S p r i n g E V E N T S c a l e n d a r IN S ID E , p a g e 2 3

Comparative Media Studies | Writing

In Medias Res
c m s w. m i t. e d u s p r i n g 2 0 15

Comparative Media Studies|Writing

SPRING 2015
A B O U T IN M E DIA S R E S
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
14E-303 and E15-331
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 02139
617.253.3599 / cmsw@mit.edu / cmsw.mit.edu

cmsw.mit.edu/magazine

Head
Edward Schiappa

Research Managers

TO OUR READERS

In Medio Nix

Edward Schiappa

4 F eature

Gamer Identity

Jesse Sell, CMS 15

F eature

EdTechX
Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, and
Louisa Rosenheck

I n terv ie w

Documentaries, MIT-Style

10

12

NEWS

Creating User-Friendlier
Environments
Steve Calechman
F eature

Eyes Over Kenya

Chelsea Barabas, CMS 15

18

p eo p l e , p l a c es , t h i n g s

23

e v e n ts

Personal and Project Updates

Spring 2015 Talks

Even without all the negative associations with the term gamer though, many
people probably would not want to admit
that they prioritize games over other aspects
of life. Video games have existed for decades,
theyre the largest entertainment industry in
the world, and many people now make their
living playing games, yet somehow we still
have not legitimized games as a pastime.
Jesse Sell, p. 5

Federico Casalegno, Mobile Experience Lab

Ian Condry, Creative Communities Initiative
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Center for Civic Media
Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio
Fox Harrell, ICE Lab
Suzanne Lane, Writing, Rhetoric, and
Professional Communication
Nick Montfort, The Trope Tank
Scot Osterweil, The Education Arcade
Philip Tan, MIT Game Lab
Sarah Wolozin, Open Documentary Lab

Traditional storytelling is media specific;

you make a film, a radio story, a television
show, etc. Today, digital documentaries
are informed by games, civic engagement,
activism, artificial intelligence, and creative
computing.
Sarah Wolozin, p. 9
Critical to any new technologys success
is having a cadre of people who are able to
lead the development of new legal and social
frameworks for dealing with the ambiguity
and contingencies brought about by a new
technology.
Chelsea Barabas, p. 15
Image above: MIT students on top of postblizzard snow pile behind Simmons Hall.
Photo by Tom Gearty, featured by Spectrum,
a publication of the MIT Office of Resource
Development: http://spectrum.mit.edu/
continuum/the-alps-of-mit.

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Communications Director

cmsw.mit.edu/people

T O O U R R E AD E R S

Or So Far, In Medio Nix

By Edward Schiappa, Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing

As I write this, the Boston area is dealing with one of its

snowiest winters in history, with blizzard conditions shutting
down mass transit and closing schools and universities,
including MIT. As this issue of In Medias Res testifies,
however, the challenging weather has not slowed the pace of
activities of the denizens of CMS/W!

reetings!
As I write this, the Boston
area is dealing with one of its
snowiest winters in history,
with blizzard conditions shutting down mass
transit and closing schools and universities,
including MIT. As this issue of In Medias Res
testifies, however, the challenging weather
has not slowed the pace of activities of the
denizens of CMS/W!
We are fewer in number this spring as a
number of our faculty are away on sabbaticals and leaves. As a result, we have decided
to postpone our biennial Media in Transition
conference for one year, but look forward to
organizing it for spring 2016. We also look
forward to telling you all about the accomplishments of our faculty on leave when
everyone returns this fall.
Our vibrant curriculum in gaming
continues to be enormously popular with
MIT undergraduates, and the role of games
in society continues to be reflected upon by
faculty and graduate students as well, as the
essay by Jesse Sell (CMS 15) illustrates.
Carole Urbano and Philip Tan then tell
us about the role of Education Arcade and
MIT Game Lab in the launch of the first
two courses of EdTechX, a series of massive
open online courses (MOOCs) dedicated to
the subject of educational technology. Their
narrative illustrates the enormous amount of
work that goes into the creation of MOOCs,
and they provide a candid account of what

didnt quite work and what worked splendidly.

Two of our most visible and active
research groups are the Open Documentary
Lab (ODL) and the Mobile Experience Lab
(MEL). ODL is directed by Sarah Wolozin
with Professor William Uricchio as Principal
Investigator. Nancy DuVergne Smith of the
MIT Alumni Association sat down with
Wolozin to talk about the Moments of Innovation website, co-constructed with the
International Documentary Festival of Amsterdams Doclab (p. 9).
MEL is directed by Associate Professor of
the Practice Federico Casalegno. As Steve
Calechmans article demonstrates, MEL is at
the forefront of explore the design of technology aimed at enhancing peoples experiences of locations we typically experience on
a transitory basis, such as a gas station, restaurant, or hotel lobby. If you want to see the
future of such places, then you should check
out what MEL is up to! (p. 10)
Chelsea Barabas (CMS 15) tells us about
her trip over MITs Independent Activities
Period to Kenya, where she and graduate
student Jude Mwenda (MAS, 15) worked
with wildlife conservancies to conduct a feasibility study for the use of drone technologies
to support anti-poaching activities. Barabas
and Mwenda conducted a series of workshops
with wildlife conservation workers and local
communities bordering wildlife parks in
order to understand the challenges they face

in deploying drone technologies in a sustainable way. The goal of their trip was to identify
the sort of support needed for drones to be a
sustainable component of Kenyan conservation efforts (p. 12).
We close this issue with summaries of activities by individuals and the research groups
affiliated with CMS/W. The breadth of activities going on here is great.
Throughout the spring semester, CMS/W
hosts an impressive series of guest speakers
engaging topics as varied as comic books to
hate crimes in cyberspace. Some highlights
include our MLK Visiting Scholar Coco
Fusco, who will preview her fall 2015 book
on performance and politics in Cuba on
the role of the state in Cuban art during the
1980s; Kevin Driscoll, who locates the roots
of social media as we think of it in the bulletin
board systems of the early web; and Thomas
DeFranz on queer social dance in AfricanAmerican communities. Were particularly
excited to have Driscoll and DeFranz here:
both have roots at CMS/W, with Driscoll
a 2009 graduate of our Comparative Media
Studies masters program and DeFranz a
former MIT professor affiliated with us
before his departure for Duke in 2011. See
p. 23 for a full list of this springs events, and
join us if you can.

spring 2015 3

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Gamer Identity
Is it time to shed gamer altogether?
Jesse Sell, CMS 15

ecently in a course Im assisting, I asked the students to

go around the room and choose which one of Richard
Bartles player types1 they identify most strongly with.
Bartles types include the achiever, the explorer, the
killer, and the socializer. The article focuses particularly on Multiple
User Dungeons, but the player types are easily applicable to almost
any variety of game.
Achievers are the type of people to go through a game with the goal
of completing everything the game has to offer. If there is an award to
be won, the achiever is going after it. Explorers are inclined to competitiveness and spend their time finding the outer edges of the game.
Easter eggs and secrets are paydirt for explorers. Killers are exactly
what they sound like. Closely related to griefers, they spend their time
hunting down other players, preying on the weaker types. Finally,
the socializers are those players who spend their time chatting with or
helping others. They may be a knowledgebase for the other players, or
they may simply enjoy spending time with others instead of seeking
their own rewards.
As the exercise unfolded, the entire class identified most strongly
with the achiever role, with a few leaning towards the explorer role.
Not a single student identified themselves as a killer or a socializer.
After some more questioning a few students admitted to inhabiting either of those roles when the mood suited them, but still, none
strayed from the path of the achiever for very long. Whether the result
of the exercise was a byproduct of having a class full of MIT students
or if most people just identify more with the achiever role is impossible for me to tell. The fascinating part, though, is that I knew several
of the students dont typically play video games, yet they all were able

to identify their player type quickly and easily. I was intrigued and
decided to keep digging. By a show of hands, how many of you play
video games? All but a few hands went up. Okay, how many of you
consider yourselves to be gamers? Only a small handful of students
kept their hands in the air. Interesting.
So what, then, does gamer mean? It clearly isnt just one who plays
games. It is much more complicated than that. It comes with a whole
set of characteristics that arent easy to pinpoint. Its the classic know
it when you see it identification. With issues like #gamergate2 and
other re-defining moments in the video game industry, it is time we
look at the term gamer and either discard it or reshape it.
Ive long held the opinion that anyone who plays a game is a gamer.
Its been a matter of inclusion for me. I want the term gamer to be
less strange. If more people identify as gamers, it somehow validates
my own longtime gamer identification. After speaking with this class
though, I had to change how I define gamer.
Take a moment to think of what gamer means to you.
So, is gamer a negative term? More than likely, youve conjured up
a very particular image in your head. What are some of the characteristics there? We can toss out the negative stereotypes right away:
antisocial, dependent, detached, lazy, and perhaps even misogynistic.
Those are some of the words that I associate with gamer, yet as a
gamer I would argue that Im nothing like that. I would also say that
the vast majority of people I play games with are nothing like that.
In fact, most of the players I know are inventive problem-solvers who
care a lot about other people. As far as Ive noticed, that archetypical
image is very rare yet the word gamer still holds that stigma. If we toss
out all of those negative stereotypes, though, would more people selfidentify as gamers? I doubt it.

1 Bartle, Richard (1996) Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades. Players who suit MUDs. Journal
of MUD Research. Vol. 1 (1), June 1996.

