into the story of Alaudin, his father, and his fathers family and extended circle of friends in Spanish Harlem. Balds interest in filmmaking rose from his deep belief in the power of films to act as vehicles for socio-political messages. The now-seasoned filmmaker recalls what spurred his first step in the business. When I decided to start making films myself, it grew out of a moment in my early twenties, when I was heading straight into a Ph.D. program to study more political theory. But Bald wanted engagement with social and political issues in a more popular medium. So I changed course and found an internship at a PBS TV station. There, I was able to do research for a documentary on police brutality and even though I didnt get my hands on any production equipment at that point, the experience really got me hooked. He then thought about going to India, where one side of his family is from, to pursue journalistic and/or documentary work. With that goal in mind, he had moved to New York to do a two-year masters degree at Columbia Universitys School of International and Public Affairs. But once I got to New York, he said, I realized that I had a much stronger connection to the South Asian immigrant and second-generation communities there, and was much more interested in exploring the stories and histories of the Diaspora. So my documentary film work over the last eighteen years has stemmed from this. Balds interest in music stems from similar motives: it is the message behind the melody that matters, and experiencing music through the prism of political engagement has culminated inMutiny: Asians Storm British Music, shot over the course of seven years. The film charts the influential rise of Asian music in 1990s Britain, as well as the years of cultural cross-pollination and political struggles that helped create that landmark in the history of music.

    Vivek Bald

    The film, which features interviews, performances, and archival footage of British musicians of South Asian descent, tells the story of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s, defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and its South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation went on to become some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents cultures with electronic and dub music, hip-hop, reggae, and punk. Bald, a musician himself, explained where the ideas for Mutinyall began. I got involved in music from my early teens onward, both studying the sitar during extended periods living with my relatives in India and playing drums in punk and post-punk bands in Central California, where I was growing up. I was also deeply into 1970s reggae and started going to reggae showsseeing everyone from Steel Pulse to Burning Spear, Lee Perry, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, and others, from the time I was 14, and then got into the Two-Tone ska revival and early hip-hop in the early 1980s. That period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s was an amazing time, in terms of all the things that were going on musically. But what I connected to in all those scenes was both the music and the politics the fact that they were intertwined, that in all those cases music was a form of social and political expression. So, years later, when I started finding out about a whole range of different bands and musicians in Britain who, like me, were of South Asian descent and who were bringing together elements of punk, reggae, hip-hop and electronica with South Asian folk, classical, and

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    film music, and in many cases were engaged in anti-racist and other activism, I wanted to document what was going on. So I started making trips over to Britain in 1996 and shooting performances and interviews with members of groups like Asian Dub Foundation, Fun^Da^Mental, Joi, Voodoo Queens, Kaliphz, Hustlers HC, and Black Star Liner and with individual musician/producers like Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, and DJ Ritu. That became the basis forMutiny, which was completed in 2003, he said of the film, which has been screened for the CMS students and faculty. One of the things he didnt realize until he started filming was just how deeply young people of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian descent were involved in the earliest days of British hip-hop, back in the early to mid 1980sas rappers, DJs, b-boys, graffiti artists, and running mobile sound systems. According to him, this is a history that is still not very well known. He came out of the experience of making the film with a much more expansive understanding of the connections between music and politics, which is something he plans to explore in one of the courses he is teaching called Film, Music, and Social Change. The course, which examines films from the 1950s onward that document music subcultures and moments of social upheaval, combined screenings of films about free jazz, glam rock, punk, reggae, and hip-hop with a close study of critical/scholarly writings to illuminate the connections between film, popular music, and processes of social change. Students learned to critique each film in terms of the social, political, and cultural world it documents, as well as the historical context and effects of the films reception. Balds future at MIT may hold more music. Ill be joining Global Frequency, a radio show devoted to electronic music from various parts of the globe, on WMBR this term, which will reunite me with DJ Singe and MC Verb, whose Soundlab/Abstrakt crew I was part of in NYC back in the mid-1990s, he said. That future doesnt feature grand, long-term plans. For now, the filmmaker's attention is too busy examining his immediate CMS surroundings, and he likes what he seesopportunities to be both an academic and a practicing professional in the field of digital media, to which he is devoting all his creative energies while at MIT. His professional landscape has not always looked so clear and promising, both academically and with regards to the practical aspects of the filmmaking trade. When he took the decision to study for a Ph.D. with a view to continue working as a filmmaker, he had hesitations as to whether he would be able to combine his passion for film with academic research. There are very few jobs in the academic world where someone can do both scholarly research/teaching and film production work. Usually it has to be one or the other, he said. Bald said he feels lucky to have found a department and a university that were looking for someone to do both these things. Im happy to be here in WHS, and teaching courses cross-listed with Comparative Media Studies, he said of the program which proved to be the perfect interface for his dub, Diaspora, and digital interests to converge successfully and creatively.

    Barrett Named Director of Undergraduate Studies

    Ed Barrett plays it cool along the Charles River. Photo courtesy of Ed Barrett.

    Edward Barrett, a senior lecturer in the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and general editor of the MIT Press series on digital communication, has been named director of undergraduate studies at CMS. Im thrilled to accept the invitation to work more closely with my colleagues and undergraduate students in CMS, a program Ive been part of since its creation, Barrett said of his appointment to the newly created position. He is the author of a Boston-inspired trilogy of prose-poem novels (Bosston, 2008; Kevin White, 2007; and Rub Out, 2004) as well as several books on writing and communications in a digital environment. Barrett said he is looking forward to working with my colleagues in CMS and affiliated programs to sustain and develop the vision of this vibrant and creative field of undergraduate study. Brad Seawell

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    Life after CMS


    By Andrew Whitacre

    Nick Hunter

    The last time In Media Res spoke with Nick Hunter, in the summer of 2006, he was an undergrad saying goodbye to CMS. "I owe a lot to the CMS community," he told us then. "And for that, I just want to say, 'Thanks.'" We thought it was time to catch up with him, to see what it is exactly that CMS undergrads go on to doand how they get there...
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    In Medias Res: For those of us who didn't know you as an undergrad, tell us a little about yourself. Nick Hunter : I was a double major in comparative media studies and economics. I'm a quarter Japanese, three-quarters Caucasian, but didn't figure out that first fraction until the middle of college. I grew up in New York/New England but am currently happily living in Tokyo. I'm a gamer, a learner, an analyzer, a problem solver. Oh, and I'm happy. IMR: Why choose CMS as your major? How did you come to it?

    head and put them concretely into writing. That said, I think that I managed to get the most of out my CMS education because I spent so much time just hanging around the department, engaging in random discussion with other students, grad students, and professors that just happened to be around. CMS is a not just a degree; it's a vibrant community of thinkers and doers, and that's what makes it so special. IMR: What role did your degree play in choosing (and landing) your first job out of school? What advice would you give current majors? NH: It's kind of the other way around. I chose my degree because I wanted to be prepared to go work in games, preferably in a developer capacity. I flirted with computer science, but it ultimately was too much a sidebar from what I wanted to focus onthe design and meaning of games. The important thing that current majors must understand is that networking and making connections with other people is of the utmost importance when finding a job in media. This does not mean handing out your business card to as many people as you can find at a conference or trade show. It's about making genuine connections with people that are currently working in media, getting to know them, and letting them get to know you. This will make it easier for them to think of you when an opportunity arises, and it will also give you a better idea of what it might be like to work with them. So get out to conferences and trade shows, meet lots of people, strike up conversations, have a beer (if you're over 21) with them, and get to know them. Particularly when it comes to the production of new media, personal connections and ties play a major role in decision-making. You might read the subtext there as "politics," but the fact of the matter is that when there are many (potentially subjective) unknowns, it's basically human nature to seek and create a group consensus. Understanding the other people involved and the perspectives they bring to the table makes it easier to cut through the nominal issues and find a compromise that deals with the core issue at hand. IMR: What do you do now that reflects your academic experience? NH: Currently I am working as a consultant in Tokyo for EA Japan's Marketing and Sales department. The responsibilities change almost on a daily basis, but the through line is how do we anticipate consumer needs and educate them about our titles. Some of that pulls on the work I did in economics, but a lot of the critical thinking that I do has to do with putting myself in the consumer's shoes and figuring out how to communicate relevant information to them. CMS does an incredible job of training you to look for those other perspectives, and that has been an invaluable skill set in my professional career.

    CMS is a not just a degree; it's a vibrant community of thinkers and doers, and that's what makes it so special.

    NH: I couldn't have avoided it, even if I had tried. Growing up, my parents both worked for major broadcast networks, so whenever they had friends from work over, I would sit at the dinner table and be inundated with conversation about the current state of television, news, and media at large. I also spent much of my youth playing videogames (alone, with friends, and with my father), and by the time I reached MIT, I was committed to getting into the games industry. It was only natural then when I was shopping classes that I saw Intro to Media Studies (then listed as a Literature course) and thought, "Hey, this seems like it would be pretty cool." Unfortunately it didn't fit my schedule, but I decided to attend the first lecture just to see what it was all about. William Uricchio was teaching that semester, and he painted a picture of the wide range of topics and issues that would be covered in the course, and it felt like I was a kid again, sitting at the dinner table. It felt like home. The following Independent Activities Period [a time for short, informal classes between the fall and spring semesters], I stumbled into a seminar on the trans-media properties of Lord of the Rings. I was enthralled by the discourse, and it cemented my decision to become a part of CMS. I met Kurt Squire (then department research manager), who was on the panel to represent the games side of LoTR. After it was all over, I approached him and after going over some of his points, I asked, "What can I do to get involved?" He smiled and said, "We'll think of something." IMR: What did you end up doing as a major? NH: As you might suspect, much of my course work was focused on games and interactive media. However, more so than what went on in the classroom, it was my UROP working with Philip Tan, Matt Weise, and Brett Camper that had me almost perpetually in Building 14. We worked on The Education Arcade on a project called Revolution that simulated events that took place in Colonial Williamsburg. It was a test of how one might do a more humanities style educational game, rather than a math or science game that relied on rote drill and practice techniques. The coursework was important; it exposed me to many pieces of media that I probably would not have experienced otherwise, and forced me to take ideas and theories that I had floating around in my

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    CMS IN T H E NE W S

    Beaulieu, Boyle, and Evil Twins


    classroom, the Education Arcade's goal is to help teachers adopt these new tools "without taking a big risk."

