FALL E VENTS C ALENDAR, PAGE 42

Comparative Media Studies | Writing

In Medias Res
c m s w . m i t. e d u f a l l 2 0 1 5

Remapping Christchurch:
Making Christchurch a Smart City in
Post-Earthquake New Zealand
Inside: Building a Better Chat Room
Hacking the Future of Publishing
The Production Process of Do Not Track

ABOUT IN MEDIAS RES

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Building 14E Room 303, Building E15 Room 331
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 02139
617.253.3599 / cmsw@mit.edu / cmsw.mit.edu

cmsw.mit.edu/magazine

Head

FALL 2015

Edward Schiappa

Research Managers

F RO M T H E D I R E C TO R

Heraclitean Statics
Edward Schiappa

4 F E A T U R E

14

This Years New Graduate

Students
F E AT U R E

Remapping Christchurch
Lily Bui, 16
F E AT U R E

The Production Process of Do

Not Track
Deniz Tortum, 16

20

22

27

33

F E AT U R E

Hacking the Future of

Publishing
Anika Gupta, 16
F E AT U R E

Almost Paradise
Lily Bui, 16
F E AT U R E

Building a Better Chat Room

Gordon Mangum, 16
P E O P L E , P L AC E S, T H I N G S

Personal and Project Updates

42

EVENTS

Fall 2015 Talks

With an estimated 80% of its pre-quake

buildings demolished, the city is cast as a
blank slate in this recovery, a palimpsest
for architects, developers, engineers, urban
planners and designers, artists, and citizens.
Importantly, there is a palpable tension
between two competing value systems when
it comes to the future of Christchurch: that
of restoring the city to what it was before,
against an equal and opposite desire to rebuild
the city into something new.
Lily Bui, p. 8

Federico Casalegno, Mobile Experience Lab

I do not think there is a technical fix to

this problem. No combination of human
and automatic chat moderation can prevent
a chat room from devolving into hostile insult-trading. Chat rooms are dynamic communities. While it is important to explore
the implications of the various technical
features common to chat rooms like muting
and banning, I am also proposing we look at
chat as a collection of social processes within
a community.
Gordon Mangum, p. 28

Michael Gravito
Systems Administrator

Image above: Octocopter photo of east

campus, including Building 14.
Courtsey of MIT Communications
Productions Services, from AboveSummit and
Christopher Harting

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
Rik Eberhardt, MIT Game Lab
Sarah Wolozin, Open Documentary Lab

Administrative Staff

Gabriella Horvath
Financial Assistant
Shannon Larkin
Graduate Administrator
Karinthia Louis
Administrative Assistant
Becky Shepardson
Academic Coordinator
Sarah Smith
Administrative Officer
Steven Strang
Director, Writing and Communication Center
Jessica Tatlock
Assistant to the Head
Andrew Whitacre
Communications Director

cmsw.mit.edu/people

FROM THE DIRECTOR

Heraclitean Statics
By Edward Schiappa, Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing

A theme has begun to emerge in this and recent In Medias

Res issues: our alumni are now far enough into their careers
that they are really starting to churn out major publications.
It is a point of pride, then, to be able now to educate
our current students in part with work produced by their
predecessors.

reetings, and welcome back

to another academic year! As
summer gives way to fall and
our campus oaks turn from
green to gold, we get another chance to tally
the changes around here.
We are thrilled to highlight the latest
crop of Comparative Media Studies and
Science Writing graduate students (p. 4) and
marvel at the backgrounds they bring to our
community veterans of public television, a
strong set of coders, and even a mini-cohort
of environmental scientists. Paired in their
classrooms and labs with the extraordinary
16ers heavily represented in this issue, they
make for a powerful bunch.
Its worth mentioning too how impressive
our body of undergraduate students have
become over the years. They are one of the
many reasons (and evidence) that MIT was
recently named by Times Higher Education
as Americas #3 school for the humanities. By
way of example, we invite you to read some
of their prize-winning academic and creative
writing in our sister online publication,
Angles, at cmsw.mit.edu/publications/angles
as well as by checking out the work of the
2015 Ilona Karmel Writing Prizes recipients
(cmsw.mit.edu/publications/ilona-karmelwriting-prizes).
The prizes are a great example of MIT
resources that support the ambitions of
its students. Another is the travel funding
provided by the MIT Public Service Center,

which this summer helped send graduate

student Lily Bui, 16, to New Zealand to
study the creation of a smart city. Her dispatches from Christchurch (p. 7) document
the opportunities and challenges of using
sensors to support new infrastructure for
cycling, in a city that never had it. Her lessons
have wide application for cities starting with
a clean slate, such as many in Asia, but also
show how difficult it may be for older cities to
incorporate technology otherwise heralded as
the solution to all their ills.
Meanwhile, from our Open Documentary Lab research group, we get to spotlight
analysis by Deniz Tortum, 16, on the interactive web documentary Do Not Track (p. 14).
Its one of the Open Doc Labs first forays into
case studies. Tortum describes how Do Not
Track used project management techniques
borrowed from software development and
how it managed collaboration among team
members who were geographically and disciplinarily distant. If you are interested in the
future of documentaries, this is a piece you
will refer back to for a long time.
In a bit of an experiment for In Medias
Res, we are featuring pieces written for the
classroom. We think its an excellent chance
to illustrate the content and style youll see
at the graduate level in Comparative Media
Studies. The first paper (p. 22) was for Major
Media Texts, one of the foundational classes
for the CMS degree. Many prospective
students read this magazine, so if you are one,

enjoy how the piece pulls together an item

from popular culture the film Brokeback
Mountain with one of the key issues of
our time surveillance by applying,
adapting, and expanding on the thinking of
seminal theorists. The second (p. 27) is about
chat rooms, specifically designs and practices
that could make them better. And while it
wasnt for a class, our piece on "hacking the
future of publishing (p. 20) is another fine
intro into how seemingly old media like
books can find their way into the world of
hackathons, APIs, and dating apps.
As always, we close the issue with research
and personal updates from our community,
including our alums. A theme has begun to
emerge in this and recent In Medias Res issues:
our alumni are now far enough into their
careers that they are really starting to churn
out major publications. It is a point of pride,
then, to be able now to educate our current
students in part with work produced by their
predecessors.
Speaking of alumni, several of them will be
back on campus to discuss their careers at a
special colloquium on November 19 at 5pm,
just after a CMS graduate program information session. We hope you will join us. See
our calendar of our Thursday talks (p. 42) as
well as others added throughout the semester,
available on cmsw.mit.edu/events.

fall 2015 3

F E AT U R E S

This Years New Graduate Students

Comparative Media Studies
Studying English Literature and
Politics at the University of Glasgow in
(not so) sunny Scotland, Katie Arthur
worked alongside her degree as part of
the student-led initiative GUEST.
The Glasgow University Environmental Sustainability Team, embedded in
Estates and Buildings, aimed to lobby
the University Court to commit to
substantial environmental policies
while also raising awareness and facilitating behavioural change
within the university community.
Working for GUEST inspired Katie to put her understanding of
both literature and politics to good use and she hopes that CMS will
found her the knowledge and experience to construct innovative and
effective communications strategies for third-sector groups particularly those involved in the communication of environmentalism.
With an intellectual passion grounded in enthusiasm for real grassroots social change and consciousness-raising, Katies interests lie in
empowerment through discourse and discursive strategies.
Josh Cowls joins CMS having previously gained degrees from the universities of Exeter and Oxford. Josh served
as a Research Assistant at the Oxford
Internet Institute, working on projects
researching the impact of the rise of
data in various forms on society, policy
and academia. Though a native of the
U.K., Joshs treasonable preference for
coffee over tea has led him to the U.S.
on numerous occasions: he has previously worked on presidential and
senatorial races, with an interest in how online tools are transforming
modern election campaigns. Joshs work has appeared in journals such
as FirstMonday and Policy & Internet, and he has frequently appeared on
national and international radio discussing politics and technology.
His wider interests include increasingly experimental cookery, sports
such as rowing and running, and Oxford commas.
Sue Ding is a documentary filmmaker
and multimedia producer. She has
worked on arts/culture and public
affairs projects for media outlets
including PBS, WGBH, Tumblr, and
International Channel Shanghai. Her
production credits also include several
Emmy Award-winning programs for
New York Citys public television
stations.

4 in medias res

Sue graduated from Brown University with a double major in

Visual Arts and International Relations, and has also studied at the
Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the
Universit Paris-Sorbonne.
At MIT, Sue works at the Open Documentary Lab and explores
new forms of nonfiction storytelling. Her research interests include
emerging media technologies, identity construction, and visual
culture. She is also passionate about pop culture, travel, art, social
justice, and mythology and folklore.
A longtime DC area native and SF/
Fantasy fanboy, Evan Higgins earned a
B.A. in English Literature and B.S. in
Marketing from the University of
Maryland.
After interning at a rock radio
station in college, he went on to work
in the education department at PBS.
Once there, Evan moved between the
station relations, marketing, and sales
teams before settling onto the content/editorial team where he helped
design educational resources and discovered his passion for content
creation and refinement.
Evans love of fictional worlds has led him to CMS to study the
way in which new media formats inform authorial ownership of their
creation. Focusing on the relationship between canonical and noncanonical pieces of media, he is interested in how collaborative storytelling can be used to tell fuller, more immersive narratives. He can
usually be found replaying early aughts video games, searching out
up-and-coming rappers, and trying foods he cant pronounce.
Chris Kerich is a programmer, artist,
and human being. He worries about
forgetting the latter when focusing on
the former.
Chris has a bachelors in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University
but likes to tell people that he very
nearly minored in film. He has spent
time in the trenches of professional
software engineering and unprofessionally working with system-focused art (some of which is on his
website www.ckerich.com).
Chris interests lie in what he calls critical systems studies, or, critically reading systems/algorithms as media and asking the important
questions of for whom, why, and how. As praxis this can take many
forms, but one of particular importance to him is pushing digital and
non-digital systems to their absolute limits and seeing how this stress
characterizes or fractures them. At MIT Chris hopes to flesh these
ideas out further, do in-depth case studies, and make a lot of art.

F E AT U R E S

Nathan Saucier is a filmmaker and

educator. Returning from two years
teaching English and media classes at a
university in South Korea, he joins
CMS to work with the Creative Communities Initiative while pursuing
diverse interests in non
fiction media
making and education.
Nathan is a graduate of Bard
Colleges film department, where he
created documentaries and narrative shorts inspired by his time in
Romania and the Balkans.
His background includes work in film production and video
streaming in Los Angeles. These experiences helped shape his interest
in the culture and capabilities of live streaming. He is further interested in the relationship between filmmaker and subject in the context
of participatory documentaries.
Yao Tong graduated from the University of Michigan, double majoring in
Communication
Studies
and
Economics. Growing up in Beijing,
Yao took a particular interest in the
complex interplay between political,
economic, and cultural contexts
impacting new media in Asia. Most
recently, she interned at China Central
Television (CCTV) as a director
assistant, where her tasks involved coming up with an effective propagation strategy in the face of the continuous mediocre television
ratings. To delve deeper, Yao conducted an independent research
project on microblogging services in China and revealed substantial
insights on how cultural and social factors dictate the way Chinese
people communicate online. At MIT, Yao joins the Center for Civic
Media and assists Professor Jing Wangs NGO 2.0 project.
In her spare time, Yao is an ardent jazz music lover and an enthusiastic pianist in chamber music groups on campus. She swims every
day to keep fit, and loves to go to BSO (Boston Symphony Orchestra)
to admire her favorite musicians such as Evgeny Kissin and Anna
Netrebko.
George Tsiveriotis moved to the San
Francisco Bay Area six years ago after
attending high school in Athens. At
Stanford, he earned his B.S. in
Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary
program with coursework in computer
science, psychology, philosophy, and
linguistics.
After research positions in cognitive
science and education labs and stints in
healthcare and payments startups, George most recently spent a year
in media relations at Facebook. While there, he collaborated with
tech reporters from outlets such as WIRED and The Washington Post

on stories about a wide range of topics including tech accessibility, the

Silicon Valley gender gap, and the role of analog art in online communities.
At MIT, George hopes to explore real and imagined power structures in social and participatory media and their effects on identity
representation, self expression, and civic engagement. He likes
stand-up comedy and Bjrk.
Maya Wagoner is an interaction
designer and organizer born in San
Francisco and raised in Los Angeles.
She received her bachelors degree in
American Studies from UC Santa
Cruz, and participated in the User Experience Design Immersive program at
General Assembly, a small technology
school in San Francisco. Most recently,
she worked with the Engagement Lab
at Emerson College to develop Boston Civic Media, a new consortium of schools and universities dedicated to civic media research and
pedagogy, and to help design an educational game for the World
Bank. While in the Bay Area, she was a core organizer of Code for
San Francisco and worked as a usability researcher for Intel. She is
interested in interfaces and edges of all kinds.

Science Writing
Hailing from the suburbs of Boston,
Catherine Caruso first realized she
might have an affinity for words when,
at age ten, she missed the Grand
Canyon because she couldnt put down
her book (ironically, Brighty of the
Grand Canyon). One fateful July she
was completely sucked into Shark
Week, and from there she developed a
particular interest in marine biology
(along with a particularly intricate color-coded Shark Week viewing
schedule). She graduated with a biology degree from Wellesley
College, followed by a stint working at the Marine Biological Lab in
Woods Hole, MA, where she found it delightfully impossible to
escape science talk. Catherine just finished her M.S. at the University
of New Hampshire, with the informal title plumber/fish husbandry
specialist/molecular biologist/lab technician/lab instructor/writer/
editor. She has long suspected that she belongs at the intersection
between writing and science, and she is excited to test this theory at
MIT. She thinks aquaculture is an evolving industry that more people
need to know about, but she plans to throw herself into any and all
scientific topics that cross her path.
In her free time, Catherine alternates between total nerd and total
jock, which involves podcast listening, Wikipedia scouring, running
(preferably after a soccer ball), rock climbing, and explaining the
complexities of American football to unsuspecting victims.

fall 2015 5

F E AT U R E S

Diana Crow was born in the town

where they shot Moonrise Kingdom,
grew up in the town where they
isolated the uranium needed for the
atomic bomb, and holds a B.A. in
biology from a college The Onion
once called The #1 Dinner Party
School in America. (Bard College,
Class of 2013. Go Raptors!) She is now
a science journalist. Her claims to fame
include launching a student-run science magazine, building a rainbow
paper mache volcano for submitting science-inspired poetry to said
science magazine, wrangling cicadas on the set of The Fly Room,
writing about hypothetical aliens for Scientific American, and authoring
a blog about crashing MIT Biology lectures at dianacrowscience.com.
Favorite science subjects include ecoimmunology, splicing isoform
shenanigans, quirky somatosensory neuron behavior, and the awesomeness of fungi. She is thrilled that the MIT Graduate Program in
Science Writing has agreed to academically adopt her and will
probably be using her MIT ID to get into all sorts of odd places.
Equally at home chasing salamanders
and scrambling to meet a news
deadline, Conor Gearin grew up in St.
Louis, Missouri. One day, his sixth
grade science teacher read from
Stephen Jay Goulds book of essays
about evolutionary biology, The
Pandas Thumb. This seemed to bore all
present except Gearin, who now seeks
to follow in Goulds footsteps, writing
with humor and insight about complex science. He earned his B.A. in
English and B.S. in Biology from Truman State University, and has
worked as a biology research assistant at Washington University in St.
Louis (poking fish brains with electrodes and listening) and University of Maine-Orono (taking water samples and pursuing the aforementioned amphibians.) His poetry and watercolor paintings have
appeared in Mochila Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and
Phizzog Review. He likes listening to and playing Irish music. He
misses the weather in St. Petersburg.
Claudia Geib grew up on Long Island,
New York, where she spent her
formative years wading into tide pools
and staring off at the horizon in search
of whales. Though her first job aspiration was to be a dolphin trainer, her
dads old issues of National Geographic
taught her that writing about the
natural world was a tool through which
she could explore as much of it as
possible. She spent her undergraduate years at Northeastern University pursuing degrees in Journalism and Environmental Science, while

6 in medias res

using any free space in her schedule to indulge her interest in marine
science from helping with the necropsy of a nine-foot seal at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, to hauling lines on a 134-foot
tall sailing ship off of New Zealand with Sea Education Association.
She is excited to dive into a new adventure at MIT and hopes her
graduate work will help her make science as accessible to others as it is
wonderful to her.
One flight, one very long car ride, and
one rickety boat trip later, Margaux
Phares arrived at a tiny research station
island in the Atlantic. She was far from
the mountains of Colorado, bitter
neighbors New York and New Jersey,
and innocuous suburbs of northern
Illinois that punctuated her somewhat
nomadic youth. Here, among the
coral, rays (sun and marine), and
mangrove forests, she was drawn to the life sciences. It was in the great
snowy north at the University of Minnesota, however, where she took
her B.S. in Biology, working underground in neuroscience laboratories and above ground as a volunteer EMT. Margaux developed a keen
appreciation for the intersections of science and medicine with media
and information literacy in society. Pursuing science communications
made sense. Now, after presenting MRI research for Health and Biological Research News, writing a blog for Halo Neuroscience, and
teaching chemistry principles to youth (like how to make elephants
toothpaste), science writing consumes her. Next thing, Margaux was
moving to Cambridge, looking forward to eating bona fide Italian
food, immersing herself in the local music scene, and probing the
mysteries of science within the halls of MIT.
Kendra Pierre-Louis hails from
Queens, New York. Not only is
Queens New York Citys (and arguably
the countrys) most homo-diverse
borough (county) but this bit of
Gotham also teems with biodiversity.
In fact, Kendra credits her interest in
environmental science, at least in part,
to the cicada songs that provided the
soundtrack of her childhood and their
molted remains that haunted her nightmares. The rest of the credit
probably goes to Captain Planet; as a child she watched a lot of television. Kendra believes in being awed and terrified by nature on a semiregular basis which is probably how she wound up running from a
polar bear in the Arctic. Fun fact: polar bears can outrun you. Kendra
holds a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University, an M.A. in Sustainable Development from the SIT Graduate Institute, and a Master
Composter Certificate from the Queens Botanical Garden. Kendra is
the author of Green Washed: Why We Cant Buy Our Way to a
Green Planet (Ig Publishing, 2012). You can also find her writing at
In These Times, Newsweek, Modern Farmer, and Slate.