4 in medias res

2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

FFEEAATTUURREES

Even with the realization that the stereotypes are pretty far off-base
(as stereotypes tend to be), there is still a deep-seated negative association with the term gamer. Id argue that this negativity comes from
the medium itself. The industry has been associated with misogyny
for quite a long time at this point. #gamergate churned up a huge
amount of animosity around gender in the video games industry. The
industry does not have the best track record when it comes to the representation of anything outside the realm of white, male hegemony.
Its very slowly getting better, but #gamergate shows the impetus for
more change. For a long time, the argument has been that games are
for boys, by boys. Its long past time to throw this argument out.
Almost everybody plays games, so its time that everyone has a chance
to both make and be seen in games. Some people discard the fact that
most people (men, women, and other) play games as irrelevant by
saying something along the lines of, yeah everybody plays games, but
they arent real gamers. Whats a real gamer though?
That statement typically sets the stage for the creation of a
dichotomy between casual and hardcore games, as if somehow
one game is more canonical in the gaming world. Nothing irks me
quite as much as this separation, especially considering its almost impossible to actually distinguish hardcore and casual games when
you actually sit down and try. Hopefully people are spending their
free time doing whatever they want to do. To argue that anyone can
spend time playing games harder than someone else is just ludicrous.
Is someone participating in a four-hour raid in World of Warcraft
somehow more legitimate than someone spending their four-hour
plane ride crushing some candy? No. I also wouldnt argue that both
of these people are gamers though.
One student in class posited that a gamer is anyone who prioritizes
games. I find this definition to be perfect. We often use this same logic
when referring to other pastimes: movie buff, quilter, bird watcher,
sports fan. While it might not be fair to apply these labels to people

without their consent, they definitely do not come with the same
negativity.
Even without all the negative associations with the term gamer
though, many people probably would not want to admit that they prioritize games over other aspects of life. Video games have existed for
decades, theyre the largest entertainment industry in the world, and
many people now make their living playing games, yet somehow we
still have not legitimized games as a pastime. Theyre so fundamentally similar to sports to have evoked the term e-sports, but most parents
would be happy to let their child participate in a soccer or volleyball
tournament for an entire weekend but would get upset to think their
child might spend that same amount of time playing video games. Its
not my place to argue for or against the legitimacy of sports-playing
(physical fitness and socializing being just two of many examples in
support of sports), but I would argue that as a pastime, video games
are incredibly similar. Perhaps its just a matter of time before we start
to see video games alongside sports as legitimate pastimes. Until then,
the term gamer will continue to be a problematic identity.
It might instead be better to get rid of the term gamer altogether. Its
long history may be too hard to wipe away. As more people continue
to play games, perhaps other (less problematic) terms will emerge. The
industry continues to grow every year without signs of stopping, so as
I mentioned earlier, it might just be a matter of time before the legitimacy of gaming wipes away the stigma of the term gamer.
A version of this piece first appeared in November on the MIT Game Lab blog: http://
gamelab.mit.edu/gamer-identity/

Images
https://www.flickr.com/photos/16865302@N00/393152033/
http://www.wtfgamersonly.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/I-Love-Gaming.jpg
http://hntb.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/gamer.jpg

spring 2015 5

FFEEAATTUURREES

EdTechX
Our Online Courses on EdX
Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, and Louisa Rosenheck

he Scheller Teacher Education Program, The Education

Arcade, and the MIT Game Lab recently launched the
first two courses in EdTechX, a series of massively open
online courses (MOOCs) focused on educational technology. Both MITx courses, 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology and 11.126x Introduction to Game Design, were
developed on the EdX platform. Of the over 40,000 combined registrants, approximately seven percent or 3,000 students earned certificates for their participation.
For those of us involved in designing these courses, the story goes
far beyond earning certificates. We wanted to push the envelope of
what was possible. Since these were new courses, we had a blank slate
from which to work rather than transferring a residential version of
an MIT course to the digital environment. We maintained a deep
commitment to replicate the interactive, collaborative, and intimate
environment of our typical small, project-based courses delivered
on campus. But how exactly do you build and support that sort of
learning and community in massive online courses?
Our solution included several specific instructional design decisions
to support elements we considered critical to the learning process
student and community engagement, student-constructed knowledge,
and collaboration. Of course, we also made many mistakes along the
way, which allows us to apply further refinements to our next two
courses in 2015.

6 in medias res

Student Engagement
In face-to-face classes, it can be challenging to know whether you
are engaging students. We often have to rely on subtleties like facial
expressions and sitting postures to provide valuable feedback to an
instructor. How do you determine whether you are succeeding in
reaching students that you cannot see or interact with in real-time?
We needed to create different opportunities for actively engaging
students throughout the course, starting with the primary medium
of the MOOC: streaming video. To lay the foundation for student
interaction, we settled on three primary forms of video-based content
interview style, action or demonstration-based videos, and activity
breaks.
Interviews borrowed from the visual language of celebrity talk
shows. We took advantage of our access to many of the pioneering
voices in our fields and worked through foundational concepts right
on camera. Instead of telling students everything we knew about a
topic, they could hear reasoning and rationale from the horses mouth.
Edited into five- to ten-minute segments, these informal and informational clips subtly suggested to students that knowledge doesnt
need to come from one authoritative voice, and that there is room
for different perspectives, approaches, and philosophies to work
together. Demonstration videos took on more of a how-to vibe, not
unlike childrens science television and YouTube cooking channels.

F E AT U R E

The instructors would not only introduce assignments and goals, but
also demonstrate how they would tackle a sample problem. In one
clip, Sara Verrilli and Philip Tan designed a board game in under ten
minutes in front of the camera, and concluded the segment by challenging the students to do the same. These think-aloud videos aimed
to reduce the anxiety of getting started by showing how even instructors can make mistakes. The presenters continuously talk through
their process and decision-making, setting student expectations by
demonstrating what reasonable effort and success might look like.
Every video series was punctuated by an activity break. In Design
and Development of Educational Technology, one activity break encouraged students to stop the video, try their hand at juggling, and
reflect on what it felt like to take on the role of the learner. This
gave students the room to explicitly contemplate the learning theory
distinct from the technologies. Other activity breaks afforded students
the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with and consider
possible applications of the tools and technologies exploring and
manipulating motion graphs with SimCalc1, experimenting and
exploring using simulations with tools like PhET Science Sims2,
Molecular Workbench 3, and StarLogo Nova4.

Community Building
Learning is an inherently social process we learn by explaining to
our peers, challenging other ideas, and being challenged by others. The
physical classroom presents opportunities for students and teachers to
interact in these ways, forging peer and student-teacher relationships.
Yet, these types of experiences are not often baked into MOOCs;
many students experience online instruction in isolation. Seeing the
social aspects of learning as critical to the process, we sought to create
better student interactions in forums and live events to create a more
intimate experience for students, creating an environment to increase
the quantity and quality of peer interactions.
In the early weeks of both courses, the lead faculty Eric Klopfer
and Philip Tan conducted Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on
Reddit. AMA participants were able to get a feel for the faculty and
how the course might go while also meeting some of their classmates.
Both sessions helped to spark peer interactions and model respectful
communication among prospective participants.
To support a diverse student body, in terms of geography, technical
expertise, bandwidth, etc., we needed to build a broad event and
social media infrastructure. We wanted to support students within
their technological comfort zone while introducing a broader range
of possible technology tools that could enhance ongoing collaboration
and contribute to a sense of community.
The Design and Development of Educational Technology team
held a number of live events using various technology tools spaced
evenly throughout the course. These events were delivered on
different technologies including Talkabout, Google Hangouts on Air,

1http://math.sri.com/technology/index.html
2http://phet.colorado.edu

and Unhangout. This allowed participants to evaluate the benefits and

challenges associated with the tools and provided them with opportunities to interact with each other and with the course team.
The Introduction to Game Design team presented live video in the
form of broadcast on Twitch.tv, mirroring the practices of the gaming
community. While attendance at these events was promising, scheduling for the real-time events were defined by staff working hours
in the US Eastern Time Zone, limiting live participation from the
global student population and forcing them to rely on online archives
instead.
We considered the potential value in supporting more organic
community development. Student-created social media pages and
hashtags are a mainstay of the MOOC experience, so we created
official pages on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google+, allowing
participants to communicate with fellow students through media that
they found more familiar. Introduction to Game Design participants
created an internet relay chat channel to support each other on the use
of GameBlox as a development tool. Staff did not monitor or moderate
these vehicles heavily but occasionally participated in them to guide
students back to the course forums, where the team could focused
our efforts to build community and support student interaction and
collaboration.

Student-Constructed Knowledge
Unlike many MOOCs, both Design and Development of Educational
Technology and Introduction to Game Design were designed around
the principles of project-based learning. We sought to create opportunities for students to provide evidence of their learning and explore alternative methods of grading over typical online quizzes. Each of the
activities and assignments throughout the two courses were designed
to provide students with incremental knowledge and skills required to
complete the summative course project.
For the Design and Development of Educational Technology, that
meant preparing students to create and deliver a Kickstarter-like pitch
about a new educational technology. Introduction to Game Design
students created a digital or tabletop game using iterative game design
processes. The projects not only provided an effective example of
the theories discussed in the classes. They also provided students
with a final goal. Weekly assignments all led to the summative final
project, allowing students to think through their projects each week
to integrate new course information, peer feedback and questions.
The projects for these two courses may have been too large a scope
for students to handle in a short time frame. This was especially true
given the amount of theoretical and technical content students were
trying to process at the same time. Students were trying to incorporate new theories and best practices while having to become fluent in
new technologies. This tension created a level of frustration on the
part of students who were invested in completing the course with
an admirable portfolio. Despite these frustrations, there was an overwhelming desire on the part of students to continue to make progress
on their final projects. Many did complete them and gained valuable
experience from doing so.