    Driscoll and Diaz's chiptunes study


    Both Rhizome, an influential arts website, and BoingBoing Offworld, a popular gaming website, touted grad students Kevin Driscoll and Josh Diaz's collaboration on chiptunes, music inspired by videogame soundtracks. Their paper "Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes" originally appeared in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

    Joel Hodgson, Jason Begy, Generoso Fierro, and Trace Beaulieu. Photo courtesy of Generoso Fierro.

    Fierro/Begy host MST3K creators


    The Boston Globe covered the Mystery Science Theater 3000 event put on by CMS's Generoso Fierro and Jason Begy: "Three and a half hours into their appearance at MIT last month, Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu were determined to match their fans' dedication. They had given a nearly two-hour presentation on their creations, and almost all of the hundred or so fans stayed to stand in line for autographs. Hodgson and Beaulieu indulged a group that had made drawings of the 'invention exchange' sketches from the show and beamed proudly at a kid, barely out of elementary school, wearing a Mystery Science Theater sweatshirt."

    operation that tracks courageous moments among everyday people by collecting e-mails, phone calls, and letters, and then mapping positive news. [T]echnology can change social engagement and political decisions."

    CMS student Schmiedl earns accolade for image


    An image taken by CMS undergrad Eric Schmiedl will be included as part of a web gallery for American Photography 25, one of the most prestigious photo competitions in the country. Fewer than 1 percent of the 10,000-plus images submitted were chosen. Schmiedl's image, part of his "Women of East Side" series, was originally taken for the cover of a student-driven calendar meant to raise money for an Institute scholarship.

    Jenkins on Susan Boyle, out-ofnowhere star of Britain's Got Talent


    Henry Jenkins popped up all over the media as reporters sought an explanation for the meteoric rise of doughty singer Susan Boyle. Jenkins told the Washington Post, "There's a lot of talk about things going 'viral' online. But 'viral' suggests that someone has created a virus and that people are unknowingly transmitting it, as if they had no choice but to carry the virus. But that's not really what's going on with Susan Boyle. What we're really seeing with Susan Boyle in a very powerful way is the power of 'spreadability.' Consumers in their own online communities are making conscious choices to spread Susan Boyle around online."

    Nick Monfort on Atari


    In the "Ideas" section of the Boston Globe, Nick Monfort spoke about the "deep history" of videogames. "I wouldn't want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together. Maybe we forgot some things that were good about play experience. Maybe we want the computer to be a device that is more like a hearth that members of the family come around and use to interact with each other."

    C4FCM director talks up work on economic activism


    Chris Csikszentmihlyi, creator of a project to keep natural gas and oil representatives honest, spoke with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Washington Post about using the Web for economic activism. "Many, many people who have signed a lease often feel they didn't know enough about it at the outset," he said. "There's an information imbalance. If you're an oil and gas company, you know exactly how much everyone in the neighborhood is settling for."

    NML's McWilliams writes for Guardian


    Jenna McWilliams, education researcher and curriculum specialist at Project NML, picked up a side-gig: columnist for The Guardian. She has written on the film State of Play and its ignorance of how journalism works in the digital era among other things.

    Ford's soap opera course Slashdotted


    CMS alum and current instructor Sam Ford had his course American Soap Operas featured by the popular "news for nerds, stuff that matters" website Slashdot. After quoting Ford's course description, Slashdot commented that "All I really need to know I learned from my evil twin, who fathered my unborn child, who has a extremely rare disease that only one of my many CIA contacts, who is also sleeping with my wife, can cure."
    For more CMS updates, see cms.mit.edu/news.

    Boston Phoenix highlights C4FCM project Hero Reports


    Alyssa Wright was featured in an article about the Media Lab. "These days, Wright is channeling her tech-meets-art-meets-protest angle into Hero Reports, a Manhattan-based Web

    Osterweil in Education Week


    In an article titled "High-Tech Simulations Linked to Learning," Scot Osterweil of the Ed Arcade told Education Week that although teachers are skeptical of using games in the

    fall 2009 17

    FEA T URE ST TS ORIES E V EN

    ideo is now available at TechTV of this year's Julius Schwartz Lecture speaker, J. Michael Straczynski, who visited MIT to discuss his distinguished career as a transmedia creator. Known best as the creator of the cult science fiction series Babylon 5 and its various spin-off films and series, Straczynski wrote 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, including an unbroken 59-episode run. He was one of the first television producers to actively engage his fan community online and has explored the interface between digital media and other storytelling platforms. He recently entered the motion picture arena, writing the period drama Changeling for Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie. His early television writing career spans from work on He-Man, She-Ra, and The Real Ghostbusters through to The New Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote. He followed up Babylon 5 with the science fiction series Jeremiah. At the lecture, Straczynski spoke with emotion about the counterintuitivebut integralrole of failure in honing artistic skills. "We're afraid of failure," he said. "But if you don't fail once in a while, you're not doing it right." And to an audience that featured young science fiction fans, many of them writers, he had this to say:
    People around you will say, 'Don't do this, we don't want you to fail. We're trying to protect you.' But they're more protecting themselves. Because if you follow your dreamsand achieve themthen they have to see for themselves 'What didn't I do? And why didn't I do it?' That's the harder thing to accept.

    JMS @ MIT

    He admitted to his own almost pathological desire to prove doubters wrong. To a teacher who told Straczynski he would never amount to anything, he sent a copy of every article he ever published. And when that teacher died, Straczynski visited his grave, wrapped a published story around a pencil, and drove it into the ground. As tough as he sounded, as much as it was a work-hard-and-youcan-do-anything message, Straczynski at times was humbled to hear interviewer Henry Jenkins speak his name in the same breath as some of his heroes. "We have the premiere [of Changeling]. There's like sixteen black cars lined up. And there's French police having their picture taken with Clint [Eastwood]. They drive us through the streets of the south of France, running lights and sirens. Afterward I was sitting on the beach, in the south of France, thinking I've woken up in someone else's life. I'm just a kid from Jersey." JMS was the second Julius Schwartz Lecture speaker, after Neil Gaiman last year. The lecture is an annual event held to honor an individual who has made significant contributions to the culture, creativity and community of comics and popular entertainment. The lecture is hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include the first science fiction fanzine, the first science fiction literary agency, and the first World Science Fiction Convention, held in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for well over 42 years.

    18 in medias res

    Photos courtesy of Renata Greene

    E V EN T S

    MiT6 Delves Deep into Data Storage and Transmission


    By Brad Seawell, MiT6 Conference Coordinator

    ore than 300 scholars, librarians, artists, and archivists descended on Cambridge in late April for the sixth Media in Transition conference. This years installment of the biennial conference, organized by CMS and the MIT Communications Forum, was subtitled stone and papyrus, storage and transmission, and focused on the exponentially increasing speed and capacity of digital communications. What challenges confront [those] who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue thevast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? asked the conferences mission statement. The content of presentations and the nationality of speakers reflected the international scope of the conference. Conferees came from more than 25 countries including Taiwan, Israel, Denmark, Turkey, Ireland and Brazil. This years conference drew a large Canadian contingent, driven in part by the references

    Award-winning African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako ( Waiting for Happiness , Life on Earth) appeared at the April 23 Communications Forum Global Media with his wife Maji Abdi who acted as a translator. The forum kicked off the sixth Media in Transition conference. Below, James Paradis, Head of MIT's Writing and Humanistic Studies Program, moderated the final "Summary Perspectives" session. All photos by Greg Peverill-Conti.

    Continued on page 39

    fall 2009 19

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    The Future of News and Civic Media Conference

    he Center for Future Civic Media and its main sponsor, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, co-hosted the Future of News and Civic Media Conference this past June, a major three-day event that brought together MIT media innovators and past and present Knight News Challenge winners. The highlight of the conference was the announcement of the 2009 News Challenge award recipients. Nine projects received between $10,000 and $720,000 to develop websites, gadgets, and just plain good ideas so they can bring news and information to communities in new ways. The big winner was Document Cloud, a collaboration between the New York Times and ProPublica to make it easy to share, find, and evaluate source documents for reporting. The conference also featured a surprise for the attendees: a collaboration contest. Whomever put their heads together to come up with the best civic media idea of the conferenceas voted on by fellow attendeeswould win cold, hard cash to develop it. Top prize went to Tweetbill, a collaboration between seven attendees that "sends you notification via Twitter when a bill reaches the stage in the US Congress where it's useful for you to call your Congresscritter!" The MIT community played an integral role in the conference proceedings, helping to set up and facilitate ad hoc instructional sessions. These sessions, known as "barcamps," hacked the traditional conference format so that attendees to teach or learn about a civic media topic of their choice. Center fellow Aaditeshwar Seth and Caesar McDowell of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning helped teach a session on community news in areas with low literacy rates. Rick Borovoy of the Media Lab collaborated with several Challenge winners to teach about sustainable business models in a session aptly called "Entreprenerds and Entreprenews." And Center director Chris Csikszentmihlyi partnered with Nadav Aharony of the Media Lab's Viral Communications group to provide an introduction to mobile platforms. Overall the conference was a roaring success. The conference website is still available to check out more of the events, and videos of plenaries have been posted online: Conference website: civic.mit.edu/knighconf Plenary: "News, Nerds and Nabes": How Will Future Americans Learn About the Local? with Alberto Ibarguen, Eric Klinenberg, and Henry Jenkins. ow.ly/jh9o Collaboration contest. ow.ly/jhaQ Plenary: "Flesh and Bits: Information, Representation, Action" with Chris Csikszentmihlyi, Ben Fry, Matt Carroll, and Martin Wattenberg. ow.ly/jhb3 Photographs by Pete Karl, used with permission. More available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pete-karl/

    20 in medias res

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    Colloquium and Communications Forum


    09.17.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

    Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks


    Ethan Gilsdorf will discuss some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-yearold former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the appeal of such "escapist" adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood? Gilsdorf will talk about the culture's discomfort with the geek/nerd/ gamer stereotype and look at society's ambivalence about gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author's own past misgivings and final acceptance of his "geek" identity. 09.24.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

    now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media's coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics? Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News will discuss these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. This forum is the first of two this term in our ongoing civic media series, a collaboration of the Communications Forum and the Media Labs Center for Future Civic Media.