F E AT U R E S

Remapping Christchurch
Lily Bui, CMS 16

Image: SensingCity.org

Lily Bui, CMS 16, worked in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the

summer of 2015, funded in part by the MIT Public Service Center. She
was in Christchurch to design, develop, and deploy a mobile app that
tracks cyclist commutes, which will assess mobility patterns of cyclists after
the 2011 earthquake. She worked with the smart city trust SensingCity
and the University of Canterbury. The following are her dispatches for the
Public Service Center, written through the summer.

Making Christchurch a Smart City in PostEarthquake New Zealand

Im living in Christchurch, New Zealand this summer (well, technically winter in the southern hemisphere).
You might recognize the citys name from international headlines
a few years back when a series of earthquakes shook the city and
destroyed much of its central business district. It was a tragic event
that left 185 dead and much of the urban infrastructure damaged.
The reason that Ive made the journey is to join the SensingCity
Trust and the University of Canterburys GeoHealth Laboratory as
a research fellow, a collaboration that formed as a part of the citys
reconstruction efforts.
Over $30 billion (NZD) will be spent on the city over a relatively
short period of time. The vision is to allocate energy and funding
toward various initiatives that equip the city with technologies that
enable citizens to be more informed about the built and natural environment and to stimulate civic engagement throughout the process.
This is a keen match for my masters research at MIT Comparative Media Studies, which (for the time being) focuses on the design,
communication, and use of air sensing data in cities and its potential
impact urban design. I was also fortunate enough to be fully funded to
travel, live, and work here by the MIT Public Service Center fellowship and the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives
(MISTI).
The Sensing City Trust is a non-profit organisation working with
Christchurch stakeholders to help them understand how data can
inform decisions about city management. The Trust has two active

projects one focussed on the impact of air pollution on respiratory

disease, and the other on cyclists generating data to inform cycleway
development.
I touched down in Christchurch on a windy Tuesday afternoon
and was met by a welcome party of SensingCity colleagues. Because
warm and cold ocean currents meet near the New Zealand islands,
this causes conditions to be almost constantly windy. Turbulence is
the status quo when landing in Christchurch, and I certainly learned
this the hard way! Fortunately, I was met by a warm welcome party of
co-workers at the airport, who were kind enough to help me transport
my bags to my flat. My new flatmates are a blend of medical students
and designers. We have an espresso machine, a WiiU, a piano, and
AppleTV. I live within walking distance of Hagley Park (the largest
park in the city), a handful of museums, and the beach. A professor of
the University of Canterbury was kind enough to loan me a bike for
my time here, so Ill be able to get myself around more easily.

Hagley Parks botanical garden located next to the Canterbury Museum

On my first day here, I spent time exploring the city. At the top
of my list was the Christchurch Rebuild Tour, which focuses on the
parts of the city most affected by the series of earthquakes. Over the
course of 1.5 hours, I gained so much more context about how much
construction and demolition have needed to occur and are still in

fall 2015 7

F E AT U R E S

Ongoing construction in Christchurch

The EPIC building, which houses ~20 software companies in Christchurch. Also where
SensingCity is located.

Image: Crosswalk specifically for cyclists in Christchurch

progress years after the quake. It was also disheartening to hear

more presently about the lives lost during the natural disaster.
This week, I set up shop in both of my offices (as Ill be dividing my
time between SensingCitys space and the University of Canterbury)
and held a handful of meetings with SensingCity team members and
University of Canterbury Geohealth team members to better understand their goals for my project, which will focus on assessing cyclists
perception of safety in existing cycleways.
After synthesizing the information during our meetings, I hit the
ground running and developed a strategic plan/outline for the time
that I will be here. Whether or not things go as planned is still meant
to stand the test of time. However, putting our ideas down in one
place was a good feeling.
This is the farthest Ive ever moved away from home in both
space and time, given my crossing of the international date line. Yet,
its the calmest and most ready Ive felt while making the transition.
Much of that is due to being surrounded by brilliant, supportive
people both here and back home.
Im looking forward to logging the progress of my work here, for
those who are interested in following along. As always, I have arrived
with my own assumptions and expectations in tow, but I have no
doubt they will be challenged, matured, and revised along the way.
Cheers to this Kiwi adventure.

Sensors, Cycling, Safety, and Cities: The CycleWays

Project in Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

8 in medias res

In order to understand Christchurch, New Zealand, Ive realized, one

must first understand a little about catastrophe.
Dont be mistaken. This is certainly no comment on the citys
current state. Rather, catastrophe, in the form of a natural disaster,
formulates much of Christchurchs recent history.
Shaken and stirred
Four years after a series of earthquakes destroyed Christchurchs
Central Business District (CBD), the city is still rebuilding. Pipes
were broken, roads were fractured, buildings fell, cars crashed, and far
too many people lost their lives. What Ive learned after being here,
though, through the stories that people tell and the moments that
survivors remember, the earthquakes also surfaced immeasurable acts
of human kindness. Clothes were donated, shelter was provided, and
neighbors were rescued.
With an estimated 80% of its pre-quake buildings now demolished,
the city is cast as a blank slate in this period of recovery, a palimpsest
for architects, developers, engineers, urban planners and designers,
artists, and citizens.
Importantly, there is a palpable tension between two competing
value systems when it comes to the future of Christchurch: that of

F E AT U R E S

SensingCity CycleWays Grandmaster Plan (view complete PDF at cmsw.mit.edu/cycleways-pdf)

restoring the city to what it was before, against an equal and opposite
desire to rebuild the city into something new.
The work of Dr. Susanna M. Hoffman, who researches the dynamics
of disaster from both an anthropological and personal perspective,
helps me think more deeply about what happened in Christchurch
through The Angry Earth, a compendium of essays from disaster
studies scholars:
Peoples recovery in the aftermath of disaster constitutes the Janus face
of a major catastrophe, the social countenance laid over the physical
reality. It can be a time of not just material but social devastation, fragmentation, and despair. For many, it can also be, quite remarkably, a time
of social cohesion, purpose, and almost glory.

Despite the relatively short amount of time Ive spent here, I can
confirm that the stories I have heard about the quakes fall along all
parts of the spectrum.
Still, I find that my arrival has taken place at a good even
opportune time, at the sweeping off of trauma, at a moment of
readiness for resolve.
Cycleways, sensors, and safety
For now, Ive set up camp in two places: SensingCity and the Univer-

Image: Christchurch City Libraries

sity of Canterbury Geohealth Laboratory. The former is a nonprofit

organization that sits outside of government, industry, and academia
and coordinates various projects to help stakeholders understand how
data can form city management. The latter convenes researchers interested in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in some form.
The problem before us is this: in post-quake Christchurch, though
pre-existing modes of transport have been disrupted by diverted
vehicle traffic and ubiquitous road works, cycling has endured as a
convenient way to get around. Its faster than public transport, free,

fall 2015 9

F E AT U R E S

Granted, this is largely because the city council has no baseline data
to go off of, and much was built in a hurry after the earthquakes to get
the city back up and running form versus function.
Thus, what were trying to do with the CycleWays Project is to
improve the availability of data regarding cycling routes, road-user
behavior and cycling infrastructure in Christchurch. This involves
designing a mobile app that collects GPS, timestamp, and other data
about perceived safety levels of cyclists as they move through the city.
Hopefully, by the end of the winter (yes, winter, and unfortunately so
for this native northern hemispherer), well have a working prototype
app that (1) lets cyclists map their routes throughout the city and (2)
collects some feedback about cyclist safety and cycling behavior in
Christchurch.
Easier said than done, of course. Before development even takes
place, I have my hands full with research about existing cycling app
solutions, ethical concerns about data privacy (especially with GIS
data), a bit of community organizing among cycling advocacy groups
to better understand cycling culture and attitudes here, some user
experience design and wireframing of the conceptual app, lining up
media partners, and usability testing of the prototype.
Copenhagen and Amsterdam are, of course, often held as gold
standards for cycling communities, but there is no such thing as a onesize-fits-all solution for cycling. Even Google, which recently released
a Bike Vision Plan for Silicon Valley, takes into account specific, local
constraints. Cities share some similar DNA, but the way in which
that DNA expresses itself constitute myriad forms. For Christchurch,
it must be about finding the right solution for Christchurch, not any
other city.

and overall better for the environment.

However, cyclist safety and cycling infrastructure are other issues
entirely. Christchurch is not a big city (population ~366,000 as of
2013), and its roads privilege cars, not bikes. Thus, motorists are not
used to sharing the road, which is even harder to do with construction
projects everywhere, and cyclists dont have the proper mechanisms to
interface safely with vehicle traffic. Sadly, there is precedent for cyclist
injuries from cars, even one cyclist death. One solution is to improve
the visibility, connectedness, and accessibility of cycleways (more colloquially referred to as bike lanes in the States) in Christchurch.
Extant cycleways were planned in top-down fashion, with city
planners basing routes on where they believed cyclists travel most
often. Lo and behold, this does not take into account where cyclists
are actually traveling.

10 in medias res

Image: Christchurch City Council proposed priority cycleways (Christchurch City

Council, CCC)

Cacophony, community, and change

One key thing for me about working on a cycling app for a city is
also being a cyclist in that city. Ive inherited a mountain bike from
a professor at Uni. As its my only mode of transportation other than
walking or the bus (which is somewhat expensive and not convenient
based on where I live and work), Ive been cycling quite a bit. Ive encountered, first-hand, many of the same frustrations that other cyclists

F E AT U R E S

report, chief among them: ambiguously drawn cycleways, little to no

bike parking, cars and buses that swerve into cycling paths, and road
works that present safety hazards in every which way.
Not to mention, Ive chosen to take on this project in the winter,
during which the average temperature is around 3 degrees Celsius
(~35 degrees Fahrenheit) and fewer cyclists are on the road in general.
Despite all this, I remain optimistic (whether by delusion or determination, only time will tell).
Im optimistic because of things like the Winter Solstice Night Light
Bike Ride, which I attended, and which happens every year and is independently organized by the cycling community in Christchurch.
About four hundred people showed up in Hagley Park (Christchurchs
largest urban open space) with their cycles decorated with lights. Kids,
parents, college students, young professionals, and seniors showed up
with bicycle bells and whistles to ride around a pre-planned route in
an illuminated caravan.
Hagley Park has one of the few continuous shared-use paths in the
city (wherein pedestrians and cyclists can safely travel) and its perimeters have the only cycle-only intersection signals in the city, making
it an ideal place to host the event. A local science education center set
up a kiosk and sold extra LED string lights to last-minute participants.
Food trucks showed up at the end of the route to serve hungry cyclists.
It didnt matter that it was winter or that a biting southerly wind
(from Antarctica, no less) had blown in. Events like this reinvigorate
my enthusiasm for our work. They stand as a reminder that there is,
foremost, a desire for safer transport, more accessible mobility, and
(what I hope to be) positive change.

At the Speed of a Bicycle: Changing the Culture of

Cycling in Christchurch, New Zealand
Ill start this post with a bit of news in the both the figurative and
literal sense. I was commissioned by a local news outlet in Christchurch, New Zealand, called The Press to contribute an op-ed about
the history of cycling in the city. The story ran on Saturday, July 25th
in the Mainlander section of the newspaper, and it was also featured
on the front page. This was an exciting opportunity to synthesize
some of the research that I had already been doing about cycling in
the city. The interviews that I was able to feature in the op-ed gave
voice to cycling advocates who are working to change the perception
of cycling in the city and to make the roads safer for all those who use
it. This is a cultural moment for Christchurch one that will define
what transportation looks like in the citys future as it rebuilds, postearthquake.
On the app development front, Sensing City has begun development of our app design in collaboration with a team called SpecialEyes. After a workshop held at Christchurch City Council and

Winter Solstice Light Bike Ride

Construction makes it difficult to discern which paths to take in Christchurchs CBD

Coda
One final note. Hoffman reminds us that there is a place for equilibrium after disaster takes place, albeit temporary:
[A]mong the cacophony of place, event, and topic, a certain order
generally emerges. For those suspended between havoc and wholeness,
by and large a process ensues. Its steps are many and complex, yet they
are almost as predictable as crawling, standing, and walking.

And perhaps cycling too.

receiving match funding from the Canterbury Community Trust, we

have moved forward into development and should have the app ready
for testing by early September. Although this will be after my fellowship ends, one key thing I hope to do during the remainder of my time
here is to create a road map for next steps, which I can pass onto the
team members who will be taking over after I leave. The workshop
that Sensing City held with Christchurch City Council helped me
better understand the dynamics between citizens in the community
and members in the council. The atmosphere is overall a collaborative one, and the city seems to be enthused by initiatives that benefit
Christchurch and its residents.
Aside from working on the cycling project with Sensing City, Ive
also been participating in cycling events in Christchurch out of my
own personal interests. I had the opportunity to help organize a GPS
painting event with the cycling community here. GPS painting is an
activity that involves using a GPS logger like Strava, MapMyRide,
or similar mobile apps to map your route as you ride, walk, or move
throughout spaces. Doing this, you can paint patterns or images

fall 2015 11

F E AT U R E S

using urban infrastructure. We were able to gather about twenty

people to help paint a picture of the Arc de Triomphe in Christchurchs streets to celebrate cycling as well as the end of the Tour
de France. Since one of the local bike shops recently changed their
location, we saw an opportunity to tie the GPS painting activity to the
promotion of the move. At the end of our ride, we had a small picnic
with treats and snacks at the new bike shop location.
Cycling in Christchurch is nothing new. It has rich history, and
there is no shortage of advocacy groups that promote cycling in
different ways here. The longer I spend here working on this project,
the more I realize that there are limits to what technology (e.g., the
development of our mobile app) can do to facilitate cycling in the
city. Even if the infrastructure is improved and available (i.e., more
cycleways), the growth of cycling in Christchurch, there is still more
cultural work to be done to encourage more cycling overall. And this
will be up to the community of cyclists in the city, which is already
going strong. Change may not happen overnight, but it can at least
take off at the speed of a bicycle.

12 in medias res

CycleWaze: Finalizing Christchurchs Cycling App

Design
We have wireframes! In some meetings last week, Sensing City met
with our app developers and signed off on the wireframes for our

F E AT U R E S

There is a term, urban tissue, which refers to recognizable

patterns in the built environment among buildings, streets, geographies. The metaphor connects the lived-in to the living, constructing the notion of the built environment itself as a living organism.
Our research thus far sits at this nexus of the urban corpus, examining
where infrastructure intersects with public and civic health as well as
how digital technology might mediate and mitigate concerns in both
worlds. Mechanisms for providing and receiving feedback are essential
for assessing the vital signs of civic and public health, and what we
have proposed in this paper is a research methodology that privileges
feedback from relevant stakeholders at the community and city governance level to inform the design of digital technology. My hope is that
at the end of the day, weve done something positive for the cycling
community here and that the transportation data generated from the
app contributes toward the rebuild of Christchurch.
This fellowship has, in many ways, given me a unique opportunity
to engage with a real-world smart cities project, which is invaluable
to my masters research. More than that, though, Ive been able to
connect with a place and a community that I would not otherwise had
the opportunity to. Aside from smart cities stuff, Ive learned
something about resilience in cities that have been through natural
disasters. Ive had the chance to participate in a cultural revival around
cycling and active transport in a city that has its historical roots in
cycling. Because the University of Canterbury Geohealth Lab is a key
partner in Sensing Citys cycling project, Ive unexpectedly and
happily forayed into human geography, a discipline I didnt know
much about before but now realize I have been a part of all along. Last
but certainly not least, Ive made friends, met people, and seen places
that I want to hold onto for the rest of my life. So, although I wont
presume that Ive made a lasting impact on Christchurch, but it has
made an impression on me changed me for the better.
This piece originally appeared as multiple posts on the MIT Public Service Center
website: http://mitpsc.mit.edu/blog/archivepage/current-summer-15-lily-bui-g-2/

FOLLOW OUR
WORK
cycling app. This adds a nice note of finality to my fellowship as it
wraps up this week. (Has it been three months already?) Much hard
work has gone into user research, liaising with the cycling community
(while being a part of it), getting funding for the project, presenting
preliminary findings to city council, and much more to get us to this
point. Now, the last and hardest part is to hand off the project
to the rest of the team as I prepare for my move back to the States.
There is still much more work to be done in terms of usability testing
and data analysis once we have a working minimum viable product
(MVP).