3http://mw.concord.org
4http://www.slnova.org

spring 2015 7

F E AT U R E

Philip Tan and Sara Verilli model a paper prototyping exercise for 11.126x Introduction
to Game Design participants.

Live on twitch.tv! Philip Tan and Paul Medlock-Walton answer questions about game
design and Gameblox, a new blocks-based programming tool for designing games.

Collaboration and Peer Review

experience with providing peer review among the course participants.

To help students become more adept at peer review, we increased
our modeling of providing constructive and supportive feedback
beyond the forums. The Design and Development of Educational
Technology course team hosted a Google Hangout on Air5 in which
Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil and Jen Groff reflected on a few student
projects, asking probing questions to help students think about their
project, their goals, and possible refinements. The Introduction to
Game Design did the same with weekly videos. We shared standard
peer-review guidelines and discussed comments from the forums and
live chat to demonstrate examples of effective feedback.
Students were encouraged to create working and affinity groups
that might serve as their personal learning community. Several groups
were successful with members stepping up to serve as dedicated facilitators, ensuring that the group came together and stay on task. We are
currently studying the most successful groups to determine how to
better foster and support the behaviors that made them work.
We anticipate that building-in greater support for creating and
maintaining self-directed collaborative groups, combined with
enhanced modeling and supports for effective peer review, will result
in fewer bland Good job! and Fun game! comments and more
insightful questions that help students consider their projects under a
new lens. This sort of reflection allows a student to make explicit and
deeper connections between the course content and their own work.
Design and Development of Educational Technology and Introduction to Game Design validated that project-based collaborative instruction can succeed in the virtual world. A subset of students were
deeply engaged and became integral members of a strong learning
community. We will continue to iterate and identify ways to scale that
positive experience for a larger percentage of students and make these
successes feel like core components of our courses. Coming up in the
EdTechX Series will be 11.127x Design and Development of Games
for Learning 6, which starts April 1, 2015, and 11.133x Implementation
and Evaluation of Educational Technology, starting in July, 2015.

The final component we rethought was collaboration and peer review.

Both are critical instructional strategies of residential courses delivered
by the MIT Game Lab and Scheller Teacher Education Program. It
was important to design both the technical infrastructure and the curriculum to ensure a positive collaborative experience for students.
From a technical perspective, we spent significant energy identifying the most effective forum and discussion tools for supporting
community interaction and conversation. We also had to find solutions
that would integrate easily with the EdX platform. We created a customized student forum system based on open-source technologies
for both courses. The forum features seemed to work well overall,
providing opportunities for students to interact in groups, share course
artifacts, develop a personal profile, and highlight interesting work.
Many of the students who had taken other MOOCs commented on
the enhanced interactions provided by our forums.
Still, there is much more work to be done. Some students struggled
to make connections with others with similar interests, in nearby
locales, or with similar background knowledge and experience. There
were also typical technical hiccups with peer review students inadvertently submitting blank documents or inaccessible web links
but we are most committed to improving the value of the feedback
provided to students.
In a MOOC, there are so many students that it is clearly not sustainable for the faculty, teaching assistants and other members of the course
team to personally review and provide feedback on all submitted
work. It was a priority for the course teams to get peer review to
work well. We tried many different approaches from the start, such as
establishing guidelines and norms about providing effective feedback
on the course pages and modeling what feedback might look like in
the forums.
Despite this, many participants received either no feedback on their
work or feedback of low value due the lack of comfort, experience,
knowledge, or context on the part of the reviewer. In an ideal world,
peer review allows students to help support each other as they acquire
and refine new knowledge and skills. As the courses progressed, it
became evident that there was a disparate range of familiarity and

8 in medias res

5http://mitsha.re/1zDgX2H
6http://mitsha.re/1zDhvWg

I IN
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UVIRIEEW
W
SS

Documentaries, MIT-Style
Experience interactive, multimedia, immersive storytelling
Nancy DuVergne Smith, MIT Alumni Association, with Sarah Wolozin, Director of the Open Documentary Lab

elling real stories in interactive time is the MIT Open

Documentary Labs experimental turf. The lab brings
together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to invent
new storytelling modes that focus on collaborative, interactive, and immersive forms. The research goal is to understand the
impact and evolution of such new story forms.
Documentaries are taking a creative leap thanks to influences such
as television, ubiquitous handheld cameras, user-generated content,
interactive documentary forms, and work that combines and crosses
media, according to William Uricchio, professor of Comparative
Media Studies, the program where OpenDocLab was founded in
2012. The documentary field now is like looking at the first five to
eight years of televisionnew tools, new storytelling techniques, new
participants, he said in an Great Ideas interview. Its a very exciting
moment.
You can get a sense of the approach by visiting Moments of Innovation, an interactive whitepaper that describes the long search for
immersive story experiences and highlights recurrent themes in documentaries.

Nancy DuVergne Smith: Why is MIT a good place to investigate

the future of storytelling?
Sarah Wolozin: The future of storytelling and I would argue that
the future is here is interdisciplinary and based on innovative
new uses of emerging technologies. Traditional storytelling is media
specific; you make a film, a radio story, a television show, etc., and
each has its own forms and processes. Today, digital documentaries
are informed by all of these media as well as games, civic engagement,
activism, artificial intelligence, creative computing, to name a few.
MIT has researchers studying and experimenting in all of these areas

and innovation at MIT is based on an interdisciplinary approach. It

makes MIT a great place to incubate new storytelling projects, take
the time to reflect, collaborate across disciplines and shape the future
of storytelling.
NDS: What is the Moments of Innovation docubase and why is it
important?
SW: Moments of Innovation is a website we created together with the
International Documentary Festival of Amsterdams Doclab in honor
of their 5th anniversary. Its designed and developed by the French
company, Upian. And its based on Professor William Uricchios thesis
that todays storytelling practices such as participation, interactivity,
and data visualization are not new. They have long and rich histories;
people have always used the tools of the day to tell these kinds of
stories. Uricchio also argues that documentary has always been at the
forefront of innovation; documentarians were often the first to experiment with new technologies. It makes sense because we all observe
the world around us and tell stories to make sense of it and some
people are driven to express it and can do so in a public way. Whats
exciting today is that public storytelling is more democratized than
ever before; the means of production and distribution are in peoples
pockets or purses in the form of a cell phone.
Docubase is a database that aggregates and curates the innovation
taking place in documentary storytelling today and serves as a place of
inspiration and education about new documentary forms. According
to Uricchio, we are going through a major shift in documentary storytelling and Docubase is serving to archive these experiments for
posterity and encourage them.
Originally published at http://slice.mit.edu/2014/10/17/documentaries-mit-style

spring 2015 9

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Creating User-Friendlier Environments

Federico Casalegno designs technology environments that keep human experience at the center
of user experience.
Steve Calechman, MIT Industrial Liaison Program

echnology is a two-headed monster. It can instantly

bring information to the most remote locations. But it
can also create a coffee shop full of people, starting at
screens without acknowledging anything or anybody else.
Federico Casalegno aims to avoid that dynamic.
The director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab looks to innovate
with technology but only in support of the user. This approach results
in less impersonal hotel lobbies, smarter gas stations, more intuitive
homes, and a conference that examines creativity with a decidedly
bottom-up approach. We want to design technologies around people,
not people around technologies, Casalegno says.

The warmer reception area

The hotel lobby is a well-established place check-in desk, free newspapers, restaurant and its not wholly impersonal, but its not always
inviting. Casalegno has partnered with Marriott to take embedded
media and create a lobby as a social space. Business travelers are the
testing target audience, so Casalegno has used LinkedIn accounts as
source material. Once a guest checks into the hotel and unlocks their
network from a phone or laptop, Casalegnos application would match
people based on various components, such as industry, college, and
shared connections.
But more than just picking out common words, the app is able to
rank the strength of potential matches. Before it would put together
people who have worked in the same city, it would introduce people
who have worked at two of the same companies. Along with the app,
Casalegno has designed an interactive lobby table that works in the
same respect. When someone places their mobile device on it, the
device would glow, alerting the person of possible connections, along
with providing a scrolling text of events of interest in both the hotel

10 in medias res

and the area. Moreover, the hotels concierge can further customize
events for guests.
As Casalegno says, this new lobby isnt necessarily doing anything
that a person couldnt do on their own. But the technology, now in
the prototype stage (see p. 11) and ready for expanded testing, is an
example of how location-based media and ubiquitous computing can
further social interactions for both the hotel and guest. It brings hospitality to a new era and makes for a richer experience, Casalegno
says. And when there are many hotels in a market, this tailoring is the
kind of thing that can make you stand out.