    How Not to Be Seen


    Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is an assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, will discuss camouflage framed by the question of how not to be seenin film, on film, as film. Shell introduces how not to be seen in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. She will screen and talk about her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Shells book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance, will be published by Zone Books in the spring of 2010. 10.01.09 | 5-7 PM | TBD

    Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture


    Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. Well deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix's ability to effect actual change. Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay. 10.22.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

    10.15.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

    CMS Town Meeting


    Restricted to CMS faculty and students. What is the state of the CMS program as a whole? Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we headed? CMS director William Uricchio will lead the department's semiannual Town Meeting. 10.08.09 | 5-7 PM | Bartos Theater

    Transatlantic Acousmatics
    In 1897, the year The Invisible Man was published, Marconi filed his patent and established the first station for wireless telegraphy, what would become radio. H.G. Wells's novel reads as if it were an instruction manual for the uses and abuses of the nascent radio voice. Picker will begin to argue that, in conjunction with the racist basis of much fin-de-siecle anxiety, the acousmatic status of Wells's protagonist allows for a conspicuous if incoherent racial performance. This performance tests the limits of Wells's sympathetic imagination even as it further amplifies the voice of Griffin, the Invisible Man. Picker begins with Wells's story and goes on to show how, when one attends to questions of voice and sound technologies in several different media,

    Communications Forum: Race and Politics in the Media


    The election of an African-American president in November 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama's ascension transformed anything? Many peoples answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer

    Subscribe to the CMS Podcast


    Cant make it to an event? Subscribe to the CMS Podcast at cms.mit.edu/news/podcast. Download mp3s of events with Katie Salen, the producers of Heroes, Scott McCloud and more!

    Download the Colloquia Poster


    Never miss a CMS Colloquium event again! Go to cms.mit.edu/events to download a free color 11x17 poster of the CMS Colloquium Series to hang on your wall!

    22 in medias res

    E V EN T S
    the racial and ethnic dimensions that become audible forge invisible connections among modes of art that we have been taught to keep distinct. Tracing a transatlantic route from fiction to radio and sound film back to fiction, this approach offers a new way to characterize a crucial period of change from the late Victorian to the modern world. John Picker is visiting associate professor of literature at MIT, where he arrived this fall after several years as Associate Professor of English at Harvard. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes and has ongoing interests in sound studies, media history, and the literature and culture of the Victorian era. His many articles and book chapters include, most recently, an essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors and out this September from Harvard University Press. 10.29.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231 cases radically redefining its form and content. The forum will debate what critical values from the traditional media should survive, explore how digital media is changing the ways we articulate our responses to the arts, and point to promising contemporary business models and experiments in cultural coverage. 11.19.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

    Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion
    Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of "artifacts" that, although they support a writer's career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer's life caused by new media and a proliferation of "open channels"? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her "self" in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer's life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? A writer for the New York Times Book Review, Huffington Post, and Washington Post, Jeff VanderMeer is also the award-winning author of the metafictional City of Saints & Madmen, the noir fantasy Finch, and Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers. Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books) which was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fast Company, and on National Public Radio. He blogs for the Huffington Post and at kevinsmokler.com and is the CEO of BookTour.com.

    Cinematic Games

    Many people talk about "cinematic" games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture will present film clips from a number of classic movies, analyze how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggest ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap. Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven FPS Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City. 11.05.09 | 5-7 PM | Bartos Theater

    Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures


    From Nintendos first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnational fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogame players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry. Mia Consalvo is visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.
    For details on speakers and events, visit cms.mit.edu/events. Most colloquia are made available as podcasts a few days after the event.

    12.03.09 | 5-7 PM | 4-231

    Communications Forum: What's New at the Center for Future Civic Media
    This second civic media forum will highlight several of the Center for Future Civic Medias most promising new projects. Advanced researchers from the Center will describe their work and offer live demonstrations of their computing wizardry. The forum will be moderated by Chris Csikszentmihlyi, director of the Center and the Muriel Cooper Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences in the MIT Media Lab.

    Communications Forum: The Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era
    Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever. Panelists Doug McLennan (editor of ArtsJournal.com) and Bill Marx (editor of TheArtsFuse.com) will discuss how cyberspace is transforming arts journalism, in some

    11.12.09 | 5-7 PM | 66-110

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    P RO J EC T U P DA T ES

    Time to Play New Games


    By Geoffrey Long, GAMBIT Communications Director and Philip Tan, GAMBIT US Executive Director

    At left, characters from this summer's games. Above, the GAMBIT class of 2009.

    The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab has been hard at work on its 2008-2009 lineup of new games. Two games from the summer 2008 lineup have undergone heavy polishing. One developed in conjunction with the Sloan School of Business was released as GAMBITs first downloadable board game; two new games were developed during the academic year under the guidance of GAMBITs resident researchers; and seven new games have just been completed through the GAMBIT summer program. The summer 2008 games polished by the US lab are GumBeat, a stealth game that uses simple gameplay to engage with the complex ideas of political oppression, and Moki Combat, a physically simulated 3D jousting game. In GumBeat, overseen by Matthew Weise SM 04 and Joshua Diaz SM 09, players are cast in the role of a normal civilian

    in a police state where bubblegum is outlawed. In Moki Combat, which was developed in conjunction with Yeuhi Abe and Marco Da Silva from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the players character interacts with the environment and other opponents in a free-form manner with no canned animations. New games from the 08-09 academic year include The Bridge, Rosemary, and Tipping Point. The Bridge, which was overseen by GAMBIT postdoctoral researcher Doris C. Rusch, is a ludic poem dealing with hope, despair, courage, and the art of letting go. Rosemary, overseen by GAMBIT research associate Clara Fernndez-Vara SM 04, is a point-and-click adventure game in which the player explores the eponymous characters memories from childhood in order to solve the mystery of the game. Tipping Point is the first GAMBIT game released as both a board game and a digital game. Developed with research from the Sloan School of Management and overseen by GAMBIT lead producer Sara Verrilli and Jason Begy SM 10, Tipping Point is designed to teach players how

    to manage multiple projects, emphasizing the importance of long-term planning. During the 2009 summer program, GAMBIT brought 40 undergraduate and polytechnic students from Singapore to work with 15 students from MIT, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Berklee College of Music, and Boston University to develop games designed to address and test research questions and technologies. Three graduate students and 11 faculty members from Singapore observed the students and collaborated with MIT on their research. Abandon, overseen by Matthew Weise and GAMBIT Studio Manager Rik Eberhardt, features a girl lost in a surreal dreamscape and trying to escape the encroaching darkness. The development team utilized experimental, automated rigging software by Ilya Baran of CSAIL to enable rapid creation of animated models. The team sought to create a world for the player where just about anything can come to life. Camaquen, overseen by GAMBIT prototyping manager Marleigh Norton and written by Joshua Diaz, models the effect of emotions in dialogue, enabling players to affect the emotional dynamics of a conversation, even though the script remains the same. Players take on the role of Alux (Ah-loosh), commanding spirits of emotional energy (or

    24 in medias res

    P RO J EC T U P DA T ES

    camaquen), changing the meaning behind the words of two bickering brother-kings, and swaying their destiny. Dearth, overseen by GAMBIT technical director Andrew Grant and based on the research of CSAILs Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez, is a research tool for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Markov decision problem solvers for implementing game artificial intelligence. A cooperative action-puzzler, players lead tribal shamans to smash water-sucking creatures into each other, returning water to the land. Pierre: Insanity Inspired, overseen by GAMBIT audio director Abe Stein and videogame researcher Jesper Juul with the research assistance of Jason Begy, has players guiding Pierre the artist cat around a spinning circular platform to collect inspiring items. Pierre must contend with the critics gentle encouragements or savage insults. The game is an experiment in communicating failure, examining how verbal abuse may make a player more or less motivated to continue playing. Shadow Shoppe, overseen by GAMBIT art director Jason Beene, is a casual memory game set in a small town that has lost its shadows. The player creates new shadows for the townspeople based on his or her personal assumptions about personality and physicality. The game collects data on how people associate character traits with body shapes, and GAMBIT researchers hope to identify trends and conventions across different visual cultures. Finally, the twin games of Waker and Woosh were developed under the guidance of GAMBIT lead producer Sara Verrilli as well as Scot Osterweil and Lan Xuan Le SM 09 from The Education Arcade, with the research assistance of Kevin Driscoll SM 09. Waker is a puzzle-platform game set in the world of a childs broken dream, including a narrative by Geoffrey Long SM 07 reflected in its art and cut scenes, while Woosh is entirely abstract. Both use identical gameplay to expose players to elementary physics. Researchers from The Education Arcade will study how the narrative and abstract forms of the game affect student engagement with, and understanding of, the educational material.