HERES HOW YOU CAN FIND OUR

UPDATES AND OTHER NEWS

Daily updates: @cmsw_mit, @MIT_Sciwrite

Event news: facebook.com/MIT.CMSW
Video: cmsw.mit.edu/category/media
Networking: cmsw.mit.edu/linkedin
Research: cmsw.mit.edu/blog
Announcements: cmsw.mit.edu/signup
fall 2015 13

F E AT U R E S

The Production Process of Do Not Track

Deniz Tortum, CMS 16

o Not Track is an interactive web documentary series

about internet privacy directed by Brett Gaylor and
co-produced by Upian, NFB, Arte, and BR. In the
project proposal of Do Not Track, director Brett
Gaylor quotes Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook employee:
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make
people click ads. Channeling the famous first lines of Allen Ginsbergs Howl, Hammerbachers statement solidifies what Gaylor identifies as having gone awry with the Internet. Do Not Track addresses
questions around this phenomenon: When and how did the internet
become home to targeted advertising where a users browser history
determines the advertisements she sees? How do data brokers collect
and sell information about users to hundreds of companies? If we dont
want to be tracked, how do we fight back?
To ask these questions, Do Not Track takes on the same production
strategies used by many web developers. Do Not Track is a documentary for the web, rather than a documentary on the web. It optimizes
its story for a web experience through offering personalized stories,
short video content that keeps the viewer focused and basic interactivity that keeps the user constantly involved.
The storytelling method is not the only thing Do Not Track tailors
to the web; it also adopts the agile design production methods of tech
and design fields. The documentary content is optimized through web
analytics and iterative design. The filmmakers have also developed
communication and collaboration strategies to work efficiently with
an international and interdisciplinary team. This case study focuses

14 in medias res

primarily on the methods Do Not Track creators used to develop a

film in an agile method, how they collaborated internationally, and
how they composed a script under these conditions.

Agile Filmmaking
Filmmaking models generally follow what Brett Gaylor refers to
as waterfall production methodology. This means that research,
filming, editing, and release follow each other in strict order, using a
top-down approach. Waterfall development techniques put all the
planning and research up front, followed by design, then finally development and testing. If something unforeseen emerges during the
testing phase, it is difficult to go back and modify the original design.
Do Not Track borrows its production language from software development, where a host of development methodologies with names like
Agile, Iterative, Scrum, and others have replaced traditional waterfall
methods. These agile methods focus on rapidly creating prototypes,
cycling through the entire process of product development quickly
and changing approach on the fly as new information emerges. Gaylor
explains that the waterfall method is still widely used because it fits
into the funding and exhibition models of the film world. Funders do
not want to stray away from conventional methods, while exhibition
models are not quick enough to adapt to new filmmaking methods.
If you want your work seen at the festivals it needs premieres. But
what is a premiere on the internet? Brett asks.
One way that an agile approach benefits the web documentary

F E AT U R E S

format is that each episode can be changed based on the analytics

of the prior episode. In addition to the personalized aspect of the
documentary, the documentary is also changed based on aggregate
analytics. To picture how this can impact a film, consider how
companies like BuzzFeed go so far as to release multiple headlines for
the same story, testing each to see which has the highest click-rate.
Gaylor says that web documentaries can also apply these techniques.
By thinking of each episode and each two-week production cycle as a
separate project, rather than a single long project, adapting to previous
results and learning from them comes easily. Gaylor compares the
phase of releasing a new episode every other week to a festival run of
a film, in which you get useful feedback and press attention, then have
time to make changes before officially releasing the film.
Though it is true that film production does follow a standardized and linear production process, it is also subject to serendipitous
changes, coincidences, and improvisational choices. This type of improvisation is difficult when producing content for the web, because
of the technical complexity already involved Gaylor thinks that by
considering agile web production techniques as a model, it may be
possible to create a new production process that carries over positive
aspects of traditional film production but accommodates a more rapid
product cycle and web-native interactivity and responsiveness.

International & Interdisciplinary Collaboration

One remarkable feature of Do Not Track is its international and interdisciplinary production team, who collaborates remotely for the
majority of production. The team what Gaylor calls the RACI
model to collaborate. As shown in the figure below, the model assigns
each team member to categories named Responsible, Accountable,
Consulted, Informed. This approach indicates the roles of each
member upfront and clearly. People who are responsible, accountable and, consulted all contribute creatively to the project but, at the
end, the final decision is the responsibility of the accountable person.
The informed group receives updates about the project but they do
not collaborate creatively. This coherent distribution of responsibility
prevents micromanaging and gives people enough room to experiment. Gaylor is a firm supporter of this method: Thats how I think

RACI Model from the Episode Guide of DNT

you get good results when something is distributed like this. If you
are in there micromanaging every step and nobody is having any fun,
youre going to just fail, youre going to have ultimate burnout.
The team behind Do Not Track was organized into separate core
groups for story, design, development, montage, project management

Team 1 from the Episode Guide of DNT

and conversation management. The figure below illustrates how the

RACI model was employed across these groups.
The Script team creates the story. The UX team designs all the
elements that go into the project. The development team codes the
interactive documentary, and the montage team edits the film.
Gaylor explains that on an interdisciplinary team, crosstalk between
developers, designers, and project managers is a necessity. A project
manager, for example, might not need to be able to code, but should
be able to ask the right questions of coders. As Gaylor explains: A

Team 2 from the Episode Guide of DNT

fall 2015 15

F E AT U R E S

good product manager is going to ask the right sort of nave questions
like, Did you think about it this way? Or, Oh okay I understand, it
takes too long to create this because of this service, have we considered writing this one our self, what would that take?
There are two organizational teams in Do Not Track. The project
management team is responsible for the production of the whole
project, from filming to web design to development. The conversation management team handles outreach, marketing, and user expe-

Basecamp and Slack, and a weekly online action meeting. For Gaylor,
communication is basically project management and thats part of the
work.

Script & Writing

Writing for interactive documentaries is a challenge: multiple types
of media, interactivity, personalization all have to go into the script.
How do you organize all this information? How do you create a script
format? This is a complex question, and the storyboard of Do Not
Track reveals some interesting solutions. Interactivity is communicated through state-based storyboards, where a user is not just at a
timestamp but also has several variables attached based on personalization and prior choices. Fail-states convey scenarios when things
dont go as planned (such as viewers Facebook do not reveal enough
data). The script also has labels to mark different types of media. These
labels offer a convenient vocabulary for writing interactive docs.
The labels we find on Do Not Tracks storyboard are:
1. Video: This label is used to mark the video content particularly shot
for DNT. Note all the different languages. The film is prepared in
different languages and automatically plays in a different language
depending on the location of the user.

Conversation Management

rience outside of the website. Below is a chart illustrating how the

conversation team works.
But how do you communicate with a team that is dispersed around
the globe? Collaborators are from Quebec, British Columbia, France,
and Germany, which makes communication a big challenge. Do Not
Track began with several large, in-person meetings in Paris, where
they developed a style guide and production schedule. After this, the
team relied heavily on real-time collaboration tools like Google Docs,

Communication through Google Docs

16 in medias res

2. Text Input: The information users input to make the experience

personalized. Note that the video is Cinemagraph style which
means it is a moving photograph. It can loop forever until the user
puts in information.
3. Real Time: This label is used to mark the moments when users see
information depending on the data they provide and on the data
the DNT API collected from their IP, such as where someone lives,
which computer she uses, etc. (User Dynamic Information)

F E AT U R E S

4. Fail States: What if the user doesnt provide any information, or the
information provided is not adequate? For those scenarios there are
alternative scenes, which are marked as Fail States.
5. Archive: This label is used for archival footage.
Other labels include Audio Only, for cases, where the user only

Video Label

hears audio and Animation, when animated images are used.

How do you brainstorm and make decisions? Easy! Discussion
about the script was made through Google comments.
Do Not Track presents a highly innovative production model; it
borrows from web and tech development as well as filmmaking in
order to find the best process for the form. It brings techniques from
web development into film production: agile methods, long-distance

Text Input Label

fall 2015 17

F E AT U R E S

collaboration, and state-based storyboards. While these approaches

Archive Label

Realtime Label

Fail States

fit naturally into the distribution system of the web (making it immediately available and modifying it on the fly), they dont integrate
well with the established funding or distribution models for film.
New analytic tools for understanding user behavior can be a powerful
source of knowledge about the audience to filmmakers, and can help
them identify problems or miscommunication, but these tools are not

18 in medias res

without risk. The rapid prototyping cycle can be reductive; user-centered filmmaking can lead to flat content.
Do Not Track is aware of these shortcomings and tries to walk on
a tightrope balancing flashy with meaningful, brief with comprehensive.
Furthermore, in order to illustrate its subject, Do Not Track uses

F E AT U R E S

FALL EVENT
HIGHLIGHTS
JANE MCGONIGAL DISCUSSES HER
NEW BOOK SUPERBETTER WITH
SCOT OSTERWEIL
September 17 @ 7:00 pm
MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater

DISSOLVE UNCONFERENCE
A Summit on Inequality

An example of how RACI model works. Since Brett is accountable for the script, he has
the last say to reject or accept suggestions.

Featuring social scientists, media theorists, writers, artists,

activists, this unconference asks: How can we dissolve the structures of power that produce todays inequalities?
October 8 @ 1:30 pm
Stata Center Lawn

CELEBRATING THE FEMALE

SUPERHERO THROUGH DIGITAL
GAMING
Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist and researcher whose
work explores how video games and comic books can engage in a
dialogue with identity, gender and civic awareness.
October 15 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 4, Room 231
Collaboratively working on GoogleDocs

the same tools as advertising companies: personalization and social

media logins. It doesnt preach against analytics or algorithmically
customized content: rather, it relies on these tools.
However, by revealing how the tools work, the documentary seeks
to inform the audiences about these technologies and what implications they have on our everyday life while leading the audiences in
taking the action steps, using security softwares and websites, to
ensure their privacy online.
This piece originally appeared on Docubase.: http://docubase.mit.edu/lab/case-studies/
production-process-of-do-not-track/

WOMEN IN POLITICS:
REPRESENTATION AND REALITY
Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet
TV shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral
curve. Political consultant Mary Anne Marsh and children/
teens book author Ellen Emerson White look at the connections (if any) we can draw between representation and reality.
November 12 @ 5:00 pm
MIT Building 3, Room 270

Full listings on p. 42 and online at cmsw.mit.edu

fall 2015 19

F E AT U R E S

Hacking the Future of Publishing

Anika Gupta, CMS 16

20 in medias res

That group eventually went for another idea, but they werent
entirely wrong: reading isnt lonely, of course, but its precisely that
absence of loneliness that might pave the way to other, equally close,
connections.
The hackathon attendees being a group of (largely) millennials, one
hackathon team evolved the notion of Kindlr a dating app for
people whod rather be reading. A company called BitLit Media has
released an app called Shelfie, which allows users to take photos of
the books on their bookshelf. The app then matches the user with
free or low-priced ebook versions of those same print books. Theres
something very nifty about Shelfies app, and the Kindlr group used
Shelfies API to allow potential daters to upload pictures of their
bookshelves as the ultimate guide to their psyche. While giving
his three-minute demo at the end of the hackathon, the presenter
(charming, dry) offered a series of questions on which the app would
match potential couples: what is one book you would never read?
Or, more tellingly, what is the last book you lied about finishing?
(Not mentioned: Is it wrong to lie about finishing?)
Of all the hackathon ideas, this one got some of the biggest laughs,
and possibly also some of the most appreciative glances. Maybe its a
bad idea to look to readers as models of fidelity: any true reader knows
that choosing a favorite book is an exercise for noobs, because one
of the greatest pleasures of reading is its near-infinite variety. Even
the Kindlr presenter acknowledged the pointlessness of The One,
saying of a potential profile match who had only 10 books in her
digital library, Im not going to date a filthy casual.
In keeping with the theme of unlikely matches, another crowd
favorite was Neural Public Library a team that described their
concept as a library of book titles and authors generated by a recursive
neural network. The fictional titles are generated by the network,
while the cover images are grabbed from Flickr. Although a recursive
neural network sounds only slightly more complex than the Dewey
Decimal System, NPLs website (and accompanying Twitter stream!)
serve a host of humorous auto-generalia. Today, in the Romance
genre, this is what their website gave me (see image opposite).
Speaking of the challenges of finishing, more than one group
tried to shorten the physical experience of reading. Instant Classic
was developed by Media Lab alum Dan Schultz and his team. Their

Image Credit: Jennifer 8. Lee

or someone who has grown up with reading, the idea of

reinventing the reading experience might seem either
like sacrilege or like a waste of time. At the CODEX
hackathon, which ran from June 26-28 in San Francisco,
several of us spent the first few minutes of the event rhapsodizing
about the physical joys of reading: trailing fingers over unbroken
spines, inhaling the rich and varied scents of different papers. To those
who read, the book is no trifling matter, and its form is as much a part
of its purpose as its content.
And yet, with or without our consent and awareness, the experience
of reading is changing under us, and that is part of what this hackathon
was meant to address. Newspapers, as has been much noted, have
migrated online, but perhaps they were a lagging indicator. The experience of finding and securing information has become a rapid and
ideally lossless process. There is something deeply inefficient (and Im
not just talking about time) about finding a book, reading it, taking
notes out of it, tracking the notes back to some imaginary writers
attic, and consulting them as a primary or even secondary sources.
If research has the whiff of necessity about it, how do we address
the notion of pleasure? Some 69 per cent of Americans read a print
book in 2013, and another 55 percent disagree that libraries have not
kept up with new technology. So what are the pleasures of reading in
the digital age?
For some people reading is a social experience, and the Internet has
enabled a greater breadth of connection. At one point, Goodreads was
one of the countrys fastest-growing social networks. During the two
days of the CODEX hackathon, one group decided to create an app
that would help people read more, so their members interviewed the
rest of us about the greatest obstacle to our reading.
What keeps you from reading more books? asked one of the developers. Hed come over to a corner of the Code for America basement
in SF, where my group (there were four of us) were reclining while
debating our own ideas. Is it that reading is a lonely experience?
The rest of us exchanged looks of astonishment. The idea that
anyone could perceive reading as lonely had never occurred to me.
Anyone who has lent a friend a book understands what it means to
exchange a unique intimacy. Here, the action suggests, learn about me
by learning what has moved me.

F E AT U R E S

program shortens any text by removing words and sometimes whole

sentences. Users can choose the percentage of shortening they require.
So, for example, the immortal lines:
To Sherlock Holmes she is always _the_ woman. I have seldom heard
him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and
predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion
akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were
abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.

Become the following, when shortened to 50 per cent:

To Sherlock Holmes, she is always _the_ woman. In his eyes she eclipses
and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion
akin to love for Irene Adler, since all emotions, and that one particularly,
were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.

By reducing to 10 per cent, we get:

To Sherlock Holmes, she is always _the_ woman, not because of any
emotion akin to love.

What a fascinating transition, and not a wholly nightmarish paraphrase. Maybe Holmes, with his penchant for directness, would
approve. Schultz acknowledged that this function may not be the
best thing for fiction, where the pleasure lies in more than effective
movement from Point A to Point B. But then again, doesnt everyone
kind of agree that Dickens and Hugo could have used some forcedshortening? Of course, set the browsers view preference to zero per
cent and the text disappears altogether. A great piece of performance
art, maybe, but anxiety-inducing if permanence is what you crave.
Another fascinating entry in the read faster Olympics was
Boustrophedon, the practice of reading alternating lines of text in
opposing directions. Here are the first few lines of A Room of Ones
Own, rendered in Boustrophedons reader:

According to the projects creator, The ancient Greeks and

Romans did it! I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether this
method of reading feels easier.
Mailchimp contributed an API as well as a prize for the best team
that used it: Apple watches, or Android equivalents. Several teams,
striving for this trophy, experimented with serialized fiction, an art
form that had its heyday in the Victorian Era (astonishing as it may
now seem to both industries, fiction once sold magazines). And yet, if
serial fiction relies upon the interplay of frustration and longing, then
certain authors are already experts at tugging the strings. Or, as one of
my friends said in response to the MailBook project: Can we make
something like that for George RR Martin?