More than filling up your tank

Much like with the lobby, the gas station has been a consistent entity.
But Casalegno says that its also been stagnant in its design and unfulfilled in its potential as a multi-use urban space. Before he made
any changes, he had students travel around his native Italy, stopping
at hundreds of stations and observing how people use them and how
they could use them. From that ethnographic research, hes partnered
with the oil and gas company ENI and created a full-scale, futurelooking prototype.
The changes first start with the essential service of providing
fuel. Some simple technologies can make that transaction smoother,
Casalegno says. In his model, the station would immediately recognize
a drivers model, direct it to an available pump, and know what kind of
fuel the car uses. The pump and nozzle would use robotics to eliminate
the need for human interaction. Payment would become seamless,
he says, and also eliminate human assistance, since the station would
recognize the driver and be able to access the persons bank account.
But thats just one aspect of the design. The station is also greener,
with solar roof panels that could be opened, be closed, and collect

F EN
AE
TW
U RS E S

rainwater. And while the intent is to remove unnecessary human

intervention, its not to eliminate it. The station would disseminate transportation-related information and also serve as a shared
workspace, providing high connectivity and access to video conferencing and the latest communication devices. Rather than having to
drive somewhere or do business from the car, the person can remain
in one place. We expand the gas station, which is sustainable in terms
of energy use and architectural design, into a hub, which provides
mobility-on-demand for users, Casalegno says.

Bringing together ideas

More than designing elaborate solutions, Casalegnos work often
involves injecting a new way of thinking into a process. To that end,
he organized the Design Driven Innovation conference at MIT.
While it brings together engineers, creators, builders and students
from strategic design, digital experiences, fabrication and prototyping, the starting point for all the conversations, regardless of product
or clientele, is understanding behavior. We design for humans, he
says. And even if we design robots, they will help humans to have
better experiences and richer life.
Along with generating ideas, the conference explores a sometimes
overlooked necessity in product development how to develop
quick prototypes and test designs in real-world settings. An example,
which Casalegno has been working on, is the smart, connected home.

Casalegno says he wanted something that was both environmentally

friendly and responsive to conditions. The house envelope is made
out of easy-to-assemble, sustainable wood. The inside is wired, and
temperature is controlled in order to optimize energy usage. Along
with internal monitoring, the windows can respond to the weather
and needs of the house by changing from tinted to opaque.
Another project involved Google Glass. Casalegnos lab has been
working with Avea Telcom on a new app that would add to eating out.
But like with his other works, before any technology was conceived,
he had students go into restaurants to understand the diners experience. The research was done in Istanbul, so one of the prevailing
issues was understanding a menu and talking to a waiter when its in
a foreign language.
More than develop a translation app a relatively easy and accessible fix, Casalegno says the intention was to encourage social interaction. The app that was developed provides real-time information
about food items, such as how theyre grown and eaten, and then
connects the user with locals. That kind of enhancement and fostering
connections are central to Casalegnos work, balancing innovation
with responsiveness. Technology doesnt have to be simple, he says.
It just has to be user-friendly, efficient, and help the customer utilize
their power more. If you offer that, thats what people will probably
choose.
Originally published at http://ilp.mit.edu/newsstory.jsp?id=20304

spring 2015 11

FFEEAATTUURREES

Eyes Over Kenya

The use of drones for conservation
Chelsea Barabas, CMS 15

Chelsea Barabas and Jude Mwenda (MAS, 15) spent Januarys

Independent Activities Period in Kenya, where they collaborated with
wildlife conservancies to conduct a feasibility assessment for the use of
drone technologies to support anti-poaching activities. They conducted a
series of workshops with wildlife conservation workers and local communities who reside on the border of wildlife parks in order to understand the
challenges they face in deploying drone technologies in a sustainable way.
The goal of the project was to identify support mechanisms that need to be
put into place in order for drones to be a sustainable intervention for conservation efforts in Kenya. The four sections of this piece were authored
as reports from the field.

1. Drones in Ol Pejeta

arrived in Kenya with two colleagues, Jude Mwenda and

John Kidenda, to work on a project exploring the potential of
applying unmanned aerial vehicle technology drones to
promote conservation efforts in Kenya. Earlier this week we
travelled to Ol Pejeta, a private wildlife conservancy located near Mt.
Kenya in the northern part of the country. In addition to being home
to a rich ecosystem of flora and fauna, Ol Pejeta serves as the guardian
territory for over one hundred rhinos, including three of the five
remaining northern white rhinos in the world. Given the immense
price a northern white rhino horn fetches in the black market, this
particular rhino species has been nearly driven to extinction. Ol Pejeta
spends a large amount of time and effort every year guarding these
animals, as well as other endangered species, from poaching activities.
Last year the conservancy conducted a drone pilot study to explore
ways they could use this emerging technology to supplement their
ongoing efforts to catch and deter poachers from killing animals on
their land. Our team was interested in this project, because to date it
is one of the most ambitious drone projects undertaken on the African
continent, where access to this type of technology is still in the early
stages of development. Jude, John, and I travelled to the conservancy
to learn more about how the project was going, as well as investigate
ways we could support Ol Pejetas work in the future.
Over the last couple of days we have had some very interesting and
informative meetings with some of the key leaders in the conservancys drone project. They explained some of the challenges they faced
in using drones specifically for anti-poaching efforts. For example, Ol
Pejeta covers a very large swath of land, making it difficult to pinpoint
exactly where a poaching situation may be taking place once a gunshot

12 in medias res

has been heard. Even if an approximate location can be identified

through triangulating data from different park ranger watch towers,
poachers are likely to be on the run within minutes of firing their
weapons at an animal. This means that a drone needs to have enough
battery life not only to arrive at the site of violence but also to track
poachers once they start running from the crime scene. With a full
battery, the drone that Ol Pejeta used for their initial pilot could fly
for a maximum of ninety minutes. However, the park guards estimate
that they would need at least four hours of flight time in order for the
drone to be useful during a chase down of poachers. Moreover, even
with an expensive, commercial-grade camera it was very difficult for
the park staff to glean critical information about exactly how many
people might be involved in a poaching hit and whether or not they
were armed. Without such information, it was difficult for rangers to
know how to best approach a band of fleeing poachers.
After reviewing some of these challenges, we explored with the
Ol Pejeta staff other potential use-cases for the drone technology in
their work. We discussed the potential for using drones to conduct
more frequent animal censuses, as well as tracking the health and
expansion of specific vegetation. Our team is now in the process of
using this fieldwork as a launch point for more brainstorms about how
our specific backgrounds in citizen science and grassroots technology
development might support this work. We are also ramping up to
conduct our first pilots of our own drone technology. We have DJI
Phantom II drone, as well as three different types of cameras we want
to experiment with to understand what type of imaging is possible
with-low grade cameras, as well as how resilient the drone components are to the elements in east Africa.

2. Plant Analysis Drone Pilot

During our trip one of the key things we have learned about are the
challenges of using drones to track and catch poachers. The folks at
Ol Pejeta explained to us that they understood the primary benefit of
launching an anti-poaching drone project to be the deterrent factor
of having an eye in the sky. Drones were unlikely to be able to proactively spot and prevent poachers from entering the park, but they
could mitigate poaching activity by making surveillance and protection measures both more apparent and ominous to outside observers.
However, we wondered how long the deterrent effect would last if the
rates at which poachers were actually apprehended did not actually
increase with the drone system. Given challenges in the duration of

FFEEAATTUURREES

Mission accomplished! With our friendly onlookers.

drone flight time and the toll that the rugged environment took on
the drone hardware, it remains unclear whether or not drones would
actually increase park rangers effectiveness at tracking poachers.
In light of these findings, our team decided to spend the last couple
of weeks exploring a different conservation use case for drones: vegetation monitoring and spotting illegal charcoal burning. In Kenya,
charcoal burning is a growing ecological concern, because it often
involves the indiscriminate clear-cutting of trees and shrubs on public
land. Experts are concerned that the rapid rates of deforestation could
exacerbate the effects of draught, increasing soil erosion and reducing
the vibrancy of the surrounding flora. Currently, there is no efficient
and methodical way to monitor such activity.
Over the last week or so, our team hacked together two different
types of cameras to see whether or not we could observe charcoal
burning from the sky. The first camera we used was an Infragram
camera from Public Lab. This camera provides an open source
platforms to analyze plant health with near infrared imagery. The
second camera was a cheap Raspberry Pi camera module. In contrast
to the cameras piloted at Ol Pejeta, which cost around $7,000, our
cameras were quite cheap. We spent less than $100 for the parts we
assembled. In addition to these two cameras we also had a GoPro

camera (around $250) and mount that we used to compare the quality
of the images we gathered. Our plan was to assemble these cameras,
then to collect data out in a place where charcoal is frequently burned
out in the open. To do this, we travelled to a town about 40 km
outside of Nairobi, called Mattu. A good friend of Judes named Jason
is from this area, so he accompanied us as a local guide.
Given large amounts of traffic on the roads leaving Nairobi, it took
us much longer than we expected to reach our destination. As we
pulled into town we had only about an hour of sunlight left in the
day! As such, we decided that our safest bet would be to travel to
Jasons family land and build our own fire in a pit in the ground,
simulating an actual charcoal burning experience. Jude and I rapidly
gathered firewood for the task as John and Jason prepared the drone
and cameras for flight.
As we rapidly went about our work, a small crowd of curious
onlookers came to observe what we were doing. With only about
thirty minutes of daylight left, we launched our drone in the air,
flying it over the plot where the fire was burning. We took photos on
all three of our cameras, capturing not only the fire but also a magnificent sunset against the hills of Mattu.
By the time the sun had set, we had captured several hundred

spring 2015 13

FFEEAATTUURREES

spring
Event
HIGHLIGHTS
Illuminated Bodies

Kat Von D, LA Ink, and the Borderlands of Tattoo

Culture
John leading discussion on drone opportunity areas (Photo by Okari Omariba)

images. Success! (We werent 100% confident that the Pi camera we

built would actually work the first time, but it did!) The next task
for us was to repurpose some code that Jude found to analyze the
data. The code involves an algorithm that analyzes aerial satellite
images to identify ground fires based on the level of vegetation on
the ground and the smoke billowing from the fire. Over the weekend
Jude adapted this code to serve our needs.