    Screenshot from Akrasia

    GAMBIT Arrivals, Farewells and Accolades


    In the past few months GAMBIT has both welcomed some new faces and bid some friends a fond farewell. Our arrivals include our new audio director, Abe Stein, fresh from his recent work with the Cartoon Network and Blue Fang Games, and GAMBITs longtime colleague and CMSs newest visiting associate professor Mia Consalvo, who comes to us from Ohio Universitys School of Media Arts and Studies. (See related article on page 9.) Our departures include graduating masters students Josh Diaz and Kevin Driscoll as well as matriculated MIT undergrads Alexis Brownell, Alfred Ciffo, Jamie Jones, Trey Reyher, Katie Sievert, and Sarah Sperry. Also departing is GAMBIT videogame researcher Jesper Juul, who has joined the Game Center at New York University as a visiting assistant arts professor. We wish him all the best, although he wont be completely absent: Jesper will continue to collaborate with us on conference panels and writing projects. On June 16, the MIT Enterprise Forum New England Games SiG also celebrated the contributions of Henry Jenkins to the local and global game industry. Hosted at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center, CMS stalwarts Philip Tan, Scot Osterweil and Alex Chisholm thoroughly roasted GAMBITs lead principal investigator but gave Henry the final say.

    Together with William Uricchio, Henry will continue as one of GAMBITs lead principal investigators after his transition to USC. Finally, this has been a great year for awards and accolades! CarneyVale: Showtime, the kinetic acrobat game developed by GAMBITs Singapore studio, was chosen as one of the 10 best games from over 150 submissions to Penny Arcades PAX consumer event this year. The PAX10 showcase highlights the efforts of indie game creators across all platforms. Another feather in our cap was gained when Akrasia, the summer 2008 arthouse game led by post-doctoral researcher Doris C. Rusch, was selected as a finalist for the 2009 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games by an international panel of jurors from 218 entries. Perhaps the best award of all, however, was the glowing review GAMBIT received from a team of visiting luminaries during our midterm funding review, which included Henrys new colleague Tracy Fullerton, codirector of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at USC. With their feedback and suggestions, were currently plotting a course to further establish GAMBITs position as one of the top game research centers in the world. Stay tuned!
    Come and play all the new GAMBIT games and get news and updates at http://gambit.mit.edu or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ GambitGameLab.

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    Rolling Out Projects to "Insitututistan" and Gaza


    By Andrew Whitacre, CMS and C4FCM Communications Manager
    Chris Csikszentmihlyi, sole director of the Center for Future Civic Media following the departures of co-director Henry Jenkins and research director Ellen Hume, kicked off the spring term with an intense four-day course on mobile activism. He and Media Lab research assistant Nadav Aharony used the course to lead students into the fictional country of "Institutistan," where they all played out roles with motives for hacking mobile technology. Civic organizers developed code to resist the Institutistani government, itself led by "dictator" Jamie Zigelbaum and his various cronies, who used mobile tools to track their enemies. Meanwhile, NGO staff weighed their technical options for aiding Institutistan's people without offending its leaders. The four-day course was followed in the spring with a full version of the class, featuring guests such as famed MIT viral communications researcher David Reed, the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman, and Nick Mathewson of the anonymity network Tor. The semester-long version resulted in amazing projects, including: a system for doctors under an authoritarian regime to covertly export epidemic data a method for hiding secret messages inside of unremarkable SMS messages and an iPhone application to crowd-source protest information. The most impressive project, as Csikszentmihlyi later described on his PBS IdeaLab blog, was an SMS-based swine flu questionnaire that was actually deployed in Mexico at the height of that country's flu epidemic in late spring. In handling over a million text messages, it used viral media to understand a literal virus. Csikszentmihlyi is also moving forward with the implementation of ExtrACT, a suite of tools he has been developing with Sara Wylie, Christina Xu, and others to help landowners self-organize when approached by representatives of the oil and gas industry, also known as landmen. After months of testing in communities, they are closer to wide launches of two tools, the Landman Report Card and an online "scraper" that automatically collects and organizes dispersed, publicly available drilling information. Meanwhile, student projects sponsored by the Center have been just as impressive. Josh Levinger of the Media Lab's Computing Culture Group is developing Virtual Gaza, an online space for Palestinians to describe what they are seeing in their neighborhoods during a siege. Virtual Gaza launched during an Israeli incursion on the Gaza Strip last January, and though Levinger jokes that he is "both relieved and disappointed the siege didn't last long enough to get a lot of data," it still allowed for ordinary Palestinians to start documentingthrough public diaries, photography, and videothe damage done to their neighborhoods. When Virtual Gaza is used during a future crisis, it could potentially partner with another new project, a proposal by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and Center research assistant Florence Gallez for online journalistic ethics. Called Open Park, this project explores what it means to work as a journalist when traditional news-gathering and -distribution customssuch as guarding sources jealously or separating print and web effortsare giving way to new collaborative, integrative practices. As part of its model, Open Park seeks to formulate a Code of Ethics for collaborative reporting so that both the journalistic community and news consumers share common standards for how modern journalists can and should do their job. And lastly, Media Lab grad student Ryan O'Toole is working on No Park, a wiki and collaborative map that tracks creative use of public space. Currently focused on Los Angeles, a city infamous for its lack of greenery, No Park allows citizens to share ideas and evidence of urban recreation, whether it is how to kayak the concrete-lined Los Angeles River, where to find a building facade to climb, or even a list of green spaces built by corporations alongside their headquarters. O'Toole plans a No Park expansion to Boston in the coming months. Events In addition to the Future of News and Civic Media conference (see coverage on page 20), the Center hosted several community lunch and dinner conversations with civic media innovators. Tristan Harris, creator of the powerful content-linking tool Apture, spoke in March about his work embedding metadata and multimedia content seamlessly into news articles and the beneficial implications for news outlets of linking to outside content. The next week, Chris Hoenig and Boston Globe database journalist Matt Carroll talked about Hoenig's venture, The State of the USA, a database that aims to accessibly organize all non-classified government data. And later in the term the Center hosted a discussion on the future of radio, with Bill Siemering, the creator of NPR's All Things Considered; Sue Schardt, of the Association of Independents in Radio; and Henry Holtzman from the Media Lab. The spring's events closed with a lecture on DIY video in documenting human rights violations and another with Richard Tofel, general manager of ProPublica, on the future of investigative reporting. Videos of these events are available at civic. mit.edu.
    The Center for Future Civic Media, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner, is funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Its website is at civic.mit.edu.

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    From Microbes to Monsters


    By Scot Osterweil, The Education Arcade Creative Director
    This is a busy time for The Education Arcade (TEA), with a number of projects in various stages of the research-and-development cycle from design, to development, to research and evaluation. Here is a rundown: Just Beginning: Mass Extinction, a Curated Game. TEA has just received funding from the National Science Foundation to design and develop an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution. Grad student Michelle Moon Lee SM 10, and TEA staffers Caitlin Feeley, Jason Haas and Judy Perry will be working with Smithsonian scientists to craft a game that will expose middle-school students to issues of bio-diversity, extinction and environmental change. The game, which will be rolled out in spring 2011, will enable students to interact online with scientists and MIT undergrads as they explore the possible ravages of future human activity. Design and Prototyping: Microbes. Early prototyping has begun on an online simulation that will introduce kids to the role that microbes play in the oceans ecosystems. Though constituting the majority of the seas biomass, undersea microbes are still little understood. Professor Roman Stocker of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been performing groundbreaking research on microbial behavior, having engineered lab equipment that makes studies possible that couldnt be undertaken in open oceans. Stocker is now advising recent CMS grad Lan Le SM 09 and undergraduates Caryn Krakauer, DD Liu and Susan Song as they develop a game in which players will design virtual nanobots to replicate microbial behaviors in simulated environments. Full-Scale Development: Kids Survey Network. Work is nearing completion on Kids Survey Network, a project weve described in this cut scene IPA: \'kVt si:n\ n. (2008): a sequence in a videogame over which the player has little or no control, often breaking up the gameplay and used to advance the plot, present character development, and provide background information, atmosphere, dialogue and clues. Cut scenes can either be animated or use live action footage. (From Wikipedia)

    Nanobot design by DD Liu.

    space before. The suite of games, designed by CMS graduates Kevin Driscoll SM 09, Lan Le SM 09, and Lauren Silberman SM 09 in collaboration with project manager Feeley, are now in the final stages of development. These multi-player games will be part of the larger Kids Survey Network site, managed by project partner TERC. The games introduce players to ideas about data collection and representation. Feeley is also working with CMS graduate Talieh Rohani SM 09 on a series of videos that will also appear on the site, and which hopefully will be as entertaining as they are informative in familiarizing students with the challenges of survey taking. Research: Woosh vs. Waker? Students in the MIT-Singapore GAMBIT game lab have just completed development of two games that will figure in TEAs upcoming research. Woosh and Waker were created in tandemas educational games. Waker has a narrative expressed through cut scenes and supported by its in-game art, whilethe artwork in Woosh is entirely abstract. Both games use identical gameplay to expose players to twobasic physics concepts, requiringplayers to manipulate the graphical representations of displacement and

    velocityin order tonavigate through the game. Researchers, led by TEA staffer Perry, will study whether the narrative or abstract form of the game is more effective in promoting student engagement with, and understanding of, the physics topics. Evaluation: Lure of the Labyrinth Lure of the Labyrinth, which was designed by TEA, and developed in partnership with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision, went online in January, and has been used extensively in Maryland schools through the spring. Evaluators with the firm Macro International are now compiling data from the early classroom implementations, and we are hopeful that there will be positive results to report. In the meantime, TEA has been receiving enthusiastic feedback from users around the country who say the TEA model that gives players informal game experiences as preparation for future formal learning resonates in their classrooms.
    For more information on The Education Arcade, visit educationarcade.org.

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    D I G I TA L H U M A N I T I E S AT M I T

    New Insights: Exploring Visualizations in the Humanities


    By Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio Director

    Screenshot from the U.S.-Iran Relations Project

    Organizing historical events as a function of time dates back to the second century AD but it took until the mid eighteenth century for timelines to appear in a form that we would recognize today. Jacques Barbeu-Duborgs Carte chronologique was among the first timelines to organize events along horizontal and vertical axes but required extensive explanation even for scholars to appropriately interpret the graphical representation of time.