There were many more projects, and a full set of these projects
resides here (with demos, if youre so inclined!) My own group began
with the goal of creating an immersive reader for an e-text, thereby
transmitting the sensory experience of literary place. After two days
of hacking and hawing, we had a workable demo of Chapter Five of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Hound of the Baskervilles. As a reader
scrolled through, a map in the background switched locations, showed
images, and even played sound effects.
As with all such endeavors, the joy lay not just in releasing a
prototype, but in working alongside a group of like-minded individuals. My teammate Eric Gardner, the Digital Publications Developer at
the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, introduced me to Jekyll, Sir
Trevor and Mapbox Studio, all through the simple mechanism of using
them while I happened to be looking over his shoulder. Teammate
Ted Benson, who describes himself on his website as an expatriate of
MIT CSAIL, lent us a hand with the spreadsheet-based website management hes been developing over at Cloudstitch. My final teammate,
Arendse Lund, was a writer-in-residence in Colorado.
These relationships were the point, not the byproduct. Jennifer 8.
Lee, who curated the crowd as well as the spectacular food (most of the
items I didnt recognize, and Im not an inexperienced eater), had the
following to say about her motivations: The most important mission
of the CODEX Hackathon was building relationships through faceto-face interaction, since publishing is an industry that relies so much
on personal trust, and its an industry that has to move forward as
an ecosystem. (Lee is CEO of the Plympton literary studio, which
counts the Twitter Fiction Festival among their projects.)
At the hackathon, the best projects didnt reinvent the reading experience so much as build scaffolding around it. The experience of
reading is never face-to-face, which is both its allure and its challenge.
In this, reading may be a great correlate for something like Facebook:
it flirts heavily with human connection, but at the end, commitment
remains uncertain. A great book-based app, then, has to bring the
outside world right up to the gate of the word, and then, without
fanfare, abandon it.
The next CODEX hackathon takes place in Boston/Cambridge
from January 8-10, 2016.
This piece was originally featured at http://cmsw.mit.edu/hacking-the-future-ofpublishing/

fall 2015 21

F E AT U R E S

Almost Paradise
How Surveillance Problematizes the Public, the Private, and the
Paradisiacal in Brokeback Mountain
Lily Bui, CMS 16

Almost Paradise was written for CMS.796, Major Media Texts,

taught last semester by Professor Eugenie Brinkema on the topic of
Forms of Love.

et us first consider the sidewalk. In The Death and Life of

Great American Cities, a book about urban planning, Jane
Jacobs prescribes conditions for the ideal use of sidewalks:
First, there must be a clear demarcation between what
is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces
cannot ooze into each otherSecond, there must be eyes upon the
street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors
of the street. (35) Jacobs points to the inherent relationship of public/
private space to surveillance and perhaps even anticipates the problems
that may arise when these distinctions are unclear and when/where it
is appropriate for natural surveillance to occur. This is exactly what
we deal with in Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain. For Jack Twist and
Ennis Del Mar, love is a spatial problem. Their relationship can only
seem to find its full expression in the marginal mountains, backwoods,
and wilderness whereas outside of these spaces, the same relationship comes under scrutiny, becomes muted, and is hidden altogether.
Specifically, the film deals painstakingly with what Lauren Berlant
calls a zoning of love and desire to restricted and restrictive spaces,
a term that we can think about in parallel to Jacobs language of city
planning and clearly demarcating the public and private. This paper
will examine how non-normative love/desire functions in public and
private space and will aim to deconstruct how surveillance transforms
love/desire in public/private space from paradisiacal to problematic.
In this essay, I will address the following questions: How does the film
structure zones of public/private space, and how are these structures
antithetical or not to the ideals of paradise/fantasy when it comes to

22 in medias res

love/desire? How might surveillance disrupt what is allowed or not

allowed in the public/private, and what does it mean that surveillance
can convert paradisiacal spaces of plenitude into sites of shaming, discipline, and violence? After weve looked at these questions, we may
then challenge whether love can be paradisiacal at all (as Jack Twist
would say: where the blue birds sing and theres a whiskey spring)
with zones, or whether love/desire itself simply becomes a no-where
or no-place that is impossible to inhabit.

Paradise invariably requires isolationThe

public space of Brokeback itself becomes
a problematic zone, its openness seeming
paradoxically restrictive as it grows more
obvious that their relationship can only exist
in spatial liminality.
Foremost, we must be clear about how to deal with love and
desire as they relate to space, as well as how they relate to notions of
paradise and fantasy. I will be leaning on Lauren Berlants characterization of these concepts in Desire/Love: whereas desire is a state of
attachment to something or someone, (6) love makes a world for
desires endurance (7). Thus, love serves as a site for the repetition
and continued iteration of desire. That is, love contains desire. This
containment maps onto the idea of the zoning (14) of love/desire
as mediated by external power structures. Berlant draws on Freud
to illustrate this interdiction: Questions about the designs of desire
not only have consequences for the ways we think about intimate

F E AT U R E S

sexual practices, sexual identity, identification, and attachment: they

also help us track sexuality in the political sphere and mass entertainment, since public sites help to designate which forms of desire can be
taken for granted as legitimate, in contrast to those modes of desiring
that seem to deserve pity, fear, and antagonism (pp. 23-24). As Jacobs
does with sidewalks, Berlant gives us a way of thinking of the relationship between love/desire, space, and surveillance that is, public
space is a zone in which desire is tracked and politicized. We can
transpose and invert this notion within Brokeback to evaluate whether
private spaces function the same way. Next, Berlant offers a taxonomy
for love in relation to fantasy, claiming, love is deemed always an
outcome of fantasy (69); in other words, fantasy produces love, and
love cannot exist without fantasy. (For the context of this essay, I will
be talking about fantasy and paradise synonymously, as both serve as
utopian counternarratives to misery and suffering.) Williams echoes
this in Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess in her discussion
of the structures of fantasy, calling fantasy a setting for desire (10),
which works productively with the idea that fantasy generates love.
Given the logic that both fantasy and love can contain desire, we may
also think about how love and fantasy often stand in for each other.
Like Berlant, Williams also leans on Freud to introduce the idea of
original fantasy (10) as a form of solving problems of difference.
In this context, in the same way that castration might function as a
fantasy to solve the problem of difference in gender and sex, we might
say that love and fantasy offer a solution to the quest for connection in melodrama (11), e.g., through Jack and Ennis non-normative
romance. So, if fantasy/paradise produces love/desire, and love/desire
tends to be zoned within particular spaces, let us then consider Brokebacks visual and textual rhetoric to understand how public/private
spaces in the film establish where Jack and Ennis romantic relationship is cast as legitimate or illegitimate. I will also be investigating
how the film treats vision and sight as modes of surveillance. First, I
will focus on the problem of public and private zones, then move on
to discuss how acts of surveillance can disrupt the function of these
zones.
On the surface, the film neither seems to privilege public space nor
private space as sites that legitimize Jack and Ennis relationship to the
viewer; we see positive expressions of their love/desire for each other
in both public and private spaces. The film offers rhetorical cues for
when public/private spaces are meant to be perceived as paradisiacal
and affectively positive, versus when they become problematic and
affectively negative on behalf of the viewer and characters involved.
From the beginning of Brokeback, the film zones the mountains of
Wyoming as a site that visually stands apart from others. In contrast
to the bareness of the landscape around Aguirres cramped trailer
office, wide shots of the landscape evince the openness and vacancy
of the area (excepting the occasional wild bear, elk, and the sheep)
as well as the distance between the mountains and the conventions
that exist beyond them back on ground level. (We later also learn
that Brokeback is a fourteen-hour drive for Jack from Texas, so this
distance is neither imaginary nor exaggerated.) The mountains are
also presented with a sort of Edenic visual language, often represented
by verdant foliage and sweeping skies. Brokeback is a public space
for unrestricted expression of the characters own selves as well as a

space that makes possible the love that overwhelms these two men
(Kitses 23). In a scene with Jack and Ennis in front of the campfire,
Jack shrieks and facetiously mimics a rodeo cowboy and Ennis admits,
Hell, thats the most Ive spoken in a year. Conversely, their tent,
usually lit with warm yellow tones for its interior shots, serves as a
private, enclosed space on the public, open mountain landscape. Using
Williams concept here, the tent on the mountain is a fantasy/paradise
that provides a setting for desire. The only other place that we see
this happen is the motel room in Wyoming when Jack comes to visit
Ennis, pointing at the scarcity of zones beyond Brokeback for their
love/desires sexual expression. While public and private settings both
enable Jack and Ennis romance, we are reminded too that paradise
invariably requires isolation, a constraint that consequently disables
and impairs their relationship. The public space of Brokeback itself
becomes a problematic zone, its openness seeming paradoxically restrictive as it grows more obvious that their relationship can only exist
in spatial liminality. This realization spurs a confessional confrontation the last time they see each other:
JACK: Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together, fuckin real good
life, had us a place of our own. But you didnt want it, Ennis! So what we
got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everythings built on that.
[]
ENNIS: Its because of you, Jack, that Im like this. Im nothin. Im
nowhere

Here, Jack points out the zero-sum game that they have both been
playing with regard to space: its either Brokeback or nowhere. In the
beginning of the movie, Aguirre tells Jack and Ennis, You eat your
supper and breakfast in camp, but you sleep with the sheep, hundred
percent, no fire, dont leave no sign. Perhaps the fact that Jack and
Ennis are asked to leave zero evidence of their presence on Brokeback
foreshadows it as a place that eventually impossibilizes their relationships public inscription and existence. The film also casts domestic
zones (the home, the workplace), which Jack and Ennis share with
Lureen and Alma, respectively, as private spaces that their non-normative romance interrupts. By repeatedly escaping to Brokeback to
be with each other, Jack and Ennis grow increasingly distant from
their wives and families. Ennis and Almas marriage erodes and ends
in divorce while Jack remarks about his relationship with Lureen: As
far as our marriage goes we can do it over the phone. Jack and Ennis
relationship seems to be impossible within these private domestic
zones. We might also consider framing as another mode of zoning in
the film. For instance, the dramatic scale of Brokeback that we see in
the initial establishing shots shrinks to the dimensions of a postcard
contained by the private space of Ennis closet. Similarly, the final shot
of the film leaves the spectator with an eclipsed view of the wilderness
that once dominated the screen, as seen from the inside perspective
of Ennis claustrophobic trailer home. Furthermore, the problem of
framing also manifests itself in the films mixing of genres. Whereas
genres are designed to frame (and perhaps zone) types of narratives,
Brokeback imports the Western into melodrama: The melodrama

fall 2015 23

F E AT U R E S

contains the action, the heroes unable to achieve self-definitionBut

at the same time the Westerns conventions can be said to constrain
the melos, lowering the emotional and stylistic peaks, the extreme
gestures, the music of the melodrama (Kitses 27). Thus the films
narrative classification itself is one marked by containment and constraint the same language that Berlant and Williams use to talk
about love, desire, and fantasy with no clear place or definition in
one genre or the other. While Kitses might say that the dissonance
between genres works to naturalize (25) the queer love story, it
problematizes both the public identity and private interior lives of
the protagonists in that the public performance of masculinity and
heteronormativity that often accompanies the Western genre seems
irresolutely discordant with the private non-normative sexual and
emotional lives of the films protagonists. Any naturalization of their
relationship is only possible through fantasy (through the characters
and the spectator), considering the ultimate death of their relationship. This returns to the idea that fantasy can be read as a convention
that solves problems of difference, in this case the difference between
heteronormativity and homonormativity. Now that we have looked at
how fantasy and paradise operate across the films different zones, we
can say that both public and private space seem to invite and evict the
possibility of Jack and Ennis romantic love, making paradise appear
reachable and remote in both demarcations of space. If this is true,
then these sites have the ability to play twin, Janusian roles: to suspend
as well as provoke the Fall. What prompts the oscillation is the figure
of surveillance, which we will examine next.

different readings of surveillant acts in the film. One reading of surveillance is that it is a a way of ensuring security. Jack and Ennis sole
duty on Brokeback is to watch Aguirres sheep (i.e., to surveil them),
and the conceit of this act is that watching the sheep equals protecting
the sheep. However, despite their vigilance over the animals, their
stint on Brokeback inevitably results in the death of sheep, losing track
of sheep, and mixing-up of sheep with another herd. While at first
blush we are meant to think of surveillance as a form protection or
accounting, the film suggests also that it often leads to more violent
consequences like tracking and intrusion.
Suddenly, the mountains, like the oceans, aggressively visible
(Kitses 25), make possible the intrusion of Aguirres binoculars on
the spectacle of Jack and Ennis relationship, changing the initially
idyllic setting into one of public shame. Aguirres vitriolic denial of a
job for Jack is a direct result of his surveillance over Jack/Ennis, from
which he makes a judgment on their their lackadaisical work habits
and sexuality: Twist, you guys wasnt gettin paid to leave the dogs

n Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes, Visibility is a

trap (100). This could be an appropriate epigraph to consider
alongside the discussion of sight and surveillance in Brokeback.
Acts of surveillance serve as a means of appropriating political,
sexual, and economic power in the film. The power that one gains
through surveillance has the ability to transform both public and
private sites of plenitude into ones of paucity. To start, let us dissect

baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose. Now get the hell out
of my trailer. While looking is something that grants political and
economic power between Aguirre and Jack/Ennis, it is also a mode
of gaining and conceding sexual power between Jack and Ennis. Jack
holds a sort of ocular advantage over Ennis, the latter characterized by
his verbal and visual restraint, usually pictured looking at away from
his interlocutor and seldom speaking long utterances. When they

24 in medias res

Given that both public and private space

can be disrupted by acts of surveillance, do
we also need to think more deeply about
what this does to notions of privacy?

F E AT U R E S

first meet, Jack regards Ennis in the rearview mirror of his pickup
truck. In the tent the first two times they have sex, we see close-up
shots of Jacks face looking at Ennis, whereas Ennis eyes are either
closed, looking downward, or unpictured. Hats, especially when it
comes to Ennis, work to accentuate when looking happens or does
not happen, as they have the ability to obscure and block the gaze.
Ennis uses his hat to shield his face from view when he traumatically
breaks down in the alley after his and Jacks first separation. So, if Jack
is a character who often looks, Ennis is then a character constantly anxious about being looked at, which prompts further questions
about how surveillance can be actual as well as perceived. To revisit
Discipline and Punish, Jeremy Benthams Panopticon, as discussed by
Foucault, is one of the more widely cited figures in the discourse on
surveillance. It is an architectural design for prison institutions that is
meant to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power and renders
surveillance as permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in
action (201). For Ennis, going into town means entering a panoptic
zone that raises certain anxieties about being watched, about others
knowing about his homosexuality: You ever get the feelin, I dont
know, uh, when youre in town, and someone looks at you, suspicious,
like he knows. And then you go out on the pavement, and everyones
lookin at you, like they all know too? Ennis sense of public space
as sites of judgment conjoin both Berlants claim that public spaces
help to designate what is legitimate (pp. 23-24) with Foucaults idea
of judges of normality being present everywhere, making private
matters feel as though they are public concern. According to that
reading, surveillance is not limited to public space at all; it can also

That Jack can never answer to Ennis;

that there are no witnesses; that both the
shirt and postcard get folded back into the
recesses of the closet; that this takes place in
a constrained private space.
intervene anywhere, through anyone. Foucault suggests, We are
in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educatorjudge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign
of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find
himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes,
his achievements (304). In short, anyone can be a watcher for what
is normative or not, and anyone can be watched, anytime. Ennis
decision to live on the outskirts of town and on what Alma calls
lonesome old ranches is perhaps a deliberate decision to stay away
from sight, surveillance, and the judgment that often accompanies it.
Still, he is unable to avoid surveillance even in the private space of his
home. Almas gaze leads her to discover Jack and Ennis kissing in the
alley, and her intrusion upon Ennis crail case for fishing through her
note (Hello, Ennis, bring some fish home. Love, Alma.) is an act of

surveillance that confirms her suspicion of her husbands relationship

with Jack. She later uses the knowledge of their relationship to disempower Ennis role as a husband and father, first through filing for
divorce and later during a violent confrontation during Thanksgiving.
Even after the divorce from Alma, a reticent Ennis turns Jack away in
barely a mouthful of words in front of his ranch. Importantly, he does
this in the presence of his daughters, who, though they are not cast
as surveillant actors, still seem to give Ennis a sense of being watched
and judged. Ennis paranoia about being watched may also stem from
his childhood memory of seeing the dead body of Earl, a homosexual
man in his community, meant to be a warning to others who strayed
from societys conventions. The fact that Earls murderers are never
revealed and that circumstances of Jacks death are left ambiguous
suggest that anyone in the public anomie could have been and could
still be responsible for this policing of sexuality, a notion that would
rightly inspire fear and paranoia.
Finally, the most striking convergence of all aforementioned
notions of the public/private, fantasy/paradise, love/desire, and surveillance is the figure of marriage. With regard to zoning public/
private space, weddings occur in public settings with witnesses. We
see Ennis and Alma get married in a church full of people, and tragically, we see their marriage end in a courthouse likewise populated
with other bodies. Marriages are officiated/unofficiated (read: made
legitimate/null) in these public settings. As far as fantasy/paradise
goes, weddings historically bookend narratives to point at a happily
ever after, a sort of paradise in itself. The final scene involves Alma,
Jr., asking for Ennis permission to get married, then departing toward
her wedding in the proximate future. Alma, Jr.s marriage-fantasy is
juxtaposed with another. What happens next in that scene can also be
regarded as a sort of lo-fi wedding: Ennis stands facing Jack (represented by an object, his shirt), backgrounded by a postcard that stands
in for Brokeback Mountain, and utters the words, Jack, I swear The
incompleteness of this phrase invites the spectator to fill in the ellipses
to approach some meaning, but one must not ignore that these are
words that we also hear, incidentally, in wedding vows. Despite the
fantastic possibility of this wedding, it is a moment that is marked by
impossibility. That Jack can never answer to Ennis; that there are no
witnesses; that both the shirt and postcard get folded back into the
recesses of the closet; that this takes place in a constrained private
space of Ennis trailer rather than an open public one suggests, like
the postcard print of Brokeback, that the fantasy of their love can
only be sustained through simulacra, lacking true definition in public
space. Then again, what I said about a lack of witnesses in the final
scene is not totally correct. There is at least one intended witness to
the lo-fi wedding: the spectator. Same-sex marriage had still not been
legalized in the United States by 2005, when this film was released.
Reading this scene against a real-world political context may assign
it a different meaning. Perhaps the fantasy of witnessing a same-sex
marriage works toward provoking public surveillance of such an event
instead of preventing it, with the sense that such a provocation might
instantiate change, evoke empathy, even naturalize this love story.
Ennis declares that it is because of his relationship with Jack that
he is like this, that he is nowhere. Incidentally, the Greek root
for utopia, a synonym for paradise, comes from ou, meaning not

fall 2015 25

F E AT U R E S

and topos, meaning place. As we have seen, Brokeback is simultaneously the only place Jack and Ennis can be together and no place
for them to be together. Our investigation into how the concepts of
public/private space, love/desire, and fantasy/paradise interact gives
rise to a new set of questions to consider, primarily: is it possible at
all to achieve or arrive at paradise through love/desire when it must
be zoned, surveilled, accounted for, politicized, patrolled? Zoning,
in the case of Jack and Ennis relationship, seems antithetical to nonnormative love/desire and fantasy/paradise. Acts of surveillance work
toward enforcing containment, as in the case with the sheep on the
mountain and Almas fishing note, but we may also read containment
as ultimately futile. The sheep still get mixed up; Ennis and Alma still
divorce. However, surveillance deeply debilitates those who attempt
to cross (or ooze, to revisit Jane Jacobs language) over designated
zones. And given that both public and private space can be disrupted
by acts of surveillance, do we also need to think more deeply about
what this does to notions of privacy? Perhaps privacy provides a
mechanism for self-determination, and since the failure of Jack and
Ennis romance is rooted in their inability to achieve self-definition
(Kitses 27), it is lack of privacy (and not lack of private space) that
problematizes the fantasy. In both public and private settings, Jack
and Ennis life together has been one apart (27), impossibilized by
the zones their love/desire was restricted to. Ennis and the spectator
are left the sole solution of resolving this problem of space through
fantasy, which, as Rushdie would say, speaks to the human dream
of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of
rootsIt is a celebration of Escape, a great paean to the Uprooted Self,
a hymn the hymn to elsewhere (qtd. in Batchelor 74).