Theresa Rojas, Ohio State University and Predoctoral Fellow in

Comparative Media Studies/Writing
February 19 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 4, Room 231

Women in Science
Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and energy studies expert
Jessika Trancik
February 26 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 66, Room 110

3. Drone Workshop at the iHub

Last Friday our team held a drone workshop with our partners at the
iHub, a center for collaboration and tech incubation in Nairobi. The
goal of the workshop was to convene entrepreneurs and hobbyists
who are currently working with drones in Kenya to discuss current
and future applications of drone technology in the local context.
We were keen to learn from participants about the challenges and
potential opportunities they identified for using drones for entrepreneurial activities, as well as addressing social and conservation issues.
We were not sure how many people would attend the workshop.
In prior weeks, we conducted some research and invited about ten
individuals who were working with drones or aerial technology more
generally. In addition, we posted the event on the iHub website. We
were aiming to have about a dozen participants attend. However, on
the day of the event we were pleasantly surprised by the number of
people who turned up, around forty participants in total. The participants ranged from young adults from Kiberas Tunapanda Institute (a
center that provides tech and computer training to young adults with
minimal resources) who had never seen a drone before, to seasoned
engineers and entrepreneurs who were building their own drones
from scratch and developing business models based on their drone
expertise.
We opened our workshop with a discussion of how drones are
currently being used in Kenya. Right now, the most common applications are media driven: using drones to capture aerial images of events
like weddings and journalistic reporting of large public events. Some

14 in medias res

Coming of Age in Dystopia

The Darkness of Young Adult Fiction

Kristin Cashore, author of the award-winning Graceling Realm

trilogy, and the University of Floridas Kenneth Kid
March 19 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 66, Room 110

Re-calling the Modem World

The Dial-up History of Social Media

Kevin Driscoll (Ph.D., University of Southern California and

S.M. in CMS, 11), postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research
April 9 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 4, Room 231

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

Danielle Keats Citron, University of Maryland Francis King
Carey School of Law
May 7 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 4, Room 231

Full listings on p. 23, and online at cmsw.mit.edu

FFEEAATTUURREES

Critical to any new technologys success is

having a cadre of people who are able to
lead the development of new legal and social
frameworks for dealing with the ambiguity
and contingencies brought about by a new
technology.
people were using drones to develop promotional and marketing
material, such as filming commercial real estate. We then moved to
talking about aspirational uses of drones in the future. People had
some great ideas, such as using drones to monitor traffic flows and delivering medicine and remote diagnostics to medical patients in rural
areas. Participants also conceptualized drones as a potential new infrastructure, which could make some services such as wifi hotspots more
accessible to the general population.
After discussing some of the inspirational potential use-cases of
drones, we moved to discuss some of the significant challenges we as
a community of drone enthusiasts faced in fostering innovation and
experimentation with this technology. Kenya, like most countries,
has not yet developed a robust policy framework for regulating drone
activity. However, as recent as last week the Kenyan Civil Aviation
Authority issued a notice requiring anyone who wants to deploy
drones for personal or public use to receive permission before doing so.
The proclamation was received with mixed emotions. On one hand,
this provides some clarity and protection for people who feared being
arrested or harassed by the police for flying their drones. However, it
remains unclear how difficult it will actually be to obtain permission
from the KCAA. Additionally, the group expressed a desire for clear
guidelines regarding operator liability and the establishment of permissible civilian fly zones. (Continues p. 16)

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PARTNERS
HOW TO SUPPORT OUR STUDENTS
AND RESEARCH

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing combines an innovative academic agenda with collaborative research at the
frontier of media change. CMS/W is committed to shaping
new media uses and practices for a range of purposes from
entertainment, education, and creative expression to civic engagement and community empowerment.
Donors, sponsors, and research partners make it possible for
us to pursue this far-reaching mission.
For information on funding opportunities, contact Director
of Grants Development Jill Janows at jjanows@mit.edu.

Individual Donors
Individual supporters are essential to the CMS/W mission,
enabling us to continue attracting the best students worldwide
and maintain a dynamic set of research activities, all shaping the
future of media. Various levels of support can leverage support
from private foundations and government grant programs,
fund a research assistantship for one of our graduate students
providing living expenses and a stipend, one of the ways
we continue to successfully draw the worlds top talent and
afford for a number of named acknowledgments.

Foundation, Corporate, and Public Support

Major support from private foundations, industry sponsors, and
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over its history. You will join the likes of the Knight Foundation, Cisco Systems, the MacArthur Foundation, the National
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Research Partners
CMS/W regularly partners with other universities, professional organizations, and independent research and development
groups. Current and past collaborators include Massachusetts
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in Arts, Technology, and Culture, and the Scheller Teacher
Education Program.

spring 2015 15

FFEEAATTUURREES

Participants discussing challenges with drones (Photo by Okari Omariba)

In addition to policy issues, the group also discussed challenges

with the hardware and software platforms on which drones operate. It
is very difficult for local enthusiasts to repair and replace parts on their
drones. Not only is it difficult to source manufactured goods from
abroad, but its also challenging to find the resources and materials
necessary to manufacture locally. One participant described his frustration after attempting to access one of the few 3D printers located
in Nairobi in order to recreate a component on his drone. Additionally, finding skilled individuals who have the ability to develop and
implement local designs was also a challenge. The drone market is
not big enough to provide a steady income for software engineers and
designers who are in high demand in other sectors.
After brainstorming some of these challenges we broke into small
groups to discuss specific short-term and long-term solutions to each
of these problem areas. This was probably the most fruitful part of our
workshop, as it gave us a chance to dig into tangible next-steps we
could take in order to develop the experimental drone community in
Kenya. There was great enthusiasm around the idea of establishing a
permanent group of lobbyists and hobbyists to exchange knowledge
and advocate for more robust policies from the government. We
have already established a working group that will be working on
an internal code of ethics and certification process for the drone
community in Kenya. Our hope is to form a citizen community
that self-regulates their drone activity, as well as provides training to
novices who are new to the risks and challenges of flying drones. We
are also planning to build a website which will serve as an online hub
for drone operators across east Africa.
Overall, the workshop was a great success.
Although the number of people interested in drones in Kenya is
quite large, they had never held a formal convening to get to know one
another and share their experiences. Our event provided an opportunity for these disparate individuals to coalesce into a community. The
workshop also enabled our team to identify tangible opportunities
to extend our work moving forward. In the coming months, I look
forward to contributing to this emerging community and developing
more interventions to overcome the challenges we identified during
these initial discussions.

16 in medias res

We wrapped up the workshop with a drone demo! (Photo by Okari Omariba)

4. Final Reflections
Over the last few weeks, weve had some diverse and highly educational experiences working on our UAV project in Kenya. The goal of
our project was to survey the landscape for future innovation and applications using drone technology in the region. This work involved
interviewing individuals and organizations currently experimenting
with drones in Kenya, as well as building and piloting some of our
own technology to gain some practical insights into the challenges
and opportunities of using drones in this context.
From these experiences, we learned a few key things:
There already exists a large number of UAV enthusiasts, designers,
and hackers in Kenya. But before January this group had not coordinated themselves into a cohesive community. This is rapidly
changing. The workshop we held at the iHub a couple of weeks
ago has sparked the formation of a group calling themselves the
Association of UAV Operators in Kenya. There are currently about
twenty members actively engaging in conversations and debates
about how to further the interests of the drone community moving
forward. For example, this past weekend, a small group convened
at a local cafe to start early conversations around the development
of an advocacy and lobbying group to interface with the government regarding future regulations and guidelines for drone use.
The formation of this group is quite timely, as the Kenyan Civil
Aviation Authority just recently announced that any and all individuals using drones (for personal or commercial use) must receive
permission from the government before doing so. It remains
unclear how difficult it will be to obtain such permission, but this
group is dedicated to building a support network to facilitate the
process.
There is a lot of potential for drones to be a highly-beneficial
leapfrog technology in the Kenyan context. Our discussions with
thought-leaders on the ground revealed many thoughtful and
creative potential use cases for drones in the future. Many of these

FFEEAATTUURREES

ideas conceptualized drones as a potential support infrastructure,

on which critical services and products, such as the delivery of
medicine or disaster response, could be implemented more efficiently. Developing as the crow flies distribution channels could
be immensely beneficial, particularly in areas of the country where
the road infrastructure is underdeveloped (rural areas) or where
traffic is quite dense (Nairobi).
Drones provide an interesting educational platform for the development of critical skills necessary for the future growth of the
Kenyan tech scene. Not only do drones provide opportunities
for individuals to develop skills in handling both software and
hardware, but they also provide a unique opportunity for young
entrepreneurs to familiarize themselves with the uncertainty that
comes along with working with a cutting-edge technology. The
legal and social structures currently in place have not had the opportunity to catch up to speed with the rapid development of UAV
technology. Critical to any new technologys success is having a
cadre of people who are able to lead the development of new legal
and social frameworks for dealing with the ambiguity and contingencies brought about by a new technology. Drones provide an opportunity to develop these skills, which can strengthen the future
trajectory of the Kenyan tech scene overall.
Although there is much enthusiasm around drones in Kenya, there
are very few UAV-based projects that have managed to establish
sustainable long-term operations. The price of drones is still quite

high, while the accessibility of critical parts for maintenance is

still quite low. Entrepreneurs also struggle to hire employees
with the skills necessary to scale the design and manufacture of
locally-sourced drones. However, there are some promising developments underway in Kenya, such as the opening of Gearbox,
a shared maker space designed to bridge the gaps preventing new
inventions and ideas from becoming commercializable products.
Gearbox is scheduled to open this year, with the primary aim
being to unleash industrial innovation in Kenya, building a base
for widespread economic growth. Organizations like this will be
critical to the future development of an ecosystem where cuttingedge technologies like drones are able to thrive.
Overall, our time in Kenya has yielded some very interesting
insights for our team. In the coming months, we will continue to collaborate with our partners on the ground in order to support the
future development of the drone-innovation ecosystem in the country.
This includes bridging promising projects, such as the work in Ol
Pejeta, with the partners and resources necessary to increase their sustainability. We will also continue to participate in the emerging UAVadvocacy community as they take critical next steps to pooling their
resources and efforts to educate policy makers and the general public
about UAV technology.
More writing on Barabass and Mwendas trip is available via the MIT Public Service
Center: http://mitpsc.mit.edu/blog.