    Compared to lists of events, timelines have a number of advantages. They visually present a series of events in the context of additional, simultaneous events over a large time span. They also represent correlations so that users can quickly identify patterns in temporal data that would be difficult to discern otherwise. Over the past several years, HyperStudio has been exploring digital timelines and other data visualization tools for a number

    of humanities projects, often correlated with data representation on geographical maps and innovative data browsers that can flexibly filter data according to chosen criteria. More recently, HyperStudio has focused on timelines as innovative research tools that give scholars and students contextualized access to temporal information, frequently in combination with collaboration functions such as joint commenting and tagging.

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    Screenshot from the Serial Experience Project

    For example, the US-Iran Relations project, developed in collaboration with Center for International Studies Associate Director John Tirman and partners at Brown University and the National Security Archive, employs a flexible timeline to display political events that are core to the understanding of the relationship between the two countries. Using the timeline as a starting point, users can search and filter an extensive archive of declassified US documents, rare documents from Iranian sources, as well as information on key political players and institutions. The screenshot at left shows a vertical timeline of events, a detailed chronological list of events in the middle, and documents related to a selected event on the right-hand side. Another project that uses a digital timeline in novel ways is the Serial Experience project, developed in collaboration with the head of the Literature Faculty, Jim Buzard. The project provides scholars, students, and fans with a web application for exploring Victorian serials as both a publication phenomenon and a reading experience. Through a flexible, interactive timeline linked to a faceted browser and full facsimiles of original installments, users can explore serial novels as overlap-

    ping, time-based works of art in conversation with their audience and neighboring texts. In addition, users may collect and annotate novels into their personal library; subscribe to and receive novels along their original publication schedule; and join reading groups to collaboratively read and discuss the novels as serial publications. Serial Experience will not only provide access to a rich database of materials related to nineteenth-century novels, catalyzing new comparative research, but will alsothrough the innovative integration of a timeline toolcreate a unique space in which users can read Victorian serial novels as a shared experience. CMS alum and HyperStudio consultant Christopher York, SM '01 has just completed a research report that describes and compares different approaches to digital timelines in the humanities with a special focus on timeline tools that go beyond data display to enable researchers and students to interactively manipulate the display in order to pose further questions. In addition, York developed a collaborative, web-based timeline prototype that turns the creation and discussion of events into a social activity. Check HyperStudios web site for the report and a beta version of

    the timeline tool. Timelines are only one of several data visualization approaches that HyperStudio is developing for use in teaching, learning and research. With recent funding from the NEH-JISC and in partnership with Jeff Ravel of MITs History Department, Oxford Brookes University, and the Comdie-Franaise in Paris, HyperStudio is developing a suite of digital tools to investigate the Revolution-era performance records of the Comdie-Franaise, Frances most important theatre troupe. The Comdie-Franaise Registers Project will create a scholarly web resource that facilitates independent and collaborative research in a digital archive in novel ways. Working in an on-line workspace, scholars can dynamically navigate large amounts of data, using innovative search and browse tools tightly integrated with interactive data visualizations ranging from simple bar graphs to advanced parallel axes graphs. The project, which helps scholars to interpret data in ways previously impossible, will function as a model for similar digital humanities projects.
    For more information on HyperStudio, visit their website at hyperstudio.mit.edu.

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    C O N V E R G E N C E C U LT U R E C O N S O R T I U M
    C O M PA R AT I V E M E D I A S T U D I E S AT M I T

    Consortium Wraps Up Research


    By Daniel Pereira, C3 Research Manager
    The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) research team harnessed the energy and ideas generated at its annual sponsor company retreat to complete three white papers. The papers were based on an agenda that grew out of our 2008 research on spreadable media and was concerned with the following questions: What is the correct notion of value on which global media flows should be built or implemented? How can corporations create content that will circulate? What is the role of platforms within this circulation? Are platforms agents for change from a purely commodity culture to one that values personal agency, a re-establishment of trust, emotional properties and the restrengthening social ties? C3 Researcher Xiaochang Li SM 09 delivered a white paper that explored issues of monetary and non-monetary exchange and how these flows positively and negatively reinforce notions of community and/or previously established, sometimes implicit social contracts between media companies and consumers. Sheila Seles SM '10 focused her white paper on the issue of platforms and detailed some compelling audience-segmentation categories for thinking about the future of television. Seles will follow up the success of this paper as she continues as a C3 researcher this academic year. C3 researcher Ana Domb SM 09 led the efforts on a third C3 research project: a qualitative case study based on three weeks of field research in Belem, Brazil. In the final deliverable white paper, Dombs research yielded a valuable comparison of value chains versus value networks and noted a shift toward the value of audience participation in determining the aggregate value of networks. As with all C3 research, strategic takeaways regarding issues of community figured prominently. The data generated by the research on the three white papers were presented at C3s annual sponsor company retreat, held this year in May at the MIT Faculty Club, and researchers received the feedback they needed to generate the final versions of the papers. The C3 research team wants to thank all the C3 sponsor companies for their support of the research over the last year, and, of course, Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio for their guidance and leadership throughout the research process. Most importantly, Joshua Green played a huge, vital role in the success of each of the white papers. In related news, Greens book YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture was published by Polity Press and is now available online or in bookstores. Looking forward, Jenkins will now be listed as founder and lead researcher on the C3 project and will remain active and
    Josh Green's new book, published by Polity Press this past summer.

    involved even as he assumes his new position at USC. He will deliver the keynote address at the fourth annual Futures of Entertainment conference to be held Nov. 20 and 21 at MIT. Uricchio will remain as the principal investigator and will be engaged in all things C3 throughout the year as the project evolves through this year of transition.
    For more on C3, visit convergenceculture.org.

    Registration will soon open at futuresofentertainment.org for the fourth Futures of Entertainment conference, held at MIT and hosted by C3 this November 20 and 21. The conference will help unpack the buzz around the creative and business practices behind transmedia texts. It will engage with questions around managing, producing, financing and positioning transmedia efforts, and how to identify the value created from transmedia projects. It will look some of the creative challenges that emerge from managing every larger franchises and which come from developing content for multiple mediums. It will also ask some serious questions about the future sustainability of transmedia events. The second day will feature panels on fan activism, contemporary media business models, and the progressive blurring of distinctions between communication mediums.

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    Grant Encourages New Media in Rio Schools


    By Erin B. Reilly, New Media Literacies Research Director
    Starting in September, Project New Media Literacies (NML) follows Henry Jenkins and becomes a research project at USC, Annenberg School for Communication. Though housed there, Project NML will continue working with grad students and be part of the vibrant conversations and change in the coming school year at CMS. Our goal is to facilitate and support collaboration virtually between designers, researchers, practitioners and supporters and foster activities that span from the east coast at MIT to the west coast at USC and across nations. In Brazil, Rio de Janeiros Department of Education (Rios DoE) has implemented a strong move towards establishing a solid foundation of technology access for teachers, students and administrators. Over 50,000 teachers have been given their own laptops with internet access to encourage the use of technology in education. Despite this extensive effort of providing a solid infrastructure, Rios DoE has at best anecdotal evidence on teachers effectively using these technological support mechanisms in their teaching. The current model of learning is in response to traditional practices that do not match todays educational needsand do not match students strategies for processing knowledge. NMLs approach is to integrate the new media literacies across curricula. Our focus of literacy has changed from individual expression to community involvement, the hallmark of which is creative manifestation and active participation. We recently completed a pilot study of the Learning Librarys Media Makers Challenge Collection and our teachers strategy guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture. What emerged from the study is a better understanding of students daily practices and how they are situated within their learning ecologies and are dynamically interrelated to their existing conditions, infrastructures of place, and technologies. Although the classroom and interaction among teachers and learners is at the core of this ecology, adults and kids worlds are co-constituted, suggesting that school, after-school, home and online places are all organic parts of the learning ecosystem. The Educators House will be designed as a learning ecology built on the co-configured expertise of researchers and educators. The goal of The Educators House is to fully engage participants in challenging intellectual tasks that open their thinking to others so that they learn through targeted and timely feedback, adaptation and creation of new concepts and processes. Over the three years, NML will reach about 9,500 educators by helping to establish new modes of professional development; provide methods and tools to increase collaboration within the Brazilian education sector; offer exciting, creative educational content (including the Learning Library and Teachers Strategy Guides); and frame, conduct and publish research that responds to the countrys needs. This is a new beginning, a time where NML extends beyond New England and taps into audiences and resources worldwide.
    For more information on Project NML, visit their website at newmedialiteracies.org.

    "Join-Ning" the NML Community


    Project NML has created a community at projectnml.ning.com so that we can share resources, give feedback and have discussions with educators and learners who are interested in further understanding new media literacies and integrating them into their learning environment. As part of the NML community, educators can: Learn strategies for creating participatory structures in the classroom by incorporating curriculum from NMLs strategy guides into their plans. Explore the Learning Library, a new tool to share media and create learning challenges (media-based lessons) on any topic. Practice by exploring NMLs Media Makers Challenge Collection in the Learning Library, a set of challenges that explore the new media literacies within the context of media artists and production. Create lesson plans. Educators can incorporate curriculum from NMLs strategy guides into their 2009-2010 school year plans. They can check out stories from teachers who used the guide last year. Share stories and hold discussions with fellow educators to share ideas and get to know one another.

    The Educators House


    Partnering with The Alchemists, NML was recently awarded a three-year grant from Rios DoE to develop The Educators House, a professional development program to encourage Rios teachers to implement new media practices. The Alchemists is a transmedia storytelling think-do tank based in Rio and Los Angeles. Maurcio Mota founded The Alchemists with the main objective of inciting a shift in the content and storytelling landscape applying the concepts in Henry Jenkinss Convergence Culture for brands and networks and, now, Brazils education sector.