Bibliography
Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion Books, pp. 64-75, 2000.
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Punctum Books. 2012.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated from French by
Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books: New York, NY, 2009.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage
Books: New York, pp. 34-35, 1961.
Kitses, Jim. All That Brokeback Allows. Film Quarterly, Vol. 60,
No. 3. University of California Press, pp. 22-27, 2007.
Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Perf. Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal. River Road Entertainment, 2005. Film.
Gay Marriage Timeline: 2000-2004, 2005-2011. ProCon.org.
Williams, Linda. Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. Film
Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4. University of California Press, pp. 2-13,
1991.

26 in medias res

FUNDERS AND
PARTNERS
HOW TO SUPPORT OUR STUDENTS
AND RESEARCH

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing combines an innovative academic agenda with collaborative research at the
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For information on funding opportunities, contact our
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enabling us to continue attracting the best students worldwide
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providing living expenses and a stipend, one of the ways
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Foundation, Corporate, and Public Support

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FFEEAATTUURREESS

Building a Better Chat Room

Problems, Models, and Solutions
Gordon Mangum, CMS 16

hat rooms can be highly toxic. They are the frequent

haunt of trolls and spammers. This is especially true for
chat rooms connected to live video streams. But chat
rooms are also one of the only places where viewers can
discuss what they are seeing in real time with a group of people who
are all seeing the same thing. Communities form around chat rooms,
and they sometimes develop their own unique culture and norms of
behavior. I have been researching and designing a platform called
DeepStream that allows people to curate live streaming videos by
adding contextual information such as blog posts, news stories, related
videos and Twitter feeds. The act of curation can place previously
decontextualized livestreams into a rich narrative that can inform and
engage viewers and potentially challenge dominant narratives about
the events being streamed. One of the goals of the platform is to offer
people new ways to engage with world events through the ability
to create open, participatory communities based on livestreams. But
is chat an important piece of functionality for this platform? Will it
help or hinder the formation of communities around some of the
curated streams? Is there a way to implement chat so that it will tend
to be more civil and less toxic? This paper explores the problems and
potential of chat. I will argue that chat is necessary but poblematic,
and will articulate a model of citizenship and community that could
be built with the help of chat. I will survey existing chat moderation
features on several platforms to analyze some of the technical solutions
that are used today, and consider the importance of these features in
positively influencing the tone and tenor of chat rooms. Finally, I will
propose new features that might encourage vibrant, participatory, and
civil communities around chat rooms.

The Problems with Chat Rooms

So what specifically is the problem to address? There are several
ways people sometimes undermine participatory and civil discussion
in chat rooms. One is spamming. Some people will create a long block
of text and copy/paste it over and over into the chat room, flooding
the chat with so much text that it effectively hides other legitimate
conversations that may be going on. An analogous offline behavior
might be standing in the middle of a cocktail party and yelling as
loudly as possible, in the hope that you will be so loud that it will be
impossible for anyone else to have a conversation. Another problem is
threats. Hostile behavior can have a chilling effect on the chat room,
cause people to feel unsafe participating in the space, or cause people
who were previously in conversation to make counter-threats. Continuing the cocktail party analogy, if someone loudly starts threatening to beat up the host, other conversation is very likely to stop
while people consider how to respond to this threat, and some people
may leave and never return. There are also trolls. People may appear
to be engaging in the conversation, but their real motive is to bait
people into responding to outrageous claims, turning the conversation toward arguing over a point the troll may not even care about.
Imagine someone at a cocktail party intentionally making loud outrageous claims to rile up the entire room until everyone is shouting at
her or him. When this happens the troll has accomplished their goal,
which is to control the conversation, turn it toward something they
have no real concern in, and make people angry.
There are also problems related to over-zealous attempts to
moderate trolls, spammers, and hostile participants in chat rooms.

fall 2015 27

F E AT U R E S

An example comes from Reddit, which is not a chat room but it

requires an extremely high level of moderation. Some of this moderation is done with automated programs that detect rule violations.
A user recently wrote to say that he had been posting for three years
and had just realized that he had been auto shadow banned since his
first post (a form of banning that allows the user to continue posting
comments, but the comments are not seen by anyone else except the
user) because his first two posts included links to the same domain,
which was against Reddits rule and triggered a moderation bot (ribbonlace 2015). In this case legitimate speech was silenced by overenthusiastic moderation policies. This illustrates the tension inherent
in moderation between trying to efficiently remove unwanted content
and ensuring the space allows democratic participation, including dissenting or unpopular opinions (Leavitt and Peacock 2014).
The final problem with chat rooms is that moderators are hard to
find. It takes time to build a relationship with someone that is suffi-

I do not think there is a technical fix to

this problem. No combination of human
and automatic chat moderation can prevent
a chat room from devolving into hostile
insult-trading. Chat rooms are dynamic
communities.
ciently trusting to give him or her moderation privileges in your chat
room. A livestreamer that I interviewed spoke about this as one of her
biggest challenges. Without moderators, spam, trolling and threats
can render the chat room toxic.
If chat rooms can really be made more civil, why hasnt this been
done? I do not think there is a technical fix to this problem. No combination of human and automatic chat moderation can prevent a chat
room from devolving into hostile insult-trading. Chat rooms are
dynamic communities, often with frequently changing membership.
In active rooms messages can appear faster than they can be read.
The ideas discussed below must be tempered with the knowledge that
there is no perfect system. While I am not claiming to have the answer
to the very difficult problem of fixing chat rooms, I am leveraging
the idea that artifacts have politics (Winner 1980) and am therefore
investigating a set of specific questions about how to build an artifact
that encourages certain behavior. While it is important to explore the
implications of the various technical features common to chat rooms
like muting and banning, I am also proposing we look at chat as a collection of social processes within a community. If the goal is to design
a civic media platform that enables the formation of communities that
can make change using media, then what kind of communities do
we want? Is chat important to them? And if so, what are the design
choices and features of a chat room that might foster the type of social
interaction that supports and encourages those kinds of communities?

28 in medias res

Models of Community and Citizenship

The first question to address, then, is the kind of communities we
trying to encourage. There are two qualities that I am designing for:
participation and the ability to self-organize. Participation is one of
the fundamental design principles. DeepStream attempts to fuse participatory remix culture with the amazing content that livestreamers
are creating every day. Henry Jenkins notes that participatory culture
is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of
new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers
to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in
powerful new ways ( Jenkins et al. 2006, 8). I hope DeepStream will
be one of those media technologies, enabling people to annotate
livestreams and recirculate their remixed version.
If DeepStream were used to curate content about political or social
justice issues, it would ideally allow the community of curators and
viewers to organize themselves.

Jenkins also states that a growing body of scholarship suggests

potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including
opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward
intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the
development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more
empowered conception of citizenship (ibid, 3). This empowered
conception of the citizen connects to a model of participatory citizenship where a good citizen is someone who actively participates in civic
affairs and social life, engages in collective, community-based efforts,
plans and participates in organized community efforts, and develops
relationships, common understandings, trust, and collective commitments (Westheimer and Kahne 2004). The politics of DeepStream is
the idea that users can practice participation by curating livestreams as
a way to engage with issues that are important to them.
The second quality of community that I am suggesting is important
is the ability to self-organize. If DeepStream were used to curate
content about political or social justice issues, it would ideally allow
the community of curators and viewers to organize themselves.
Marshall Ganz and Kate Hilton describe organizers as people who
identify, recruit and develop leaders (Ganz and Hilton 2010, 1).
How could DeepStream enable the five organizing practices that
Ganz and Hilton identify? The first practice is building a public
narrative (ibid). It is exactly the lack of narrative in current livestreaming platforms that DeepStream tries to address. A skilled curator could
pick very specific content using the DeepStream interface to convey
a clear narrative about the event that is being streamed, which may
challenge dominant narratives. The second practice is establishing relationships (ibid). Where and how would these relationships form on
DeepStream? The chat room is a very likely candidate, and below I
discuss the relative advantages of using chat or Twitter for this purpose.
The third practice is building and empowering teams. I address this
step in the recommendations section, where I will propose an idea
that leverages chat room dynamics to help build teams. The fourth
and fifth practices in Ganz and Hiltons model are to form a strategy

F E AT U R E S

and take action. This is where DeepStream currently breaks down. I

have not yet incorporated design ideas that encourage communities to
move from participation to strategic planning and acting. It is possible
that some communities may invent ways around this. If a particularly
robust community wanted to assemble as many people as possible for
a strategic action, they could create a context card through the DeepStream interface that included a call to action, advertising where and
when the action was going to be and encouraging people to join.

Is Chat Friend or Foe?

If these are the kinds of communities that I hope to encourage with
this platform, do chat rooms help or hinder their development? My
initial thought was that without chat there was no practical way for any
form of community to emerge around curated livestreams, because
there was no other channel for group communication. If the members
of a nascent group cant communicate it means that they are likely to
remain passive consumers of media rather than active participants.
This realization led me to consider alternatives to chat, for example
using Twitter as a proxy chat client. This was the strategy Meerkat
used when it first launched. But I think it is revealing that Meerkat
now allows users to stop pushing chat messages to Twitter and to
communicate only within the app. I suspect the Meerkat team
realized that people simply want to say different things in a chat room
connected to a live video, often things that they dont want in their
Twitter feed. There is also the problem of context. If someone asks
the streamer a question it usually makes sense for those watching the
video. A question appearing in someones Twitter feed without the
context of the video usually wont make sense. It may also be the case
that people think their online identities are silos, or at least want them
to be. Some people may not want the videos they watch connected to
their Twitter identity, but do still want to participate in chatting about
those videos. Another consideration is that while DeepStream will
include Twitter integration, and hashtags could spring up around some
of the curated streams, people communicate more on chat compared
to Twitter, by some estimates sending 200-1600% more messages per
hour (Harry 2012, 144). Additionally, if one is going to forge a new
relationship with a stranger, and potentially build that relationship
online through discussion of shared experience, conducting the entire
relationship-building process via something as public and searchable
as Twitter may be less comfortable than non-search-indexed, and less
public, chat rooms. All of these issues led me to the conclusion that the
type of communication that happens on Twitter is different than the
type of communication in a chat room, and that building relationships
through co-watching may be more difficult on Twitter.
If Twitter hashtags cant replace chat, then we need to try to
determine whether chat rooms will help or hurt community
formation. The answer depends on many factors of actual use, but I see
several ways they could potentially be a benefit. In terms of organizing, it is interesting to note that online groups have successfully used
chat rooms to communicate, grow their membership, and coordinate
in the past. Anonymous is one of the more well-known groups that
conducted a lot of its activity via IRC chat rooms (Coleman 2013).

Second, chat is of course a clear form of participation; chat rooms

create another participatory outlet for people who wish to engage
with the curated streams. Third, as described below, I think it is
possible to use the need for moderators as a motivator for community
building, which could strengthen the bonds of a nascent community.
These potential benefits have to be weighed against possible
drawbacks. Especially for streams with few viewers, and therefore
perhaps only one moderator, the chat room is more susceptible to
trolls, spammers, and other people with bad intentions. When new
viewers do come, they may find this sufficiently off-putting that
they spend less time with that stream, undermining its potential to
attract repeated viewers that might eventually turn into a community.
Relatedly, too much toxic chat may mean that the entire platform is
viewed as an unsafe place. Online harassment is very real, and very
damaging. While men are more likely to experience online namecalling, young women disproportionately experience sexual harassment and stalking (Duggan 2015). If this kind of behavior flourishes,
DeepStream could been seen as yet another online space that is home
to unfriendly or outright hostile users, which is anathema to encouraging the kinds of open, participatory communities described above.
On balance I would argue that chat is a necessary if risky component.
There is very little hope of communities forming around curated
streams without it. But chat rooms need to be closely moderated or
else they may not encourage the type of communities I hope will
form. This leads to the final question: what are the best methods
for chat moderation that try to strike a balance between efficiently
enforcing politeness and allowing unpopular views to be expressed?

Analyzing Existing Platforms

To begin to answer this question we can look at what sorts of features
are available on livestreaming platforms today. I analyzed the chat
moderation features of four platforms: Ustream, Livestream, Twitch,
and Bambuser. I have summarized their features by type in this chart:

Bambuser

Livestream

Twitch

Ustream

Require Login

Mute

Ban

Remove Messages

Restrict User Type

Rate Limit Chat

Limit Size of Rooms

Restrict Certain Content (bad words, links)

fall 2015 29

F E AT U R E S

Bambuser has the smallest number of viewers out of the four

sites, and they have the smallest feature set for chat moderation. It is
likely that chat becomes more problematic with more viewers, and
Bambuser may not have enough viewers for significant chat problems
yet. It is also important to note that within the categories in the
table there are significant differences. All bans are not the same, for
example: Ustream allows I.P. banning, but Twitch only allows user
banning. This table is therefore intended to act as a starting point. A
new platform implementing chat should consider each of these categories and the range of options within them before making thoughtful
decisions about what to include. This process is about being prepared,
so that if a chat room does see significant activity a strategy is in place
to try to manage problems. That strategy could fail, but at least developers will not be scrambling to implement chat features in an attempt
to mitigate ongoing damage. As a final note, developers might want
to ensure that there is an easy way to shut down chat for individual streams and across the entire platform if community moderation
practices are failing to prevent harassment. Lets look at each category
and consider the range of implementation possibilities and how they
fit with the overall goals of DeepStream outlined above.
Require Login
All platforms allow chat room owners to require that participants
login, and by extension prevent anonymous participation. Online
anonymity is one of the factors that can lead to incivility (Leavitt and
Peacock 2014, 3) due to the online disinhibition effect (Suler 2004).
But research has also shown that anonymity increases participation
and the willingness to voice dissenting opinions (Haines et al. 2014).
Yet anonymous posts are also less influential (ibid). This research highlights the tension between the goals of high levels of participation and
discouraging incivility. Given that 40% of internet users are victims
of online harassment (Duggan 2015), I would argue that anonymous
chat cannot be the default chat room setting. I can imagine cases
where anonymity might be justified, such as with highly political
livestreams in repressive societies, but even so there would need to be
a clear scenario where the platform could be compelled to turn over
user information to authorities.
A typical login process requires a user to create an account and
connect it to an email address. One could imagine stronger forms
of identity verification in an attempt to reduce the ability of people
to create burner accounts that are used briefly to cause trouble then
thrown away. During a recent talk at MIT1, Brianna Wu has suggested
Twitter should allow users to only see messages from accounts that
are at least 30 days old to reduce harassment (Matias 2015). Wu also
suggested that anonymity is something that people should lose if they
abuse the privilege. In this second scenario standard login might be
the default setting, but stronger forms of identity verification would
be required for users who have engaged in harassment. The question
is whether someone who has harassed people in the past will stop
this behavior because they are forced to be less anonymous. I am not
convinced that would be the case. The request for more identifying in1http://cmsw.mit.edu/hatecrimes