Mwenda and Barabas watching their drone fly into the sunset

spring 2015 17

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

Updates from the CMS/W Community

Though coming near the end of the Center

for Civic Medias second-round grant from
the Knight Foundation implied that work
slow, it has done anything but.
Both Assistant Professor Sasha CostanzaChock and CMS/Civic Media alum Molly
Sauter (S.M., 13) published books this fall. In
Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!: Transmedia
Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement
(MIT Press), Costanza-Chock takes on the
argument that social media is a sufficient
platform for effective protest; rather, he says
using case studies around the proposed
DREAM Act, police brutality against those
supporting immigrant rights, and others
it serves to complement methods of face-toface organizing. Sauter, now a Ph.D. student
at McGill University, expanded her CMS
thesis into a book published by Bloomsbury Academic, The Coming Swarm: DDOS,
Hactivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet.
Costanza-Chock and Sauter featured their
writing in talks this fall. (A podcast and
liveblog of the latter, produced by CMS
grad students, is available at http://mitsha.
re/1K34AUg.)
And between semesters, CMS grad student
Chelsea Barabas and Media Lab grad student
Jude Mwenda travelled to Kenya to research
the opportunities and challenges of using
UAV technology to address social and ecological challenges in east Africa (see story
on p. 12). Their work focused on testing
low-cost methods for monitoring the illegal
clear cutting of trees to make charcoal, as
well as exploring potential ways to augment
existing drone projects through the use of
citizen science platforms (like Zooniverse)
to help process the data gathered by drones.
They also held a workshop at Nairobis iHub
in order to learn about the civic applications
other drone hobbyists are experimenting
with in Kenya.

The Creative Communities Initiative, now in

its second year, is expanding and diversifying.
In fall 2014, CCI welcomed two new grad
student research assistants Lilia Kilburn
and Lacey Lord as well as a new faculty
member, T.L. Taylor. Taylor and Ian Condry
are co-teaching the graduate workshop in
ethnographic methods this spring. The twos
other courses are consonant with the CCI
approach, that is, by bringing a focus on how
people use media in their lives, rather than on
focusing on texts or the materiality of media
forms. CCI uses ethnographic approaches as
complementary to other approaches to media
studies. Its work remains focused on using
exploring the intersections of online and
offline worlds to identify new solutions to old
problems.
In addition to CCIs ongoing sponsored
research into the uses of online platforms for
pregnant moms, it also has research projects
exploring video streaming (Taylor) and
the future of music creativity and industry
(Condry).
Its advanced grad student researchers are
doing innovative work as well.
Chelsea Barabas is writing about hiring in
the tech industry, based on summer research
in San Francisco where she did fieldwork
with a group aiming to help minority youth
get tech jobs. She also interviewed leading
executives who use social media data mining
to identify promising job candidates.
Desi Gonzales, another a second-year grad
student, is writing about maker spaces in art
museums, and how this is transforming what
we think of as art making.
Finally, we are also working with CMS
undergrad major Karleigh Moore, who is
conducting research on fandom in Tumblr.
All in all, its exciting times for CCI, which
we look forward to identifying more people
who might be interested in joining our team.

Two new initiatives consumed the majority

of The Education Arcades attention this fall
EdTechX, a series of MITx online courses
available on EdX and Using Popular Games
for Serious Learning, a two-year researchbased design project. Both projects are collaborative efforts with the MIT Game Lab.
Using Popular Games for Serious Learning
represents a new challenge. The Education
Arcade is typically charged with looking at
a specific instructional challenge and then
creating a new game to address that learning
objective. In this project, it will be looking
at existing games and game platforms to
identify games that are already popular with
high school students and identifying learning
objectives that might be addressed via a combination of game-play and other instructional
practices. It will focus on humanities instruction at the high school level. With the support
of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, Kyrie
Caldwell, Rik Eberhardt, Scot Osterweil,
Philip Tan, and Carole Urbano have spent
the fall researching high school humanities
content standards to determine which might
benefit from game-based learning activities.
The team has also been searching to uncover
existing practices of teachers using commercially available digital games. The project is
highly collaborative and the team has been
working to identify potential partner school
districts and teachers interested in finding
new ways to engage students. These teachers
will serve as co-designers.
Work on The Radix Endeavor continues
as the team has expanded the current pilot
to include middle grades. The online multiplayer quest-based game includes more than
115 quests in seven topic areas including
genetics, evolution, ecosystems, and human
body systems as well as quest lines for
geometry, algebra, and statistics quest lines.
Graduate student Jesse Sell developed support
materials that the more than 13,000 users can
use to get a feel for the game and enhance
their play experience.

cmsw.mit.edu/cci

educationarcade.org

Creative Communities
Initiative

civic.mit.edu

18 in medias res

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

HyperStudio launched a new version of Annotation Studio, its collaborative digital annotation tool. Supported by a Startup and
Implementation Grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, it has
expanded its user base to more than 2,500,
from high schools and community colleges to
universities. Instructors in literature, writing,
and foreign languages have integrated it into
their curricula. One can now filter annotations according to tags, users, and visible text
segments and work with a greater variety of
text formats. Institutions can now set up their
own branded instances. In November, HyperStudio organized an Annotation Studio
webinar in which faculty members Wyn
Kelley (Literature), Suzanne Lane (WRAP),
Ina Lipkowitz (Literature), and Jim Paradis
(CMS/W) discussed different pedagogical
approaches for classroom integration.
HyperStudio has significantly advanced
Artbot, an application that allows users to
discover art events and exhibitions in Boston.
Artbot uses server-side data scraping, text
analysis, and content linking to create individualized suggestions, all presented through
an elegant mobile interface. HyperStudio
will launch a beta version, conduct extensive
user testing, and continue to make improvements on backend recommendation system.
The project leads, Liam Andrew and Desi
Gonzalez, will present their research on developing cultural discovery systems at the
2015 Museums and the Web conference.
RA Andy Stuhl has worked closely with
Jeff Ravel and other French theater scholars
on developing case studies that allow users of
the Comdie-Franaise Registers Project to
explore the range of research questions that
can be addressed with the projects tools. A
multi-dimensional analysis tool developed
by Christopher York (01), offers scholars
dynamic insights into the many facets of the
projects data from 1680-1793. The projects
tools and website will go live in June.

The MIT Game Lab hosted the third annual

Boston Festival of Indie Games in September,
bringing over 3,000 members of the public
to MIT to meet 200 game developers that
spanned digital, tabletop, and experimental
genres. Speakers addressed issues of diversity,
representation, technology, live-action role
playing, education, and interactive fiction.
We continued to host lectures and meetups
for local game developers such as Boston
Indies, Women In Games Boston, and Boston
Unity Group. Topics included sensor inputs
and deck-building game design.
We ran workshops with media organizations
to help them understand how game design and
development could work with their business.
We also worked with LearnDistrict to present
Girls Make Games, a two-day workshop,
and with the Peoples Republic of Interactive
Fiction and Boston Indies for the Interactive
Fiction Jam. Our lab also hosted the Global
Game Jam for the seventh year.
Riot Games and Epic Games came to
campus to talk to students about their technology and job opportunities. Suehiro SWERY
Hidetaka and Blizzard Entertainment gave
lectures in classes about their experiences as
game designers. Many scholars visited and
shared their work during our monthly lab
lunches, including Celia Pearce, Sebastian
Deterding, Simon Niedenthal, Jesper Juul,
David Dufresne, and Gabrielle TrpanierJobin. Philip Tan presented his work with
Blizzard Entertainment at GDC Next 2014
and will be joining T.L. Taylor and Jesse Sell
at GDC 2015 to discuss design and collegiate
participation in eSports.
Students from CMS.611/6.073 Creating
Videogames also worked with the Red Cross/
Red Crescent Climate Center to prototype
digital games on cholera hygiene, heat wave
mitigation, and humanitarian funding models.
The Climate Center used one game during the
UN Climate Talks.