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    Alumni Testimonials
    Last fall, CMS co-Director Henry Jenkins announced his decision to pursue new challenges at the University of Southern California. As we did for the last issue, In Medias Res invited another three years of alumni to describe what their work with Henry and the CMS community meant to them, to their time at MIT, and to their professional lives. R.J. Bain, SM 04 tion series Big Brother. I find it fitting that Ive been asked to reflect on my CMS experience while working on a television show that makes use of documentary and games to tell stories, streams live to the web 24 hours a day, and has a dedicated fan following unlike any series of its kind. By providing me with the tools to think creatively and critically about topics such as these, CMS has made me a more mindful and deliberate media producer. My years at CMS were some of the most formative of my life, and Ill forever be grateful for the opportunities I was provided, thanks to the dedication of Henry and the CMS faculty and staff. Editors Note: While on the CMS staff, R.J. produced the first issue of In Medias Res. Vanessa Bertozzi, SM 06 Well, Im just like everyone else: mixing it up. Every day, in fact, I do that CMS two-step between creative media work and analysis of media change. Today it was waking up to draw up specs for an iPhone application to go with Kevin Lynchs Image of the City, then its time to check in on animation for a historical narrative in Beacon Hill, and then company finance, and then relating architecture to detective fiction. The mix of old and new is probably whats most settled with me from the CMS program, and its a warm beacon in the mobile media world, that can be brazenly opportunistic, and poorly rooted in the old crafts of story, a sense of place, and reflection. I run Untravel Media, a multidisciplinary studio that specializes in mobile media storytelling. Professor Ed Barrett is advising one of our projects to develop a walkable iPhone companion to a PBS special about a historic murder. In fact, some of my classmates may recall a spring day in 2003 when I brought them to Beacon Hill to run a crude prototype of this application. It miserably failed as the flowering trees and fresh environs trumped any of my GPS triggered grainy videos. But the ah ha of that little excursion and the realization that mobile media needs a new storytelling approach could only have happened but there was another added insight into work and life and culture: Henry and William instilled in us a respect for others as we went about our research. This is something that grounds the work I do today, and I will carry that forward throughout my career. I know I speak for many when I say Henry and William and everyone at CMS played a very benevolent role in our "practice of everyday life." Michael Epstein, SM 04

    My Comparative Media Studies experience actually began before I attended a single CMS lecture as a student. As a member of the CMS staff, I witnessed first-hand the considerable time and hard work that Henry and his team put into fundraising on behalf of the CMS program. Working closely with Henry and his family, as they made personal sacrifices for the sake of a new academic program, made a huge impression on me both as a humanist and as an adult. As a student, the CMS program challenged me to reconsider my ideas regarding communication and self, and I emerged, after two years, not only with a greater awareness of how individuals interact with each other but with a better understanding of who I am as an individual. My time with the CMS faculty and my fellow students helped provide me with a foundation of theoretical knowledge that continues to inform my work in the television industry on a daily basis. Currently, I am working as a producer on the 11th season of the CBS reality competi-

    My time at MIT was challenging, interesting (scratch thatmind-blowing), but most of all, as Ive worked day-to-day in my career, it has been useful. I work at Etsy.com, the online marketplace where artists, craftspeople, and collectors sell their hand-made and vintage items. Etsy is also a community of people across the world that shares a passion for making things and supporting independent artists. I run Etsy's blog and oversee our video podcast (blog.etsy.com). The combination of big ideas from CMS and their practical application has informed not just the way I view the world but also the way I participate in it. At CMS, we grappled with theory and history and tried to use those frameworks to understand the culture we live and breathe,

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    through a praxis-oriented program like CMS. These are still fundamental lessons we use in our productions, and the vision is finding a foothold in the growing communities of iPhone and mixed-reality producers. On a personal note, I got married last year to Silvia, whom I met in Venice (through a CMS connection.) We reside happily at the foot of Beacon Hill surrounded by several waypoints in a historic murder story. Clara Fernandez, SM 04 surprise. Its approach was both reflective and relevant, and it provided the kind of environment that naturally fostered creative crossconnections. My friends in the program were doing entirely different kinds of work, and whether at those weekly dinners at Senior House, or tramping down the Infinite Corridor, or at colloquia, those conversations are a big part of my CMS memories. I also think back of Henrys stupendous and singular commitment to CMS, and to each one of us. Dont know how he did it, but I cant thank him enough. My CMS experience has definitely seeped into the way I think of culture and media. I moved back to journalism in India, reporting and anchoring for NDTV, a TV news network. I covered tech and social media for a bit, and began to appreciate the extent to which CMS gave us frontline perspectives on emerging media debates. After a year, I shifted to the editorial pages of the Indian Express, where I manage the op-ed page and also write columns on media, culture and tech. Were all smatterers, in a way. But a great deal of civilization depends on intelligent smattering, said Frank Kermode, about the enterprise of literary study. For me, CMS was the best kind of smattering, bringing a humanistic intelligence and historical grounding to thinking about media. Moneta Ho (now Kushner), SM 04 workhow cool is that? At the center of it all was Henry. I am excited for Henry and wish him the best in his new endeavors but also hope to see the CMS program at MIT continue to grow and thrive. CMS provided me a great background for my career as a user experience designer at Microsoft, where I have been working for the five years since graduation. Thanks, CMS! Brian Jacobson, SM 05

    When I arrived at CMS, my main research interest was the cinematic versions of Shakespeare on film. Two of the best scholars in the field, Peter Donaldson and Diana Henderson, were associated with the department, so it seemed the right place to go. I also brought with me a substantial collection of videogames, which I had become interested in as a field of research. While having such a wide range of eclectic interests would not have had room most other places, it is a requirement to become a CMS student. Although I wrote my thesis on Orson Welles and Shakespeare, in the end I decided to focus on videogames and went to Georgia Tech to get my Ph.D. in digital mediaIm this close to finishing. Now, Im back in CMS with a group of other CMS alumni, studying and making games. I still love theatre and my Hamlet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Im working on a paper right now where I use theatrical performance as a model to study games, and Ive managed to include several references to Shakespeare. Same old, same old. CMS was a turning point in my career and also in my personal life. While I went through a time of change and challenges, I found an exciting career, a bunch of good friends, and a wonderful partner. It was the right place at the right time. Amulya Gopalakrishnan, SM 06 For someonemewith a rather constricted view of the humanities, CMS was a happy

    I will always treasure my memories of the two years that I spent in the CMS program at MIT. There was a lot of positive energy and excitement with faculty and classmates working on interesting projects and collaborations in an emerging field. We got to surf websites, watch movies and play videogames for our home-

    Since leaving CMS in 2005, I have tried to carry on the programs spirit of collaboration and generosity in my research, writing, and teaching. I have also continued to seek out similar sites of interdisciplinary thinking and comparative scholarship, most recently as a 2008-2009 Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) Scholar. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California in the Critical Studies division of the School of Cinematic Arts and a member of USCs interdisciplinary Visual Studies Graduate Certificate program. My dissertation, "Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and Early Cinema," examines the origins of the relationship between cinema and architecture in the worlds first film studios. This work has earned pre-dissertation research support from the Social Science Research Councils (SSRC) Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (Visual Culture field, 2007), and from fall 2009 through fall 2010 I will be conducting archival research in Paris, London, and New York under the auspices of a Fulbright Advanced Student Fellowship to France and the SSRCs

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    International Dissertation Research Fellowship. The training I received from Henry, William, and the students and faculty I met at MIT continues to animate my work, and I remain grateful for the experiences that CMS made possible in two (too) short years. Sarah Kamal, SM 05 wrapped in nostalgia and gratitude. Many thanks. Andrea McCarty, SM 05 Rekha Murthy, SM 05

    I joined CMS as a novice in the humanities, trained in the tidiness of linearity through my bachelors in mathematics and practiced in the idealism of humanitarianism via my development work in Uganda, India, and Afghanistan. It took some gentle jostling for me to let go of stubbornly narrow understandings of theory, research, and the nature of knowledge. But thanks to CMS I learned how to express myself in the world of cacophonous, ambiguous debate rather than conclusive proof. Ah, the trauma of entering the messy real world! CMS, in my eyes, offered openness towards ideas, to the unpopular in the popular, and modeled a human acceptance, intellectual generosity, and embracing of diversity that I cherished. After graduating from MIT, I worked with UNIFEM in Afghanistan on media strategies. I edited the National Action Plan for the Women of Afghanistan, a policy platform for the Afghan government to improve the status of women over the next ten years. I wrote for Oxford Analytica, the UN Chronicle, and Oxfam's Gender and Development journal. And throughout I held Henrys crystal clear prose and Williams attention to historical pattern as examples in my professional and, to my own surprise, continued academic pursuits. Life has been hard at times, abrasive. But I think Im on the other side for now, as a Trudeau Scholar on maternity leave from doctoral studies at the London School of Economics. And CMS lives on in my life,

    The two years I spent at CMS were two of the most valuable years of my life. I entered CMS in 2003 from the media archiving world, looking for a graduate experience that would give me time to read, research, and think about media. What I found was an incredibly rich intellectual landscape, with many opportunities to explore ideas and to work on interesting projects. Between my thesis work, time spent on projects at the Hyperstudio, class work and colloquia, I was able to make connections between media theory and practice on many different levels. I have since left Cambridge and now work as director of archives and asset management at HBO in Los Angeles. My CMS experience regularly informs my professional life as I watch media projects evolve at HBO and provide the material assets for repurposing content on a variety of media platforms. One of the most extraordinary things I experienced at CMS was a sense of finding my place among a community of like-minded scholars. My 05 classmates, as well as Henry, William, Kurt Fendt, and other professors, made the experience unlike any other. CMS was a supportive environment in which to try out new ideas, experiment, learn and grow. I hope that MIT will find the means to support and grow this program that provided me both a temporary home and a lifelong foundation.