30 in medias res

formation could simply push the harasser into creating a new account
to continue the same behavior with the same level of anonymity. In
contrast, variations on the 30 day rule (e.g., forcing sign in to DeepStreams chat rooms with a Twitter account that is at least 30 days
old) seem like they would indeed force people to use accounts they
are more firmly connected to, increasing the consequence of getting
that account banned. Given all of these considerations, I would argue
for a policy of requiring login, and would consider some form of the
30 day rule or letting moderators ban an I.P. address if actual usage
indicated that moderators were frequently banning the same people
using different accounts.
Mute
Mute is sometimes referred to as shadow banning because the person
who has been muted usually doesnt know it. They can continue to
post chat messages, but no one else sees them. A variation of the mute
feature is to change it to a user-level function, where individual users
can mute other individual users, removing that users future messages
from only their chat window. Drew Harry has suggested that this
second implementation could include reporting user-level mutes to
moderators, essentially flagging potential harassment that should be
examined for further action (Harry 2012, 153). The drawback to
muting is that it can be used to silence legitimate voices. Making
moderators more efficient by reporting on crowd-sourced mutes has
potential, but it needs to be tested. I would like to see the system
implemented, then do a comprehensive review of messages that led to
a user-level mute. If users are muting legitimate voices too frequently, we have to conclude that the human desire for homophily is too
strong to keep this feature in place, and return muting to a moderatoronly option, or eliminate it altogether and just use bans.
Ban
More serious than muting, banning kicks the user out of the chat room.
Most of the above platforms allow banning for a specific time period,
after which the user can rejoin the chat room. I.P. banning also has to
be considered, to create a level of protection against abusive users who
try to create multiple burner accounts. For especially egregious cases
of harassment, I would also propose implementing a platform-wide
I.P. ban, meaning that user cannot participate in any chats at all across
the entire platform. This would require a level of reporting on bans
that filters up to site administrators, showing comments of users who
were banned so an administrator could make an informed decision
about a site-wide ban. Timed ban versus permanent ban raises an
interesting question. Times ban assumes that abusive users who are
banned can be reformed, and anticipates changed behavior when
they rejoin the chat room. How frequently are temporarily banned
users re-banned? Data on this would help answer the question of
whether temporary bans work.
Remove Messages
This is a more basic feature, and simply allows moderators to remove
offending messages, either individually, or by removing all messages
from a user. Some sites also allow moderators to remove all messages

F E AT U R E S

in the room. This is the basic way moderators can take down offensive
messages, and should be enabled on all sites.
Restrict User Type
On some sites moderators have the ability to restrict chat participants
to a sub-group of logged in users. For example, Twitch has a setting so
that only moderators can participate in chat. Except in the heaviesttrafficked chat rooms where messages are going by too quickly to read
I see little civic value in this feature, and there may be better ways to
handle the room size problem.
Rate Limits
Twitch allows moderators to limit the rate of contribution for specific
users. Ustream causes everyone in the room to be rate-limited if
messages are going by too fast to read. Rate limiting a specific user
seems like a softer version of mute, so I view it as somewhat redundant.
It seems more appropriate for other chat participants to ask someone
to contribute less if a person is dominating the chat room in a problematic way, and failing that, to mute or ban.
Limit Size of Rooms
Ustream limits room size to 1,480 participants, and automatically
creates a new chat room for additional participants. On especially popular livestreams, room size does seem to be a problem. It is
extremely difficult for 10,000 people to use a chat room and have
a coherent discussion because messages are moving too quickly to
read. Large chat rooms also place a greater burden on moderators.
The speed of the messages can make it extremely taxing to monitor
for abusive behavior. Restricting user types, rate limiting, and room
size restrictions are all attempts to deal with the issue of scale. I will
propose a solution for this problem below.
Restrict Certain Content
This type of moderation is done automatically. The category includes
preventing people from using bad words or links (Ustream), and
posting non-unique messages (Twitch). I dont view these as essential
features for chat rooms on a new platform, nor as furthering the
ideal of civil discourse. Moderators can deal with the type of abuse
automatic content restriction might prevent, and there are appropriate
uses of bad words and non-unique messages.

Imagining New Solutions

In addition to implementing variations of the above features, I suggest
experimenting with the following additional features as ways to make
chat rooms more civil and more likely to lead to a sense of community:
Silent Listener Period
In discussing his prototype for a chat system called ROAR that
connects small chat rooms to larger crowds co-watching the same
event, Drew Harry mentions the possibility of setting a period of
time that new viewers are required to spend silently viewing before
they can participate in a chat room (2012, 154). Harry states that this
increases the overhead of anti-social behavior: if someone gets banned

MIT #3 IN
ARTS AND
HUMANITIES

TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION

RANKINGS HIGHLIGHT DEANS
VISION FOR A CONTINUUM OF
KNOWLEDGE

MIT President L. Rafael Reif: I am delighted that MITs

faculty members in the arts and humanities are receiving this
public recognition, Their work challenges us to think about the
world in new ways, overturns fixed assumptions, and inspires
novel connections across disciplines far beyond their own
fields. Humanities and arts teaching is central to guiding MIT
students in their growth as human beings who understand the
power of science and technology, are alert to its impacts on
society, and are prepared to be bold, thoughtful leaders of constructive change.
they would have to create a new account, and then silently watch for
the fixed time period before they can participate in the chat room
again. I would add that this silent listener period also creates an opportunity for viewers to see how the chat community functions, and
implicitly observe the norms of communication that are prevalent. It
may increase the likelihood that new participants are slightly more
socialized into the norms of the community before participating.
Research has shown that comments tend to mirror the thoughtfulness
of previous comments (Sukumaran et al. 2011). Even visual and textual
design elements that suggest thoughtful engagement can influence the
quality of contribution (ibid). This requires further experimentation,
for example if the chat button is relabeled participate or deliberate will this alter the tone of the chat room? But the principle of
the listener period could be an effective way to encourage people to
contribute in community-appropriate ways.
Building Teams
I interviewed a livestreamer and asked about chat, and one of her
comments was that it was very hard to find moderators. This should
be verified by more interviews, but I believe this is a near-universal
problem and propose that the chat room be used as a place to actively
connect viewers and curators, with the intention of elevating good
participants to moderators. I envision a system that flags a viewer
who visits the same chat room more than three times and sends more
than 6 total messages during those three visits. An email would be
automatically sent to the curator, with the viewers profile informa-

fall 2015 31

F E AT U R E S

making sure people understand what the community views as acceptable behavior people are more likely to abide by those norms.
Require Moderator
When a curator turns on the chat room for their curated stream, there
could be an additional option to only make the chat room live when
a person with moderator privileges is present. This would create an
additional incentive for curators to connect with other people and
elevate them to moderator status, possibly increasing the likelihood that curators and viewers would form bonds through use of
the platform. A drawback to this approach is that chat rooms would
abruptly stop working as soon as the last moderator leaves. This could
be frustrating to participants, who may have been mid-conversation.

tion and each of their chat messages. The email would prompt the
curator to think about what makes a good moderator, and if the chat
messages from the viewer seem to indicate she or he might have those
qualities, it would prompt the curator to contact the participant and
ask if they would like to try moderating once on their next visit. If the
viewer accepts the request and does moderate the chat room a second
email will be sent to the curator, detailing all of the actions that the
temporary moderator took. This email would prompt the curator to
evaluate whether the moderator did a good job or not. They could
even give the moderator feedback.
In this way the system will continue to prompt the curator to try to
build a team of moderators. Accepting the responsibility of moderating is a logical next step for frequent participants, and moves them
up the ladder of engagement, creating a sense of co-ownership of the
chat room, and a deeper level of participation. The 3 visit/6 message
threshold may need to change, but the idea is to have some level or
participation that triggers prompts to build relationships. This kind
of system should increase the chances of communities forming, and
directly relates to the organizing practices that Ganz and Hilton
describe (2010).
Room Rules
When a curator turns on the chat room (and it could be turned off
by default to ensure it is a conscious choice by the curator to have a
chat room), the curator could be prompted to write a statement of
chat rules or norms. This would be similar to Reddit sub-forums,
which often have specific rules for posting. Joining a chat room would
require reading and agreeing to the set of norms, helping to establish
the identity of the community as they choose to define it. The rules
could either be displayed once in a pop-up window that new participants have to agree to, or they could be permanently displayed at the
top or bottom of the chat window. The idea here is very simple: by

32 in medias res

Scaling Chat Rooms

The issue of scale is one of the bigger challenges for implementing
chat. I would like to experiment with rate-limiting the entire room,
but scaling the rate limit based on the number of participants and
how frequently they are sending messages. This would require determining how many messages per minute a moderator can reasonably
deal with. If the answer were 50, then what kind of rate limit would
need to be used on a room of 1,000 participants based on their rate of
chatting to achieve roughly 50 messages per minute? While this runs
counter to the stated goal of increasing participation, large chat rooms
have the problem of too much participation. It is possible that if people
know they are being rate-limited they will try to send more substantive messages, essentially trying to contribute more with each message
to compensate. It would be quite interesting to compare messages
from a room that is being rate limited to one that is just below the
threshold to see if there is a difference in contribution quality.

Conclusion
In summary, I have attempted to argue that chat can be problematic,
but that it is necessary to create the possibility that communities might
form around the curated livestreams on DeepStream. I have discussed
the kinds of participatory and self-organizing communities that
might ideally form, and considered whether existing chat moderation
features help or hinder their formation. Finally, I have proposed some
specific ideas to reinforce moderator-determined norms of behavior
and increase the community-building potential of chat rooms, and
a way to try to deal with the issue of scale for very large rooms that
could result in higher-quality messages from participants.

References
Coleman, Gabriella. 2013. Anonymous in Context: The Politics
and Power behind the Mask, Internet Governance, September. https://
www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/no5_3.pdf.
Duggan, Maeve. 2015. Online Harassment. Pew Research Centers
Internet & American Life Project. Accessed May 8. http://www.
pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/.

F E AT U R E S

Ganz, Marshall, and Kate Hilton. 2010. The New Generation of Organizers. February 12. http://www.shelterforce.org/article/1870/
the_new_generation_of_organizers/.
Haines, Russell, Jill Hough, Lan Cao, and Douglas Haines. 2014.
Anonymity in Computer-Mediated Communication: More Contrarian Ideas with Less Influence. Group Decision and Negotiation 23
(4): 76586. doi:10.1007/s10726-012-9318-2.

People, Places, Things

Updates from the CMS/W Community

Harry, Drew. 2012. Designing Complementary Communication

Systems. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jenkins, Henry, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison,
and Margaret Weigel. 2006. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. MacArthur
Foundation Publication 1 (1): 159.
Leavitt, Peter, and Cynthia Peacock. 2014. Civility, Engagement,
and Online Discourse: A Review of Literature. Engaging News
Project. August 4. http://engagingnewsproject.org/enp_prod/wpcontent/uploads/2014/09/Civility_Online-Discourse_ENP_NICDreport.pdf.
Matias, Nathan. 2015. What Can We Do About Online Harassment? Danielle Citron and Brianna Wu on Legal and Technical
Responses. May 7. https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/whatcan-we-do-about-online-harassment-danielle-citron-and-briannawu-on-legal-and.
ribbonlace. 2015. TIFU by Posting for Three Years and Just
Now Realizing Ive Been Shadow Banned This Entire Time. /r/
tifu. Reddit. Accessed May 9. http://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/
comments/351buo/tifu_by_posting_for_three_years_and_ just_
now/.
Sukumaran, Abhay, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, and
Clifford Nass. 2011. Normative Influences on Thoughtful Online
Participation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, 340110. ACM. http://dl.acm.org/
citation.cfm?id=1979450.
Suler, John. 2004. The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior 7 (3): 32126.

The MIT Center for Civic Media has charted a path towards
informed, public-spirited innovation around the topic of information and citizen engagement. Over the last seven years, the Center
had served as a bridge between the MIT Media Lab, with its history
of technology innovation, with the CMS/W program, a leader the
field of new media scholarship. This partnership is set to evolve this
year, as the second of two major grants from the Knight Foundation
comes to completion.
The Center has combined fieldwork, scholarly practice, and technological experimentation to explore new approaches to data visualization, civic storytelling, community engagement, and online
advocacy. Center staff and students work hand-in-hand with diverse
communities of researchers and practitioners to collaboratively create,
design, deploy, and assess media tools, technologies, and practices
that foster civic engagement and political action. The Center is a
hub for the study of these technologies and practices, partnering with
other local academic and journalistic institutions such as the Boston
Globe, the Berkman and Nieman Centers at Harvard, the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, and international partners such as the
iHub in Nairobi and the government of Minas Gerais state in Brazil.
In addition to the successful launch of an innovative reporting
platform called FOLD, a set of faculty and students launched the Out
for Change: Transformative Media Organizing Project, which culminated in a 66-page strengths/needs assessment of LGBTQ media
work in the United States.
2nd-year CMS graduate students affiliated with the Center produced
ambitious theses on topics such as gender bias in the high-tech labor
market and creativity in the Chinese tech community.
civic.mit.edu

Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph Kahne. 2004. What Kind of Citizen?

The Politics of Educating for Democracy. American Educational
Research Journal.
Winner, Langdon. 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus,
12136.

Creative Communities Initiative

Bulb illustration: Tim Morgan, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. https://www.flickr.com/photos/
timothymorgan/4420821913.

The Creative Communities Initiative (CCI) uses ethnographic

fieldwork to explore communities that link online and offline worlds
to offer new solutions to old problems.
Begun in the fall of 2013, CCI students and faculty conduct

fall 2015 33

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

research on a diverse range of creative communities focusing on media, leisure, and

social transformation. Examples include
new developments in musical creativity and
business, video streaming as a global media
phenomenon, transmedia comic book artists,
ghost workers in Africa, and more.
Principal investigators Ian Condry and T.L.
Taylor are joined by several CMS gradudate
student research assistants.
cmsw.mit.edu/cci

Sandbox Summit, a conference hosted

annually by us and held this October in Los
Angeles, continues to create new avenues
of dialogue between academics and developers of childrens media whether print,
broadcast, software, or toys. This past years
event drew 200 participants.
Recently, the Education Arcade became a
founding member of the Higher Education
Video Game Alliance, a consortium that will
play a prominent role in advancing the field of
academic game studies and game education.
educationarcade.org

The Education Arcade explores the potential

of games and simulations as media that
support learning both in and out of the
classroom.
With the support of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, it continued research on
Radix, a multi-player online game created
by the Education Arcade that supplements
learning in high school STEM topics. In conjunction with MITs Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation, it has undertaken the creation of a framework to evaluate
the use of educational technologies in the developing world. It is collaborating with colleagues in the Indian Institute of Technology
(Gandhinagar) in this effort.
Working with colleagues in the Scheller
Teacher Education Program, the Education
Arcade continued the development of several
tools that enable students to learn programming and system thinking through the
creation their own applications. These tools
include StarLogo Nova, a tool for building
3D simulations, TaleBlazer, which facilitates
the creation of location based mobile games,
and GameBlox, an all-purpose game development tool. These projects have all involved
contributions from UROPs, Computer
Science masters students, and research assistants in the CMS/W masters program.
With funding from the Arthur Vining
Davis Foundations, and in partnership with
the Lynn, Massachusetts, public schools, we
have explored the use of commercial video
games in high school humanities curricula.