The ICE Lab published a number of articles

and released multiple projects. Director Fox
Harrell is spending the 2014-2015 academic
year at Stanford University as a recipient of a
fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences and a Lenore
Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship
in Communication. Professor Harrells focus
will be on developing computational media
systems that can achieve greater aesthetic,
affective, and social resonance in particular, games and social media for expressing and
better understanding cognitive phenomena
related to social identity. Recently the Lab
has developed a platform called Chimera that
supports authoring games and interactive
narratives that more effectively take social
identity into account. In Chimera, social
identity categories are gradient (members
can be more or less central to categories),
dynamic (members can move between categories), and allow for multiple memberships.
Harrell is also consolidating results of his
5-year NSF Career Grant-supported project
called Computing for Advanced Identity
Representation for publication.
Harrell and the Lab are collaborating with
an MIT Open Documentary Lab visiting
artist, photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa,
on a virtual reality project aimed at engendering empathy in the face of war called The
Enemy. He and the project have received
support from the Sundance and Tribeca Institutes. The Lab is developing models of interactive narrative and user identity dynamics
as the user interacts with virtual versions of
real combatants on both sides of international conflicts. CMS graduate student Ainsley
Sutherland is working on her related thesis
on forms of engagement in virtual reality.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Ph.D. students Chong-U Lim and Dominic
Kao are publishing frequently in the areas
of modeling identity in social media, games,
and related educational technologies.

gamelab.mit.edu
hyperstudio.mit.edu

icelab.mit.edu

spring 2015 19

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

The Mobile Experience Lab initiated the

Caring City research project in collaboration
with La Fabrique De La Cit, a French urban
innovation think tank to understand millennials expectations from the cities that they
live in. The goal of the research is to imagine
and design a caring city for tomorrow. In
order to do so the research team set up an
international observatory spanning multiple
global mega cities including Boston, New
York, Paris, Berlin, Glasgow, Barcelona,
and Istanbul. The research methodology
combines immersion, visual ethnography,
focused workshops, and extensive interviews
with resident millennials and experts. The
qualitative study uncovers millennials expectations on various aspects of city life such
as services, infrastructure, housing, mobility,
and wellbeing and allows the research team
to project how a Caring City of tomorrow
should perform.
The lab also initiated a project with ENI,
an Italian petrochemical and energy company
to understand how wearable technology can
make dangerous and extreme environments,
such as industrial plants, safer. aWEARness
is a project that facilitates communication
between workers involved in the energy extraction energy. The goal of the research is
to assist industrial plant workers in lowering
their margin of error, thus contributing to
their safety. After an extensive secondary
research focused on understanding the ways
in which biosensors can be used to gauge the
emotional and physical state of a worker. The
research team built prototypes utilizing state
of the art low-power technology and smart
materials to inform further conversation and
research.
Lastly, the labs work with ENI and recent
prototyping with Marriott were featured in a
piece about lab director Federico Casalegno
by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (see
p. 10).

The MIT Open Documentary Lab received a

grant this fall for $175k from the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to map
and assess the intersection of new documentary forms and digital journalism. Professor
William Uricchio and his team will chart this
emerging landscape.
As part of the grant, OpenDocLab held a
convening, The New Reality: Exploring the
intersection of New Documentary Forms and
Digital Journalism. They hosted over forty
leading journalists, scholars, documentarians and other experts from such institutions
as PBS Frontline, BBC, The New York Times,
The Marshall Project, Vox Media, Tribeca
Film Institute, and Sundance Institute. They
explored a range of topics from new technologies to audience engagement and new
documentary forms and processes. They
explored questions such as how to better facilitate knowledge transfer between interactive documentarians and journalists, helping
each to make use of lessons-learned in these
institutionally distinct domains.
The OpenDocLab fellows program
continued into its second year. It attracts
leading international artists, scholars, and
technologists including Lara Baladi, an
Egyptian artist who is exploring how to best
present her archives of the Egyptian Revolution and Raney Aronson, deputy executive
producer of PBSs Frontline, who is exploring
new forms of documentary storytelling.
Research assistants Sean Flynn and Deniz
Tortum are busy speaking at festivals, conducting research for the MacArthur grant, or
creating content for Docubase, a curated interactive database of the people, projects, and
technologies transforming documentary in
a digital age. Tortum and Beyza Boyacioglu
travelled to Sundance to write about the New
Frontier exhibit. They were accompanied by
ODL Director Sarah Wolozin, who presented
Docubase on a panel about the future of documentary.

The Trope Tank continues to host the

Peoples Republic of Interactive Fiction,
the local IF group, and to support research,
creative work, and teaching using material
computing resources, for instance by participating in an MIT Museum event during the
coming semester.
trope-tank.mit.edu

mobile.mit.edu
opendoclab.mit.edu

20 in medias res

The Trope Tank is bi-located in 2015, with

a branch in New York City, where the labs
director, Nick Montfort, is teaching at the
New School and working on other projects.
He continues research with the MIT-based
Trope Tank team, Erik Stayton, and newly
appointed
writer-in-residence
Andrew
Plotkin.
A team of literary translators based at the
Trope Tank recently completed phase one of
the Renderings project, the results of which
were published in the online journal Cura.
Phase one included thirteen computational
and digital literary works that were translated
from, or written bilingually in, six languages:
Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Polish,
and Spanish. Renderings is being reformulated as a distributed project, with participants worldwide, and the source languages
and types of work are being expanded for the
next phase.
Research also continues on the story generation project Slant, an international collaboration to further develop a large-scale
automatic story generator:

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

Personal Updates

Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) is devoted to teaching

students how to analyze and produce effective
communication. WRAP researches these
concepts and professional practices, develops
new pedagogy, and assesses how students
learn, apply, and transfer this knowledge.
Many of our research projects are developed
in our new research lab, ArchiMedia, for
which we gratefully acknowledge the support
of the Qatar Foundation. With the aid of our
research assistant, Lily Bui, ArchiMedia is
pursuing two central projects this year.
First, with a grant from MITs dArbeloff
fund, we are developing online communication instruction modules for MITx, specifically designed for use in project engineering
laboratory subjects. Weve invented what we
term reasoning diagrams, which illustrate
the underlying relationships between central
concepts in the research and experimental
design process, and we have designed new
textual analysis tools so that students can
manipulate and analyze texts within MITx.
Preliminary results, when these modules
were incorporated into a Materials Science
and Engineering subject, reveal strong gains
in understanding of research concepts and the
ability to communicate research to different
audiences. The modules are being adapted for
use in a Chemical Engineering project laboratory subject.
Second, ArchiMedia endeavors to further
another central focus of our research: how
digital media is shaping new practices in professional communication and in communicating science and engineering to the public,
such as in the shift to incorporating graphical
abstracts in STEM journal articles, and to
presenting poster presentations in e-poster
sessions. Our goal is to provide a taxonomy
and theoretical framework for assessing the
effects of these new communication practices.
cmsw.mit.edu/wrap

Emily Anthes (S.M., Science Writing, 06)

saw her Guardian article How Insects Could
Feed the World named by Foodtank as a
Top 8 Magazine Articles About Food in
2014. The article describes the possibility of helping feed the worlds projected
nine billion inhabitants with those plentiful,
crunchy, protein-filling buggers.
In January, Associate Professor Vivek
Bald received a 2015 Association for Asian
American Studies award for his book Bengali
Harlem: Exploring the Lost Histories of South
Asian America. The AAAS said Bengali
Harlem stood out from a stellar crop of books
for its brilliant work of historical recovery
and writing, describing Balds writing as
beautiful prose with telling detail.
An article lecturer Jared Berezin wrote was
just published in Disability Studies Quarterly
(Disabled Capital: A Narrative of Attention
Deficit Disorder in the Classroom Through
the Lens of Bourdieus Capital). The essay
is a research-based personal narrative reflecting on a memorable experience from his days
as a seventh grader struggling with attention
deficit disorder in math class.
Lindsay Brownell (S.M., Science Writing,
14) started September by finishing up her
science writing internship at the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. She then took a whirlwind
Eurotrip through Germany, Austria, Slovenia,
Croatia, and Spain before landing back in
Boston in time to graduate from the GPSW.
She currently works as a science writer for
RA Capital Management, an investment firm
that primarily invests in pharma and biotech
companies. She edits the companys internal
research reports and manages the internal
newsletter, which will hopefully grow into
an externally-facing venture later this year.
Since December, Denise Cheng (S.M.,
CMS, 14) has started working as an innovation fellow with the San Francisco Mayors
Office of Civic Innovation.
In a post about virtual Japanese pop star
Hatsune Miku who performs synthesized

songs written by fans the Huffington Post

spoke with professor Ian Condry to better
understand the phenomenon. They know
Miku doesnt exist, Condry says. But they
know people on the other side do.
Rodrigo Davies (S.M., CMS, 14) joined
Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. After just one semester, he was persuaded
to take a leave of absence by civic crowdfunding startup Neighbor.ly, to lead their new
product team. At Neighbor.ly he is helping
to build a new platform for individuals and
households to invest in their cities through
municipal bonds.
Junot Diaz received the Los Angeles Public
Librarys Literary Award for his outstanding
contribution to literature, joining the likes of
Harper Lee, Susan Sontag, and John Updike.
In what she calls another win for the CMS
matchmakers, Katie Edgerton (S.M., CMS,
13) got engaged to Amar Boghani (S.M.,
CMS, 13, and Creative Technologist at our
Mobile Experience Lab.)
Joshua Feblowitz (S.M., Science Writing,
10) is graduating from Harvard Medical
School this coming May and will be
starting residency in emergency medicine
in the summer. During medical school, he
has written on a wide variety of topics in
medicine and plans to continue this throughout residency.
Kurt Fendt, Director of HyperStudio, was
invited to speak at the conference Shaping
Access! More Responsibility for Cultural
Heritage last November at the Hamburger
Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, Germany. The
event, organized by UNESCO Germany
and the Wikimedia Foundation, brought
together participants from primarily
European museums, archives, and libraries
to discuss the impact of digital technologies
on preservation, access, and public audiences.
While in Berlin, Kurt gave a live interview
on German Public Radio (Deutschlandradio
Kultur) about recent developments in digital
humanities and their relevance for a broader
public.