    After eight years in web and radio, I entered CMS ready for a Big Change and seeking ideas for the Next Thing. I was split between hope that the program would give me more professional direction and self-caution that I was asking a lot. Well, my CMS experience exploded that dichotomy and far exceeded my hopes. Im still a generalist, but now I see generalism as a strength, not a drag. Henry, William, and my outstanding classmates were both validating and challenging. I came out inspired and no more specific. But I see thats the condition of a media enthusiast in the current age, and I now can embrace it. Since CMS, Ive remained in the Boston area. Ive been an information architect for a consulting company, a product manager for a mobile software startup, a freelance userexperience designer, and now, in the most delightfully open-ended of titles, director of projects + partnerships for Public Radio Exchange, just down the street from MIT in Harvard Square. When PRX released an iPhone app with hundreds of public radio streams, I was asked to do the media outreach. I faced the media and technology implications head-on and unafraid and encouraged stations, listeners, bloggers, and journalists to do the same. CMS has given me a flexible roadmap to lifelong learning and media consumption. My tastes are broader than they used to be: I read graphic novels, watch TV series from beginning to end, and enjoy the breakdown of genre and taxonomy. I try to help others cross their own borders and assumptions, as

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    when I lead academics, government officials, and citizens on walking tours of street media in Central Square. I am so glad I have been able to stay within MITs geographical orbit, in order to stay plugged into its formidable social, intellectual, and creative forces. I have been honored that Henry and William have regularly reached out to keep me in that orbit, and I look forward to that continuing. Karen Schrier, SM 05 Susan Hockfield to express the importance of CMS to MIT and beyond. I know that this type of camaraderie is no small part due to the ability of Henry, William, and the CMS faculty to hand pick the right students and to create a culture of cooperation, integrity, openness, and intellectual curiosity. I am inspired to foster this type of culture when I (hopefully) start my own program in the future. Parmesh Shahani, SM 05 Yannis Zavoleas, SM04

    Im currently working full-time as an executive producer at Scholastic in their digital division, and Im also a doctoral student in games and education at Columbia University and adjunct professor at Parsons New School for Design. And there are so many ways that I continue to benefit from the program that Henry and William created. My CMS education helps everyday at Scholastic, where we develop transmedia properties, prototype games and websites, analyze new media and digital trends, and develop social networking tools. And for the first few months, my boss introduced me by proudly saying she studied at MIT with Henry Jenkins. Also, CMS has helped me tremendously in terms of publishing my work and getting into conferences, and of course, with my doctoral studies. Im excited to have Henry write the forward to my book on ethics and games. Beyond that, my friendships and collaborations were an integral part of my CMS experience and were (and continue to be) extremely rewarding. In fact, upon hearing of Henrys departure, the class of 05 worked together this past year to write a letter to MIT President

    My experiences with CMSs Convergence Culture Consortium were directly responsible for me getting the dual job of editorial director of the Indian fashion magazine Verve, and head of vision and opportunities in the Incubation Lab at the Mahindra Group, where I work on venture capital and new media. I have been spreading the convergence mantra across both jobs. I have also spent the past three years traveling India and the world with my book Gay Bombay, which emerged out of my CMS masters thesis. This time has coincided with the emergence of a strong gay rights movement in India and ground-breaking incidents of activism and legal change. I have found my book and myself in the center of this storm, often being called upon to serve as a spokesperson. It has been an exhilarating, emotional, and humbling journey. Finally, I have helped in translating creative and corporate India for the world at forums such as Next Media (Banff, Canada), XMedia Lab (Auckland, New Zealand) and the Prague Bollywood Film Festival. Its pretty clear that none of this excitement would have happened without CMS. It changed my life for the better and I am indebted to Henry, William and the rest of the CMS faculty, as well as to the incredible staff and students of the program for providing me with the academic and entrepreneurial opportunities to spread my wings.

    Since graduation, I have been teaching architectural design and digital media as assistant professor in the School of Architecture, first at the Technical University of Crete, and then at the University of Patras, Greece, where I am now. The time I spent studying at CMS was decisive for me, for I was granted the intellectual framing to systematize my ideas. I come from an interdisciplinary background combining architecture and digital media. For that, CMS was perhaps the best place to critically link these design areas; moreover, I was unrestricted from any of the conventional or mainstream definitions about architecture. I have gradually constructed ideas and approaches, which are, in a sense, more reflective of me: specifically, on the methodologies and practices about architecture and how these may relate to the available tools and the rhetoric of design. Over the past five years, I have exhibited and published my work, and presented in over thirty conferences internationally. Being an academic, I have been able to evolve my ideas by testing them in workshops and in class with my students, too. Some of these ideas actually sprang from my experience at CMS. Overall, I thank CMS for encouraging me to think creatively in novel, often subversive, ways, in order to effectively challenge my field.

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    P EO P LE , P LACES , T H IN G S

    Faculty
    James Buzard (Literature) spent the summer lecturing in Jerusalem, Montevideo, and London and conducted a graduate seminar at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also prepared several pieces of his writing on nineteenth-century British literature for publication. Ian Condry (Foreign Languages and Literatures) along with Tommy DeFrantz brought a dozen MIT students to Japan to perform Live Action Anime: Madness at Mokuba at Tokyo University of the Arts. The group visited an anime studio, many shrines and temples and, of course, the Akihabara Electric City section of Tokyo. This fall, Condry will teach the class Anime while he completes his second book The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japans Media Success Story. A Japanese translation of Condry's first book, Hip-Hop Japan, was published in April. Thomas F. DeFrantz (Music and Theater Arts) worked with Ian Condry to stage Live Action Anime: Madness at Mokuba at the Anime Boston Con in May, and then at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Tokyo. DeFrantz taught at the American Dance Festival and convened the Choreography and Corporeality working group of the IFTR in Lisbon. He continues to research on performative aspects of hip-hop dance. Kurt Fendt (HyperStudio, Foreign Languages and Literatures) and Jeff Ravel (History) were awarded a two-year, joint JISC/NEH Transatlantic Collaboration grant to work on the Comdie-Franaise Registers Project along with partners at Oxford Brooks and the Comdie-Franaise in Paris. Together with Turkish-German writer Zafer Senocak, he started a web-based educational poetry project entitled "Poetikon" that rethinks the interpretation of poems as a social media experience. In the fall, he will be teaching a film class with a special focus on German films that anticipated the Fall of the Wall. Mary Fuller (Literature) has partnered with Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a professor in MITs Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, to offer a new freshman seminar: Catastrophe, Tedium, Discoveries. The seminar, supported by an Alumni Class

    Funds grant, focuses on nineteenth-century scientific expeditions and the ways in which observations are transformed into records, narratives, and theories. Fuller is looking forward this fall to teaching a beginner's class in aikido, the Japanese martial art she has studied since 1992. Diana Henderson (Literature) contributed an essay, "Re-Contextualizing Literary Education: A Multi-Variable Experiment in Learning and Performance," to a special issue of English Language Notes. The volume, published in August, focuses on experiments in literary education and features contributions by Wai Chee Dimmock, Gerald Graff, Alan Liu, and Jerome McGann. Henderson spent two weeks catching up on Paris and London theater and is working on articles about Thomas Middletons plays in performance and on gender, subjectivity, and sonnets. Wynn Kelley (Literature) will teach a new course this fall with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, who is the first Martin Luther King Visiting Fellow in Literature. The course, called Classics Remixed: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, will have students study the works Twain remixed to build his novel, and then create a contemporary remix of Twain. Wiley previously partnered with the New Media Literacies research group to help create the teachers' strategy guide for Reading in a Participatory Culture. He's the director of Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, RI, and creator of Moby-Dick: Then and Now, as well as dramatic adaptations of works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Mary Shelley, Langston Hughes, and others. Eric Klopfer (Teacher Education Program) has three new NSF-funded projects in the works. These include an initiative developing a graphical programming language for building narratives in virtual worlds, a workshop on location-based games for teachers, and a new alternate reality game being developed with the Smithsonian Institute under the leadership of Scot Osterweil, creative director of The Education Arcade research group. Klopfer is excited about a new freshman seminar this year designed to get students interested in programming through cell-phone applications.

    Nick Montfort (Writing and Humanistic Studies) sent his interactive fiction development system Curveship out to a crew of IF programmers for testing and comment. The Python framework lets authors control how the computer generates narrative. Montfort is continuing his work on the Platform Studies book series (see platformstudies.org) and has an article in the latest IEEE Annals on videogame displays, written with Ian Bogost, his Racing the Beam co-author. He's also written new minimal story and poetry generators. Jim Paradis (Writing and Humanistic Studies) is working on an edition of selected works that reflect the emergence of science and technology as sources of cultural authority in nineteenth-century England and the U.S. This project offers extracts that capture a number of the tensions and collaborations between some emergent mediated forms of popular culture and the humanistic tradition of letters. Specifically, it explores the role of science and technology in what Raymond Williams has identified as the evolving idea of culture both as a "general state or habit of mind, having close relations with the idea of human perfection," and as "a whole way of life, materials, intellectual and spiritual." Irving Singer (Linguistics and Philosophy) has written new prefaces for his Meaning of Life trilogy which MIT Press is reprinting this fall. His trilogy The Nature of Love appeared in the Irving Singer Library earlier this year, and in spring 2010 his book Mozart and Beethoven: The Concept of Love in Their Operas will be included in the library. He is now working on a sequel to his recently finished book entitled Modes of Creativity. Philip Tan (GAMBIT and SM 03) is looking forward to the release of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Labs newest games. The research topics this year are riskier, while the expectations and standards for production quality have gone up, a natural consequence of working with stellar lab staff and indefatigable students. Tan is especially grateful for the support of his wife who reminds him to actually play some games. His personal digital game library topped 1,000 titles this summer.