34 in medias res

As part of the MIT Game Labs mission to

develop new approaches for applied game
design and construction, the Labs efforts this
past year have been devoted to providing
tools and opportunities to develop games for
diverse audiences.
The seven courses offered by the Game Lab,
connected with its research and development
opportunities, have maintained MITs standing
within the Princeton Reviews top 10 schools
for undergraduate or graduate study of game
development for a sixth year running.
The Game Lab has begun its first collaboration with Shenkar College of Tel Aviv, Israel,
this summer with a six-week purposeful game
development workshop held at MIT. Undergraduates from MIT and students in Shenkars
post-graduate Game Design program are
working together to create four games based
on the theme of home and the meanings
one associate with home. This workshop is
funded by support from Dr. Avraham Kadar
and Shenkar College.
With colleagues in the Scheller Teacher
Education Program and Education Arcade,
the MIT Game Lab has created curriculum
for MITx on EdX (11.126x Introduction to
Game Design) as well as a summer workshop
on Designing Games for Learning for Chinese
youth visiting U.S. colleges. The summer

workshop is supported by a private company,

Excelorators.
gamelab.mit.edu

HyperStudio was able to grow the user base

of its educational, web-based annotation
project Annotation Studio to more than
6,000 users at more than 100 universities,
colleges, community colleges, and high
schools in the U.S. and abroad. In addition,
HyperStudio set up site-specific installations
of Annotation Studio for twenty universities
including Harvard, Vassar, Barnard, Hofstra,
Wellesley, Stony Brook, and others. The
project, funded through an NEH Digital Humanities Implementation grant is open
source, which allowed several institutions to
integrate Annotation Studio into their own
projects such as Hofstras Melville Electronic
Library or Melville Catalogue.
Another HyperStudio research project, the
mobile art discovery app Artbot, funded by
a private donor, was completed and transferred
to commercial company Trill for further
public growth and sustainability. The project
was presented at the annual Museums on the
Web Conference in Chicago and published in
its peer-reviewed online journal under the title
Playful engineering: Designing and building
art discovery systems, co-authored by Kurt
Fendt and newly-minted CMS alums Liam
Andrew and Desi Gonzalez.
Another HyperStudio project, The Comdie-Franaise Registers Project, a collaboration with MITs History Department,
Harvard University, and the Universities of
Paris IV (Sorbonne) and Paris X (Nanterre)
completed the data extraction of 113 seasons
of daily ticket receipt registers (1680-1793)
and integrated the data with newly developed
research tools and visualizations. The project
was presented at workshops in New York and
Paris.
Lastly, HyperStudios weekly email newsletter for digital humanities h+d insights

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

has solidified its role as one of the key information sources in the field and about HyperStudios work with close to 400 active subscriptions.
hyperstudio.mit.edu

Karim Ben-Khelifa, ($30,000/1-year) for

his project, The Enemy, which is a virtual
reality (VR) project with the potential to
engender empathy in the face of war. It was
a highlight at the Storyscapes exhibit at the
Tribeca Film Festival!
icelab.mit.edu

one on the theme of retail innovation, researching how mobile devices and contextual media change the retail experience in
the physical space. The other workshop
researched the relationship between technologies and material: MEL explored how
interactive technologies could foster the interaction with paper, ceramic, and textile
products.
mobile.mit.edu

The ICE Lab, established at MIT (icelab.mit.

edu) in 2010 by Associate Professor D. Fox
Harrell, researches and develops artificial intelligence and cognitive science-based
computing systems
The ICE Labs NSF-supported Advanced
Identity Representation (AIR) Project will
be successfully culminating in the coming
months. Professor Harrell is the Principal Investigator ($535,060/5 years, NSF CAREER
Award). The social category membership
engine and authoring system the Chimeria
Platform has been notably well received,
along with the avatar preference modeling and
analytics system AIRvatar, STEM learning
educational game Mazzy, and automatic
avatar generation system Exigent. AIRvatar
has was presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human All three systems were
presented at the recent 10th Annual Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Conference at the Asilomar Conference
Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. Recent
findings from Mazzy and AIRvatar will be
presented at the upcoming IEEE Conference
on Computational Intelligence and Games in
Tainan, Taiwan. On the auspices of previous
grants and the strong trajectory and output of
current projects, Professor Harrell has been
awarded two additional grants. The first is
a Qatar Computing Research Institute
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory Alliance Grant, Understanding and Developing for Cultural Identities Across Platforms: Value-Driven Design
Principles and Best Practices in a Qatari
Context, ($750,000/3 Years). The second is
the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) Visiting Artist Grant to host

The MIT Mobile Experience Lab (MEL),

directed by Federico Casalegno, Associate
Professor of the Practice, seeks to reinvent
and creatively design connections among
people, information, and places, using cutting-edge information and mobile technology
Recently, MEL researched millennials
behaviors and attitudes in cities. Leveraging
visual and ethnographic research methods, it
has investigated millennials expectations in
cities. It has also redesigned the MIT Public
Service Center, investigating how digital
and tangible media could improve human
interaction in physical spaces. Finally, MEL
is prototyping a series of wearable devices in
order to explore how wearable computing
can promote safety in work environments.
To understand how people communicate
to each other and interact with the immersive
interfaces, the group designed and implemented a prototype that allows users to collaboratively design a layout using Oculus
Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display.
MEL utilized hand tracking, which allows
users to use natural hand gestures to interact
with the interfaces. It identifies key aspects
of interaction within immersive virtual environments through pilot studies and user
tests in different contexts. The groups design
process yields to a variety of applications,
focusing on the collaboration between a user
and an expert. The example concept it introduces here is in the context of purchasing
furniture and placing them in a room layout
with the help of a design expert.
MEL organized two design workshops:

The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings

storytellers, technologists, and scholars
together to advance the new arts of documentary. The lab is a center of documentary
scholarship and experimentation at MIT.
Through courses, workshops, a fellows
program, public lectures, experimental
projects, and research, the lab educates and
actively engages the MIT community and the
larger public in a critical discourse about new
documentary practices and encourages people
to push the boundaries of non-fiction storytelling.
ODL continued to develop Docubase, a
curated, interactive database of the people,
projects, and tools transforming documentary in the digital age. It launched two new
sections at the Sundance Film Festival: the
tools and lab section. The lab includes interviews, post mortems, and project documents
such as wireframes, mood boards, and images
of the production process, opening up the
process for makers and scholars.
The labs competitive fellowship program
continued into its second year and included
multiple Emmy Award-winner Kat Cizek,
Frontline Executive Producer Raney
Aronson, war photographer and artist Karim
Ben Khelifa, interactive documentary
pioneer David Dufresne, and others.
The lab wrapped up its investigation of the
intersection of interactive documentary and
digital journalism. The report Mapping the

fall 2015 35

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

Intersection of Two Cultures: Interactive Documentary and Digital Journalism was produced
by William Uricchio and Sarah Wolozin,
together with research assistants Sean Flynn,
Lily Bui, and Deniz Tortum. The MacArthur
Foundation commissioned it.
Together with Tribeca Film Institute, ODL
hosted a conference in October for people
working in the interactive documentary field
to explore ways to measure and define the
social impact of interactive and participatory
documentaries. A series of meetings and a
final report followed.

story generation system. In the Renderings project, the Trope Tank hosted Robert
Pinsky, Marc Lowenthal, David Ferry, and
John Cayley.
Montfort gave workshops on creative programming at the New School in New York
City and in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.
trope-tank.mit.edu

cmsw.mit.edu/wrap

Personal Updates

opendoclab.mit.edu

The Trope Tank, directed by Associate

Professor Nick Montfort, is a lab for research,
teaching, and creative production. Its mission
is to develop new poetic practices and new
understandings of digital media by focusing
on the material, formal, and historical aspects
of computation and language. A focus this
year was Renderings, a project to translate
computational literary work from around the
globe into English. The lab continues to host
the monthly meetings of the local interactive
fiction club, the Peoples Republic of Interactive Fiction.
Work in the lab resulted in several creative
projects being released, including Megawatt.
Three new Trope Reports (technical reports)
were issued:
TROPE-14-01 - New Novel Machines:
Nanowatt and World Clock (Nick
Montfort)
TROPE-14-02 - Stickers as a LiteratureDistribution Platform (Piotr Marecki)
TROPE-15-01 - Textual Demoscene
(Piotr Marecki)
The labs equipment and researchers
supported an event at the MIT Museum, class
visits, and a visit by people at @party, the
Boston Area demoparty. The Renderings and
Slant projects proceeded, resulting in further
translations from other languages of computational literature and a better-integrated

36 in medias res

tory and in 10.26/27/29: Chemical/Energy/

Biological Engineering Projects Laboratory.
In the fall of 2015, WRAP opened its new
research lab, ArchiMedia, which investigates
how digital media is shaping professional
communication practices and how digital
tools can be used (and designed) to teach professional communication.

July 1, 2015, marked the first anniversary of Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional
Communication (WRAP), a teaching and
research group within CMS/W, which collaborates with other MIT faculty and departments to teach written, oral, and visual
communication to over 4,000 students a year
in more than 100 communication-intensive
subjects. WRAP also teaches the foundational writing subjects (CI-HWs). WRAP is
devoted to teaching students how to analyze
and produce effective communication, and is
led by Director Suzanne Lane and Associate
Director Andreas Karatsolis.
WRAP now guides MIT students from
the essay exam that they take online before
entering as freshmen, through their four
required communication-intensive subjects,
and in some cases, into their graduate
education. This year, WRAP taught its first
full graduate subjects, 21W.800J Business
Writing for Supply Chain Management
and 21W.801J Thesis Writing for Supply
Chain Management. WRAP also will be collaborating with Dean for Graduate Education
Christine Ortiz to develop online communication instruction modules for graduate
students.
With the aid of both a dArbeloff grant and
an alumni funds grant, WRAP developed
and deployed for the first time a half dozen
online modules for communication instruction in engineering project laboratory
subjects, specifically 3.014: Materials Labora-

Visiting Scholar Ivan Abarca recently

published an article, Too Close for Comfort:
the Political Telenovela el Candidato and the
2000 Mexican Presidential Election, in the
International Journal of TV Serial Narrative In
the article, he proposes cognitive sociopragmatics as an approach to analyzing how
popular culture can influence our decisionmaking process in the specific context of a
presidential election.
Since September 2014, Lara Baladi has been
a Fellow at MITs Open Documentary Lab.
For the new academic year 2015-16, she will
be an artist in residency at CAST MIT and
a lecturer in photography at ACT. During
her residency, she will continue working on
Vox Populi, Archiving a Revolution in the
Digital Age, an interactive timeline of the
2011 Egyptian revolution.
Since January. she has given lectures at
CIC (Contemporary Image Collective) in
Cairo, Egypt, at the Middle East Institute in
Washington DC, at RISD University and at
MIT. In preparation of her art residency at
MIT, she initiated, in May 2015, the first of
series of seminars on archives in collaboration
with Matthew Battles, director of Harvards
Metalab. During the summer 2015, she was an
artist in residency at the MacDowell colony
in New Hampshire. Her work is on show as
part of the series of exhibitions, Perspectives,
at the Smithsonian Museum, Sackler gallery,
in Washington DC, until June 2016.
R.J. Bane (S.M., CMS, 04) is Co-Executive
Producer, MTVs Catfish: The TV Show.
Marcia Bartusiak released her sixth book
this past spring titled Black Hole: How an Idea
Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein,

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved,

published by Yale University Press in celebration of this years 100th anniversary of
Einsteins general theory of relativity. The
Washington Post called the book sparkling
witty, while the Wall Street Journal reviewed
it as a beautiful case study in how scientific
ideas grow through inspiration, thought and,
finally, observation.
Taylor Beck (S.M., Science Writing, 12) is
a freelancer in New York. He writes about
neuroscience, mental health, and the arts for
The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Week, and
other publications. Sleep, the subject of his
MIT thesis, remains a favorite topic: he has
worked on a National Geographic documentary, and many articles, about it, and ghostwrote a book with a Harvard sleep scientist.
On a writing residency at Canadas Banff
Centre this summer, he began work on a
long piece about lithium, manic-depression,
and the history of psychiatry, which he hopes
to develop into a book.
The first book by Jason Begy (S.M., CMS,
10), Players and Their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset, is now available from
University of Minnesota Press. The book
examines the now-defunct online game Faunasphere, charting its lifespan from when it
entered open beta in late 2009 until it closed
in early 2011, and as such is the only study
that tracks the entire life cycle of an online
game. Players and Their Pets argues that the
field of MMOG studies is too heavily based
on studies of games sharing a common
lineage, and shows how Faunaspheres outlier
status enabled many new insights about how
players interact in an online space, how a
games fiction shapes player expectations,
and how modern video games are dynamic
entities. The book is a collaboration with
Mia Consalvo, and is based on research
they started while working together in the
GAMBIT Game Lab.
Vanessa Bertozzi (S.M., CMS, 06) has had
an exciting few months. Etsy went public
this spring and she just had her second son,
Rocco. She is enjoying time off - through the
new year!
Jim Bizzocchi

(S.M.,

CMS,

01)

has

continued his work in generative media art.

His latest work, Seasons, combines his own
generative video sequencing system with
two generative audio systems developed by
his colleagues at Simon Fraser Universitys
Advanced Media Research Group <http://
advmediaresearch.wordpress.com>. One of
the audio systems selects and combines sound
clips to form an accompanying soundscape.
The other audio system uses artificial intelligence agents (Musebots) to generate a
musical score. The work runs in real time,
presenting an ever-varying flow of sound and
image. The three systems communicate using
metadata that is tagged within the video clips,
providing semantic and emotional connection for the experience.
This year Bizzocchi presented iterations
of this work at the International Symposium
on Electronic Arts (ISEA), the Society for
Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and the
MIT Open Documentary Lab. The teams
previous artwork, Mediascape, was a top 100
finalist in this years international Lumen
competition. Open Doc Director William
Uricchio is a collaborator with the Advanced
Media Research Group.
Kristina Bjoran (S.M., Science Writing,
11) is still in Seattle and still loving it. She
is also still with Forum One but now West
Coast Lead of Content Strategy. She helps
them plan, develop, and publish their digital
content. She is also a writer and contributing
editor for UXbooth.com, a magazine by and
for user experience designers.
Katherine Bourzac (S.M., Science Writing
04) is amazed to find shes already been freelancing for four years. From her office in San
Francisco she watches the tech-boom condos
rise and she covers materials science, technology, and medicine for Nature, Chemical
& Engineering News, Technology Review, and
other publications. This spring she helped
organize the western regional conference of
the Society of Professional Journalists and
was happy to see many science journalists
in attendance. A highlight of her year was
traveling to southern Germany for a conference of Nobel laureates in science (and hiking
in the Alps). She looks forward to seeing you
at the NASW conference back at MIT this
fall.

Eugenie Brinkema gave talks on finitude

and the horror film in Montreal, Toronto,
Pittsburgh, Detroit and Ithaca, and finished
an essay on abjection in the photographs
and films of Larry Clark for a forthcoming
anthology.
Lily Bui (CMS, 16) has been exploring island
life the southern hemisphere on New Zealand
(see page 7). As part of an MIT Public
Service Fellowship, she lived and worked in
post-disaster Christchurch, New Zealand,
with the Sensing City Trust on some urban
sensing projects involving air quality and
cycling. Part of this work also involves aiding
with research on smart cities and human
geography at the University of Canterbury
Geohealth Laboratory.
Just before returning the States, she will
be doing field work for a science public
radio story about Polynesian wayfinding
in Hawaii. At this point in time, she can
confirm no Hobbit sightings.
Fresh from her first year of drinking from the
MIT fire hose, Kyrie Caldwell (CMS, 16)
travelled to the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference in Lneberg,
Germany, presenting the piece A Thousand
Words, A Thousand Embraces: Discourses
of Love in Mainstream Games. Thereafter she travelled to Berlin, Munich, Vienna,
Frankfurt, and Dublin before returning to
Boston. Here she worked with her research
labs, the MIT Game Lab and The Education
Arcade, as support staff for the MIT-Shenkar
Summer Game Development Workshop and
for two massive open online courses in the
Educational Technology MITx XSeries on
edX, and as a research assistant on various
other projects.
Kyrie also travelled to (her hometown
of )
Madison,
Wisconsin
to
the
Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference, presenting the piece Love Is a Battlefield: A Comparative Analysis of Love as
a Game Mechanic and Sartres Being and
Nothingness.
The rest of her summer was spent doing
research for her upcoming thesis, acting
as the Proceedings Co-Editor for the GLS
Conference, playing games, avoiding the
worst of the Boston summer heat, and eagerly
watching heaptons of soccer.

fall 2015 37

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

Ian Condry finished his term as Head of

Global Studies and Languages in July 2015
and is returning to research on music communities and income inequality. The Creative
Communities Initiative, which he co-directs
with T.L. Taylor, will be exploring new
topics in the coming year, and welcoming
two new research assistants, George Tsiveriotis and Nate Saucier to join Lilia Kilburn
and Lacey Lord: ccimit.mit.edu.
Kristina Drzaic (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 07) has become a videogame
narrative designer for many titles including
BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite, and most
recently Halo 5: Guardians. The highlight
of Halo 5: Guardians production was having
Nathan Fillion perform my writing!
Post-Halo, Ishe joined Amazon Game
Studios as Lead Narrative Designer on an unannounced project.
This last year she also wrote and designed
the narrative for a small Indie title called
Galak-Z which was just released on the
PlayStation 4 in August 2015 and has been
garnering great reviews. On the personal
front, Kristina and her husband have finally
achieved the dream of living in Seattle and
owning a corgi. Our corgis exploits can be
followed on the twitter hashtag #PoeTime.
In March, Kurt Fendt gave a keynote at the
2015 Digital Humanities Summit in Berlin,
organized by the German section of the
European Digital Research Infrastructure
for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). He
moderated panels at two conferences: Our
Own Devices: Tools of the Humanities
and the Melville Electronic Library Camp
(both at MIT) and gave serval workshops
across the country on Annotation Studio
together with HyperStudio Lead Developer
Jamie Folsom, now MITs Office of Digital
Learning.
For the 25th Anniversary of German
Unification on October hm, he and Senior
Lecturer Ellen Crocker of Global Studies and
Languages led a showcase of their interactive
documentary project Berliner sehen as part
of the photo exhibition Public/Private at
the MIT Museum.
This fall, Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, 07) began

38 in medias res

a new role as VP of Innovation & Engagement for the news, pop culture, and satire TV
and digital network Fusion, which is a joint
venture between ABC and Univision. He and
his wife (former MIT CMS/W employee)
Amanda and their daughters, Emma and
Harper, have relocated to Brooklyn where
they are enjoying life around Prospect Park.
Sam is also teaching a pop culture class for
Western Kentucky University via live video
feed this fall. Earlier this year, Sam published a
piece on the negotiated concept of ownership
in online communities for Wileys International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication & Society. This spring/summer, Sam
also spoke at SXSW this spring on ethics and
Wikipedia, at WKU on ISIS and the use of
popular culture and social media to develop
a terrorist brand, at the Public Relations
Society of America Sunshine/Orlando
Chapters annual conference on Considering
Publics in Your Public Relations, and at the
Association of Cable Communicators annual
FORUM on the cable industrys use of social
media.
Neal Grigsby (S.M., CMS, 07) continues
to work with Waltham, MA-based startup
Atentiv as Creative Director on an ambitious
video game and EEG headset system designed
to help children improve their attention and
inhibition control.
He also continues to draw from his experiences at CMS in creating interactive experiences that go beyond the traditional model
for educational media. He lives in Oakland,
CA, with wife Rebecca and children Elias (7)
and Daphne (2).
We welcome back Fox Harrell, who returns
from his one-year Fellowship Fellowship at
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Professor Harrells research was focused on
developing computational media systems that
can achieve greater aesthetic, affective, and
social resonance. Professor Harrell was also
awarded the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis
Annenberg Fellowship in Communication in
support of this Stanford fellowship.
Heather Hendershots essay on Black Power
educational filmstrips recently appeared in