spring 2015 21

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, 07) enjoyed coming

back to CMS/W as part of the fall colloquium series.1 Sam participated in a roundtable for the journal Transformative Works and
Cultures and published a piece with Inc. in the
fall. Sam was named 2014 Digital Communicator of the Year by PR News and was on that
publications Social Media MVPs list. Sam
also received one of Western Kentucky Universitys Summit Awards for volunteerism
and was named one of the Top 100 Global
Corporate Social Responsibility Leaders
by Global CEO. In the classroom, Sam just
finished teaching a WKU honors colloquium
on U.S. professional wrestling.
Lecturer Erica Funkhouser recently had
new poems published in The Atlantic, Harvard
Review #46 along with Nandhini Sundaresan, a Harvard student who was in her
21W.771 workshop and in Agni #80.
MLK Visiting Scholar and interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco receive the CINTAS
Foundation/Knight Foundation Award in
Visual Arts.
Faculty member Heather Hendershot has
been busy at the Radcliffe Institute writing
her book on Firing Line. She has, however,
also taken time off from work to perfect her
sweet potato pie recipe and to invent two
new gin-based cocktails, The Hairdo and the
Bloody Hairdo.
After Geoffrey Long (S.M., CMS, 07)
enjoyed the release or announcement of a
number of his Microsoft projects, including
the Xbox One, Adera, State of Decay,
Quantum Break, and the Ryse: Sword of
Damocles digital comic (which launched at
the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con and checked
off one of his personal bucket list items), he
decided it was time to return to academia,
so he packed up his family and followed for
CMS director Henry Jenkins to USC. As
Technical Director and a Research Fellow for
the Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL), Geoffs
projects have included Lighthouse in the
Woods, a ghost story for smart homes created
for the Oculus Rift; experiments in second-

screen storytelling with Google Glass; prototypes in using 3D printing, augmented

reality, and smart toys in next-gen transmedia storytelling experiences; co-organizing
and co-hosting an evening on the future of
comics featuring Scott McCloud; and consulting work for Disney, FOX, Warner Bros.,
DirecTV, Jaguar, BET, Havas Media, IBM,
Cisco, and the Los Angeles Times. The Playful
Thinking book series he co-edits for the MIT
Press with William Uricchio and Jesper Juul
is in full swing. Also, his daughter Zoe is
freaking awesome.
In the wake of the measles outbreak at Disneyland, Assistant Professor of Science
Writing Seth Mnookin and author of 2011s
The Panic Virus became the go-to source for
information on the history of the anti-vaccine
movement. He was featured by NBCNews.
com, The New Yorker, the PBS NewsHour,
and many others.
Jason Rockwood (S.M., CMS, 09) is now
working as a Principal Strategy Consultant at
Lithium Technologies (lithium.com).
In November, CMS/W head Ed Schiappa
attended the National Communication Association conference where he made three
presentations. In December, Schiappa
published Thomas S. Kuhn and POROI,
1984, in POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention 10, which
introduces a previously unpublished essay by
Thomas S. Kuhn titled Rhetoric and Liberation. Schiappa discovered Kuhns paper
while doing research in MITs Archives and
Special Collections. In January, MIT featured
Schiappa and his work on the Institutes
homepage, around the time he also published
The Development of Greek Rhetoric in
the online version of the Oxford Handbook of
Rhetorical Studies.
Steven Strang, director of the Writing and
Communication Center, says his big news is
that in July my daughter had twins, one girl
and one boy, bringing to a total four grandchildren.

GamerGate controversy, describing the difficulty of teaching games studies knowing

that vile attacks will likely still await their
female students as they enter the field. Along
with Rik Eberhardt and Scot Osterweil, they
discussed the proactive steps they have taken
in their courses to prevent hateful speech
before it happens.
T.L. Taylor was interviewed by RedBull.com,
discussing how the last several of years have
been a scramble to keep up with how much
this emerging form of networked broadcast
is impacting not just eSports, but gaming
broadly.
Professor of Comparative Media Studies
William Uricchio is in Berlin thanks to
the Berlin Prize. While there, he will give
the Holtzbrinck Lecture at the American
Academy in Berlin on The Cultural Work
of Algorithms; a keynote on The Aesthetics
of the Cathode Ray Tube at The International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal; a
keynote on The New Documentary at the
International Human Rights Film Festival
One World in Prague; and lectures at the
Freie Universitt Berlin. But mostly, he will
be writing about documentaries.
Outside of his communications duties,
Andrew Whitacre completed his first DIY
video2, part of a project for Field Video Production at the Harvard Extension School
(and paid for by MITs generous professional
development benefits). But the course was
also in preparation for spring semester work
with a UROP, when the two will develop
case studies of how academic departments
can use video to tell stories about humanities
research. A paper with their results and
lessons will be published later this year.
Andrew has also been cheering the move of
one of his oldest friends, Jon Knapp, to the
Boston area. Knapp has joined Harvards
Ph.D. program in Film and Visual Studies,
giving him the chance to cross-register with
MIT; in fact this semester he has been on the
MIT campus each week to study with
CMS/W affiliate and Literature Section
professor Eugenie Brinkema.

Both Philip Tan (S.M., CMS, 03) and Sara

Verrilli spoke with Boston.com about the
1https://soundcloud.com/mit-cmsw/cms-alumni-panel

22 in medias res

2 How to Build a Radiator Cover: http://goo.gl/IRilwT

EVENTS

Spring 2015 Talks

Feb 12 | 4-231

The State of the Comic Book Medium

Bobbie Chase, Editorial Director of DC Comics, and comic book
writer Marjorie Liu (Monstress, Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow)
discuss the current and future state of the comic book medium.
Feb 19 | 4-231

Illuminated Bodies: Kat Von D, LA Ink, and the

Borderlands of Tattoo Culture
Theresa Rojas, a CMS/W predoctoral fellow and Ph.D. candidate at
The Ohio State University, examines the prolific, heavily tattooed
Kat Von D, who offers an aesthetic that challenges tattoo culture and
notions of the monstrous body and who has chosen to lead an
exceptionally public life, telling her story in multi-mediated ways.
Feb 26 | 66-110 | Communications Forum

Women in Science

Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and energy studies expert

Jessika Trancik will discuss their careers and the outlook for women
in science in the 21st century.
Mar 5 | 4-231

Media and Memory at the Vidothque de Paris

Catherine E. Clark on how the utopian rhetoric that accompanied
the Vidothques creation helps illuminate and call into question
the utopian promises of the much more recent revolution in digital
history. Clarks current book project, Paris and the Clich of History,
explores the intersection of the history of Paris and photography.

Apr 9 | 4-231

Re-calling the Modem World: The Dial-up History of

Social Media
Kevin Driscoll (CMS, 09) maps out the generative conditions that
gave rise to amateur computer networking at the end of the 1970s and
trace the diffusion of BBSing across diverse cultural and geographic terrain during the 1980s. This history provides lived examples of
systems operated under vastly different social, technical, and politicaleconomic conditions than the centralized platforms we inhabit today.
Apr 16 | 66-110 | Communications Forum

The Mysteries of the Southern Reach

Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, the three books that make up
Jeff VanderMeers Southern Reach trilogy, were among the most
ambitious and exciting works of literature published in 2014. VanderMeer will discuss his role as one of the leading practitioners of weird
fiction, the environmental and ecological concerns that inform his
work, and his massive crossover success.
Apr 23 | 4-231

The Dancing Body of the State: Queer Social Dance,

Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture
Thomas DeFranz, of Duke University and formerly CMS/W and
MIT Music and Theater Arts, wonders at the intertwining of African
American social dances and political leadership, conceived as the
bodies of elected officials. He will suggest a haunting presence of
queers-of-color aesthetic imperatives within political mobilizations of
black social dance, continually and ironically conceived as part
and parcel of rhetorics of liberation and freedom of movement.

Mar 12 | 4-231

Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba

Apr 30 | 4-231

Coco Fusco on the work of performance artists from the 1980s to

the present, examining how the Cuban state has wielded influence
over performance through a combination of politics and practices
that enable cultural production on the one hand and discipline public
behavior on the other.

Ryan Cordell, founding faculty member of the NULab for Texts,

Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University and co-director of
the Viral Texts project, will speak about his work uncovering pieces
that went viral in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.

Mar 19 | 66-110 | Communications Forum

May 7 | 4-231

Coming of Age in Dystopia: The Darkness of Young

Adult Fiction
Kristin Cashore and Kenneth Kid on why dystopias, devastating
apocalyptic visions, and tales of personal trauma are such a staple of
young adult literature.
Mar 26 | 4-231

Cultural Studies and The Expediency of Culture,

Rethought in Relation to Internet Platforms and
Megadata
The argument that culture empties out as it becomes ever more pivotal
in the creative economy has, George Ydice thinks, been borne out.

Melville in the First Age of Viral Media

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

Danielle Keats Citron of the University of Maryland Francis King
Carey School of Law exposes the startling extent of personal cyberattacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish
online harassment. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law,
she contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency
and civility must be leveraged to stop it.
All talks are at 5pm. A full schedule, including conferences and special events, is
available at cmsw.mit.edu/events.
Miss an event? Catch up at cmsw.mit.edu/media.

spring 2015 23

MIT Comparative Media Studies | Writing

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