    36 in medias res

    P EO P LE , P LACES , T H IN G S
    David Thorburn (Literature and CMS) spent his summer writing poems, tweaking his media essays for book publication and trying to imagine MIT without Henry Jenkins. Edward Baron Turk (Literature) was featuredalong with the filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier and the political historian Pascal Oryon French TV in Serge Julys new documentary Once Upon A Time. . . . Children of Paradise, a fresh look at the making of Marcel Carns 1945 classic. He was also the only non-French authority to be chosen by Frances Ministry of Culture and Communication (Archives Division) to contribute to the 2009 edition of the annual publication Clbrations Nationales, with an essay to mark the centenary of Carns birth. He is currently completing a book on contemporary French theater. William Uricchio spent much of the summer in the Netherlands in academic robes and beret, as several of his students completed their Ph.D.s in the time-honored Dutch tradition. He gave keynotes at conferences including Ephemeral Media (Nottingham), Where Corporate Culture and Local Markets Meet (Rotterdam), and Changing Literacies (Utrecht). But his main preoccupation was developing the Utrecht Interactive project for the forthcoming anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht in 2013an interactive, locative, cross media engagement with history. Andrea Walsh (Writing and Humanistic Studies) has been doing research this summer on 19th-century American women's rights activism. She has also been the editor of Angles 2009, an online journal of exemplary student writing from the foundational writing courses during academic year 2009. She will be teaching Writing on Contemporary Issues and Writing and Experience this coming fall. Jing Wang (Foreign Languages and Literatures) launched an NGO 2.0 project in China in May, bringing together two Chinese universities, three NGOs, and Ogilvy Beijing to build a communication infrastructure for grassroots NGOs in western and central parts of China. The project built a social network service (SNS) platform and an NGO ranking system. By the end of June 2010, over 100 NGOs will be trained to use Web 2.0 tools to accomplish their goals and activities.

    Graduate Students
    Jason Begy SM 10 spent the summer working on Pierre: Insanity Inspired in GAMBIT, a circular platformer videogame in which the player runs around a disc collecting or dodging falling objects. The game will be used to study how different forms of failure feedback affect player performance. In September, Begy speaks at DiGRA 2009 as a panelist on The Bad Games panel. He also co-wrote an article on Half-Life 2 with Nick Seaver for an upcoming book on maps and games.

    to enable communication between Burmese refugee youth in the U.S. and in Thailand.

    Kevin Driscoll SM 09 recently completed his thesis "Stepping Your Game Up: Technical Innovation among Young People of Color in Hip-Hop" and will soon start a Ph.D. program in the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. This summer, he is working at GAMBIT and preparing for a second year on the Students for Free Culture board of directors. Driscoll can be heard DJing every Wednesday evening from midnight until 2 am on WMBR, 88.1FM. See kevindriscoll. info.

    Joshua Diaz SM 09 was pleased to complete his thesis on dwarf marriages, player-driven storytelling, and narrative architecture, and the ensuing graduation was nice too. He's spending his summer working as a writer and researcher for GAMBIT and is happy to report that their game is looking fantastic. In the fall, he'll be moving to the west coast and pursuing game design work while putting together programs, prototypes, and proposals. Ana Domb SM 09 finally finished her thesis. She came to CMS certain that she would be writing about film and producers and wrote a thesis on music and audiences, which actually don't feel that different any more. In the next few weeks, Domb will have to decide where to go next. Right now Latin America is tugging at her heart. Maybe soon, you can come visit her down south. Audubon Dougherty SM 10 loves school. She received an award from the MIT Entrepreneurship Center to spend half the summer in Peru making a documentary on the impact of wireless internet in rural areas of the Amazon and Andes, which was amazing (see page 4). After teaching a video class last term, she looks forward to assistant teaching in Digital Poetry this fall and building a website

    Madeleine Elish SM 10 spent the summer in Madrid working with and documenting the Medialab-Prado, a city-funded cultural space aimed at the production, research, and dissemination of digital culture and the intersection of art, science, and technology. Her days were filled with interviews, reading British sociology, and thinking about the evolving role of cultural institutions in societyas well as lots of fresh anchovies, potato chips, and caas. The summer filled her with inspiration and ideas and she is excited for the year (and thesis) to come.

    fall 2009 37

    P EO P LE , P LACES , T H IN G S
    Florence Gallez SM 10 oversaw the launch of her Open Park (OP) online collaborative journalism website and its first case studya roundtable discussion on US-Russian relations. She then headed to California climes to cover Comic-Con in San Diego for The Tech, In Medias Res, Boston.com, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Next on her agenda are OPs second case study, writing about the US exotic dance industry and media ethics (for which she interviewed club owners in Los Angeles), and interviewing Princes band members for east coast publications. This last item, she hopes, will get her a step closer to interviewing the Purple One. Michelle Moon Lee SM '10 spent the spring term developing a collaborative board game designed to model principles of computer science and encourage environmental awareness and a digital simulation game that encourages responsible entrepreneurship. She also developed an alternate reality game to explore the principles of pervasive gaming. She spent the summer making websites and games full-time for Quilted, a web and games co-op, and researching alternate reality games. See michellemoonlee.com. Nick Seaver SM 10 accidentally kidnapped Mick Jaggers dog. After returning her, he co-wrote a book chapter on doors and alien occupation in the videogame Half-Life 2 with classmate Jason Begy, started a new blog, and taught a group of very generous high schoolers about sound art and experimental music through MIT's High School Studies Program. He finished off the summer by nailing down all the keys on a free piano from Craigslist. Sheila Murphy Seles SM 10 spent the summer in New York City working as an intern for both Turner Broadcasting and The Advertising Research Foundation. Some of her projects included tracking technology trends, researching behavioral economics, and interviewing industry leaders about the value of advertising. In the fall, Seles will continue her work with C3, resume her research on television, and return to her regularly scheduled programming.

    Flourish Klink SM 10 recently was chair of formal programming for a Harry Potter convention, Azkatraz 2009, and joined the board of that convention's parent organization, HPEF Inc. She also attended Comic-Con for the first time. She will be a teaching assistant for CMS 100 this fall. In addition, she has begun research for her thesis, which will cover the intersection of Twilight fans and lulz culture, and has taken up consulting on fandom topics for a wide variety of clients in her spare time. Hillary Kolos SM 10 published an article in Threshold magazine about her Project NML research, developed a videogame about trade with classmate Michelle Moon Lee, had a paper about her teenage bedroom posted on Henry Jenkinss blog, and concluded her second year as an Adobe Youth Voices media mentor. Her summer didn't allow much time to slow down between interning at the Center for Children and Technology, attending the Games for Change and NECC conferences, and reading up on her thesis topic.

    Jason Rockwood SM 09 is spending the summer finishing his thesis on the relationship between networked media technology and prisons. His work on gay video gamers continues to attract attention: he was interviewed by a reporter for the Houston Chronicle on the topic and has been assisting a gay videogame designer at Full Sail's new videogame design program.

    Lana Swartz SM 09 is recovering from an ill-timed appendix insurrection, is finishing her thesis on counterfeit luxury fashion, and is headed west to USC-Annenberg, where she will begin the Ph.D. program in communication.

    38 in medias res

    E V EN T S

    Robert Miller, at left, president of HarperCollins HarperStudio; Robert Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book founder and co-director; and moderator Geoffrey Long appeared on a panel exploring The Future of Publishing. Continued from page 19.

    The Institutional Perspectives on Storage panel included Richard Wright, above at left, a preservation specialist for the BBC Archive. The panel was moderated by William Uricchio, above at right.

    to the work of Canadian media scholar Harold Innis in the call for papers. MiT6 was anchored by four plenary sessions, Archives and History, New Media, Civic Media, Institutional Perspectives on Storage and the Future of Publishing. A Communications Forum event titled Global Media launched MiT6, while a final Summary Perspectives panel concluded the conference. The plenary sessions featured such speakers as John Miles Foley, director of the center for eResearch and editor of Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri; Rick Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archive, which was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002; Persephone Miel, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where she directs the Media Re:public project; Pelle Snickars, the head of research at the National Library of Sweden; and Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Papers delivered during the numerous breakout sessions explored a range of primary themes: Encyclopedic Endeavor and the Internet (Erinc Salor, University of Amsterdam); The Newseum and its Digital Modes of News Storage (Mark Nimkoff, University of Illinois); Typosquatting, Transmission and the Globalization of Error (Paul Benzon, Temple University); Mapping YouTubes Common Culture (Joshua Green, MIT CMS); and The Politics of Platforms (Tarleton Gillespie, Cornell University). Other papers examined such topics as education, political activism, fiction, the developing world, and artall within the context of the transition to digital media. MiT6 was co-sponsored by the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and by the Literature Section at MIT. For a full listing of presentations, speakers and, in some cases, full papers, visit the conference website at web.mit.edu/mit6, which also contains video links to the plenary panels.

    Thomas Pettitt, associate professor at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Denmark, was part of a summing up panel that included Marlene Manoff, associate head of the MIT Humanities Library.

    John Miles Foley and Lisa Gitelman at the Archives and History session. Gitelman is co-editor of New Media, 1740-1915, a volume of the Media in Transition book series published by MIT Press.

    fall 2009 39

    CMS

    MIT Comparative Media Studies Bldg 14N-207 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139

    Pitts-Wiley Joins CMS as MLK Visiting Scholarand as MLK


    Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, director of the Pawtucket, RI-based Mixed Magic Theater and CMS collaborator, has joined MIT as a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar and Artist. Pitts-Wiley will be based in the MIT Literature Section, and will also work with faculty in CMS and in the Music and Theater Arts Section. This fall, Pitts-Wiley is co-teaching the class Classics Remixed: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Wynn Kelley, a senior lecturer in Literature. The class will explore the sources that Twain drew on and remixed for his novel, and students will create their own remix of Twains work. Pitts-Wileys remix of Herman Melville, a production called Moby-Dick: Then and Now, serves as a core text for Project NMLs teachers strategy guide Reading in a Participatory Culture. In 2007, Pitts-Wiley spoke on the Learning through Remixing panel at the fifth Ricardo Pitts-Wiley portrays Martin Luther King Jr. and Jeannie Carson plays Coretta Scott King in Media in Transition conference. The video of that panel can be viewed at mitworld.mit.edu/video/474. the play When Fate Comes Knocking produced by Pitts-Wileys Mixed Magic Theatre.

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