Steve Schirra, 13: Can the CMS class of 2013

please include this snippet from our CMS Facebook
group chat as an update from our entire class? Yes,
Steve. Obviously, yes.

the Journal of the Moving Image. In June she

made her first trip to Dublin, just in time for
Bloomsday! While in Dublin, she delivered a
paper on womens lib and Firing Line.
Her book manuscript will be completed
mid-fall, after which she will: watch
Breaking Bad, raid the graphic novel section
of the Cambridge public library, and resume
accordion lessons.
Courtney Humphries (S.M., Science
Writing, 04) is thrilled to return to MIT this
fall as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow
for 2015-2016. She has been working as a
freelance writer for the Boston Globe, Tech-

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

nology Review, Nautilus, Nature Outlook, and

other publications.
Brian Jacobson (S.M., CMS, 05) has started
a new position as Assistant Professor of
Cinema Studies and History at the University
of Toronto. His book Studios Before the System:
Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of
Cinematic Space was published by Columbia
University Press in August. This fall hell be
giving invited talks at Stockholm University
(about French oil company films) and the
University of Frankfurt (about industrial film
festivals).
Mikael Jakobsson from MIT Game Lab was
invited to give a Keynote Presentation at the
Irish Symposium on Game Based Learning
2015 (iGBL 2015), Dun Laoghaire Institute
of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. He
talked about exploring uncharted design
territory for game based learning.
Carolyn Johnson (S.M., Science Writing,
04) moved from the Boston Globe to the
Washington Post, where she covers health.
Emily Kagan Trenchard (S.M., Science
Writing, 05) was just promoted to VP of
Digital Strategy for the North Shore-LIJ
Health System in New York.
Trnt Knoss (S.M., Science Writing, 13)
has started working for the University of
Colorado Boulder as a science writer in their
news office.
After finishing his Ph.D. in Media Studies at
UT-Austin this summer, Andres Lombana
(S.M., CMS, 08) is moving back to
Cambridge in the fall to work at the Harvards
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
where he will be a fellow and collaborate with
the youth and media team and other global
and Latin American initiatives. Last may he
defended his dissertation on Latino/Hispanic
immigrant youths new media practices and
assimilation process into the U.S., where he
investigated issues of digital equity, participation, and acculturation across the contexts
of family/home, after-school, and social
media spaces. This coming year Andres
will remain affiliated with the Connected

Learning Research Network and continue

working in a project about indie innovation
ecosystems. For this project he has conducted
ethnographic work with two communities of
youth creative workers (hip hop artists and
indie game designers) living in Austin.
Geoffrey Long (S.M., CMS, 07) is having
way too much fun at USC. Now the
Creative Director and a Research Fellow at
the Annenberg Innovation Lab, this spring
Geoff co-presented talks at CES, SXSW,
Digital Hollywood and USCs 30 Years
of Cyberpunk event, and this summer he
gave a three-day transmedia storytelling
workshop in Austria; a keynote talk at the
Media Mutations conference in Italy; and
hosted a workshop on storytelling with the
Internet of Things with ioTheatre in LA.
This fall hes co-organizing an event on The
New Creators and Makers in Chattanooga,
Tennessee; attending the Future of Storytelling Summit in NYC; and (finally!) starting
his doctoral work with Henry Jenkins in the
Media Arts and Practice program in USCs
School of Cinematic Arts. His daughter Zoe
is still freaking awesome.
In May, Seth Mnookin signed a contract with
Penguin Press for his next book, an untitled
project on the science and future of aging. He
is also working with Googles Eric Schmidt
and the Broad Institutes Eric Lander on a
book emphasizing the importance of robust
investment in basic research. His New Yorker
story One of a Kind, on the genetics of rare
diseases, won the American Medical Writers
Associations Eric W. Martin Award for Excellence in Medical Writing and was selected
for the the 2015 edition of the Best American
Science and Nature Writing anthology.
Included in the dozen public talks he gave
in 2015 was a presentation to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical
Issues. He was also chosen to serve on the
FDAs Expert Working Group on Medical
Countermeasure Emergency Communication Strategies and was elected as a Board
Member of the National Association of
Science Writers.
At MIT, he was promoted to Associate
Professor and awarded the Ford Career Development Chair in Comparative Media

Studies/Writing and was named the director

of the Communications Forum.
Nick Montforts teaching classes at the New
School and the School for Poetic Computation had the fortunate effect of providing
guidance in completing the book Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities.
Nick turned in this book manuscript to MIT
Press and another, 2x6, to Les Figues. Two
new books came out in his and Ian Bogosts
Platform Studies series (MIT Press): I Am
Error by Nathan Altice (on the Famicom/
NES) and Peripheral Vision by Zabet Patterson
(the S-C 4020). Nick had work exhibited
in group shows in Vancouver, New York,
Moscow, Portugal (Coimbra), Paris, and
Providence, and he presented five productions at the Boston-area demoparty @party.
Nicks workshops on computational writing
and art were held at the NYU Game Center,
the New York gallery Babycastles, and in
Russia in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As
part of the Renderings project, which he
organizes, Nick and collaborators are undertaking new initiatives to translate unusual
literary work, most of it highly computational, from Russian, Polish, Spanish, and
French.
Conor Myrvold (S.M., Science Writing, 12)
is still at Uber, now a Program Manager on
the Core Infrastructure platform in their
Engineering Org. In late July he launched
the People of #UberEng (people.uber.com/
eng) and the Uber Engineering blog (eng.
uber.com), so is still putting interviewing
and editing skills he learned from the MIT
Science Writing program to use. He also
still regularly tags MIT SciWri alums on
Facebook animal pics he encounters on his
feed!
In February, John Picker presented a talk
at the Stanford Humanities Center, His
Monsters Voice, about race, radio, and early
sound film. Later in the spring, his essay
My Fair Lady Automaton, on Siris literary
ancestors, was published in the journal ZAA:
Zeitschrift fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik. He
finished up a chapter on the telephone booth
and urban mobility for the forthcoming
second edition of The Auditory Culture

fall 2015 39

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

Reader and started work on a chapter on

soundscapes for Routledges Companion
to Sound Studies. Longer term projects
include writing something on the topic of
techniques of listening for a lecture at the
Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale
next year, and getting more sleep.
Aswin Punathambekar (S.M., CMS, 03) is
currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Aswin spent his post-tenure sabbatical
attending conferences and doing research for
a book that examines links between popular
culture and politics in digital India. He has
also worked to establish a Center for Global
Media and Communication and is looking
forward to the formal launch of the research
center in October 2015.
Talieh Rohani (S.M., Science Writing, 09)
joined Apple in April to help change the
online shopping experience. She works with a
team of engineers and designers to help bring
the two worlds of retail and online shopping
together and to improve the customer
journey through discovery, exploration and
purchase. She is focused on defining unique
interactive experiences that help inform the
customer as they go about buying electronic
devices. She married Arash Shahangian in
Dec 2014 and moved to Cupertino, CA, to
be close to work.
Theresa Rojas, CMSs first pre-doctoral
fellow, successfully defended her dissertation
Manifold Imaginaries: Latino Intermedial Narratives in the Twenty-first Century this summer
and is returning in the fall as a postdoctoral
fellow. She presented her work at the International Society for the Study Narrative
annual meeting in Chicago, and the Comics
and Medicine 6th International Conference at
the University of California, Riverside. She
also presented at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, where she received the 2015
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies Timothy Dow
Adams Award and Journal Essay Mentorship
for her work on cartoonist Lynda Barry.
She is excited to have been in the delivery
room to welcome her newest nephew, Miguel
Angel.

40 in medias res

Emily Ruppel (S.M., Science Writing, 11) is

working on a Ph.D. in communication at the
University of Pittsburgh, where she matriculated as the 2014/2015 Provosts Humanities Fellow, with focus areas in rhetoric of
science, bioethics, STS, feminist theory, and
oral history.
Concurrent with her Ph.D., She is
pursuing a masters degree at the Pitt Center
for Bioethics and Health Law with a focus on
experimental medical ethics. This is partly
an extension of the work she began with her
masters thesis at MIT, on the social and professional conflicts surrounding the worlds
first successful hand transplants. Emily also
continues to work part time for the American
Scientific Affiliation as editor of God &
Nature magazine, a publication launched in
spring 2011 to help stimulate conversation
beyond the origins controversy in science
and religion. G&N publishes articles, interviews, poetry, and artwork from writers and
scholars around the world on various topics of
interest to scientists and people of faith.
Karen Schrier Shaenfield (S.M., CMS, 05)
welcomed home her new son, Noah, who
joins his sister, Alyssa, now three years old.
Karen spearheaded the creation of a brand
new major, Games and Emerging Media,
which just started this year at Marist College,
where she is on the faculty. She is serving
as the director of this new major.She also
handed in a book manuscript on games,
which will come out in Spring 2016 ( Johns
Hopkins University Press) (stay tuned). So,
lots of births this year.
Megan Scudellaris (S.M., Science Writing,
08) college biology textbook, Biology Now,
was published by W.W. Norton in January,
and will be used in college classrooms around
the country this fall. And in March, Megan
became a columnist for the Boston Globe,
writing a weekly column on health and
wellness news.
She continues to freelance for other
outlets, including Nature, Popular Science, The
Scientist, and Retraction Watch. Her story on
the lack of clinical trials for childhood cancer
was featured in Newsweeks special July cancer
issue, and discussed on numerous radio
stations, including WNYC.

Nick Seaver (S.M., CMS, 10) has moved

back to the Boston area, where hell be
starting as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University in Spring 2016. Until
then, he is writing up his doctoral research
on the development of music recommender
systems, visiting Microsoft Research New
England as a Ph.D. intern, and hanging out
with his newborn son Gus.
Returning back to India after spending
half the previous year at Yale as a World
Fellow, Parmesh Shahani (S.M., CMS,
05) continued to grow the Godrej India
Culture Lab (www.indiaculturelab.org) into
Mumbais leading ideas-space by hosting
scholars, performers and artists from a wide
range of disciplines and co-organzing Indias
first ever feminist film festival. Parmesh also
spoke at the World Economic Forum on
Africa in Cape Town in June 2015 as a WEF
Young Global Leader. But the highlight
of his year by far was hosting the beloved
Henry Jenkins, CMS founder and guru at
large, and Cynthia for their first ever India
trip. During the 5 weeks they spent together
as guests of Godrej Industries, they visited 7
cities, romanced the Taj Mahal, chased the
monsoon, shopped for textiles, and even
popped up on the Indian Idol sets. Read
about Henrys great Indian adventure on his
blog through the fall.
Morgan Sherburne (S.M., Science Writing,
09) is a science writer at University of Florida
Health, where she writes news releases,
magazine features and manages communications for UFs Institute on Aging. She also
freelances for The Flyfish Journal.
Lana Swartz (S.M., Comparative Media
Studies, 09) recently completed her Ph.D. at
the Annenberg School for Communication
and Journalism at the University of Southern
California. Her dissertation looked at money
as communication, both in terms of information transmission and as a vector of relations,
memory, and culture. It included chapters
on the history of public and private visions
of payment in the United States, frequent
flyer miles and other alternative currencies,
transactional data and privacy, and ideological
and technological tensions around Bitcoin.

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

This year, she is post-doctoral researcher

at Microsoft Research New England and a
fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard University. In Fall
2016, she will join the Media Studies department at the University of Virginia as an
assistant professor.
David Thorburn has been invited to lecture
at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on March
31 and April 2, 2016, the topic of Story
Machine: 50s Television and the Transformation of American Culture.
FREE SPEACH. A Second Life Machinima
Parody is a 15-minute length animated film,
directed by Gabrielle Trpanier-Jobin and
created with the collaboration of MIT Game
Lab, MITs Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and a group of MIT undergraduate students. The film mocks gender
stereotypes from video games such as Zelda,
Super Mario, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft
Auto and Second Life. It revolves around
the story of Princess Peach who leaves the
Mushroom Kingdom because she is tired of
conforming to the passive role that she was
programmed for. Borrowing from Judith
Butlers (theory on gender performativity and
performance, the film illustrates the idea that
gender and sex categories are socially constructed and can therefore be reworked. The
film is intended to raise awareness on gender
stereotypes, to conduct a reception study on
the critical potential of online parodies and
to engage the viewers in a collective action.
It is now available on YouTube: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=jKKcAJ06Fik.
Whitney Trettien (S.M., CMS, 09)
graduated from Duke University with a
Ph.D. in English and began work as Assistant
Professor of Digital Humanities at UNC
Chapel Hill, where shes kept busy making
zines and co-founding Thresholds, a journal
for creative digital scholarship. She recently
moved into a co-housing community and
continues to enjoy merzing with friends in
her spare time.
Lauren (Maurer) Trew (S.M., Science
Writing, 12) was recently hired by the Soil
Association in Bristol (U.K.). Soil is a charity

that sets the standards for organic food certification in the U.K., and campaigns for environmentally-friendly production of food,
textiles, and beauty products. She was hired
by their communications department to
maintain their website, but she is also doing a
smattering of writing and copyediting, factchecking, and graphic design.
Rachel VanCott (S.M., Science Writing, 08)
moved from Boston to Livermore, California, just in time to miss the epic snowstorms
of early 2015. She remains a senior technical
writer for Eze Software Group. In August,
Rachel married Michael Rosenberg (Ph.D.
14 in Physics). They met while living on
campus, in Tang Hall.
Genevieve Wanucha
(S.M.,
Science
Writing, 09) moved to Seattle to start as the
science writer for the University of Washingtons Memory and Brain Wellness Center,
where she is launching a new website this fall
to cover advances in research and treatment
of Alzheimers, Parkinsons and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and the UW people
behind it all. Shes still at work on her first
book, Altogether Human, which explores
how brain disease can illuminate the biological and social phenomena that make us who
we are. Drawing on what shes learned from
FTD patients, caregivers, clinicians, and researchers, she highlights the value of the
dementia-friendly community movements
now quietly flourishing as notions of what it
means to be fully human filter into society.
Erin Weeks (S.M., Science Writing, 13)
returned to Charleston, SC, her hometown,
to cover all things coastal as a science writer
for the SC Department of Natural Resources.
Our Communications Director Andrew
Whitacre, along with grad program administrator Shannon Larkin, worked this summer
and early fall to make the E15 spaces, especially the grad student lounge, feel a bit homier.
Andrew built an oversized framed magnetic
chalkboard for the hallway (see inside back
cover) and, for the lounge, Shannon braved
trips to IKEA and Rik Eberhardt and Philip
Tan helped install a giant television and
multiple games systems. Andrew also got

tired of forgetting which office supplies were

in which hall closet, so he photographed
the contents and printed them as faux x-ray
posters, taped to the outside of each door.
Huma Yusuf (S.M., CMS, 08) is a senior
consultant at Control Risks, a London-based
political risk consulting firm, leading on the
firms analysis on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
Iran. But she continues to write on Pakistans
evolving media landscape in what others
mistakenly term her spare time. Recent
publications include New media in Naya
Pakistan: Technologies of Transformation
or Control? and The media of Pakistan:
Fostering inclusion in a fragile democracy?
In late 2014, Yannis Zavoleas (S.M., CMS,
04) was granted the Pro-Vice Chancelors
Award for Excellence in Research Creative
works, with the research project Bio-Structuralism. In the same year, he presented his
research findings at CAADRIA 2014 conference in Kyoto and Biodigital Architecture and Genetics conference in Barcelona.
Works presented: Computational Thinking
with Analogue and Digital Means: The Architectural Drawing as a Parametric Tool
since Early Modernism and The Nature
of Architecture. The Biodigital Analogue
Informing Performance.
He also published Architecture Beyond
Materiality; or, A Transcendental Glimpse
of Architectural Space, in Perception in Architecture: Here and Now and Archetypes
in-Formation: Strategies of Transition in
Architecture & Urban Design, in Cities in
Transformation. Ideas, Methods, Techniques,
Tools, Case Studies. In early 2015, he was
invited to present the lecture Revamping
Structuralism at DOM-INO/OOH-NO
workshop organized by Architectural Association Visiting School, at the University of
Technology at Sydney and to participate in
Disclosures event series with the lecture Responsive Systems in Architecture organized
by Space UNDER.
He is currently working on The Model
and Its Operative Significance in Architecture. Objects Driving Evolution in Design
Research, which will be presented at the Architectural Science Association Conference,
University of Melbourne, in late 2015.

fall 2015 41

EVENTS

Fall 2015 Talks

Sep 17 | 4-231

Oct 29 | 4-231

L. Shane Greene presents a theoretical overview of various situations

particularly their political, aesthetic, and media dimensions that
arose in the production of a book about the history of anarchism and
punk rock during Perus war with the Maoist-inspired armed group
known as the Shining Path.

Unlike other comparative studies that rank countries quantitatively

based on a simplistic assessment of broadband speeds, Stuart Brotmans
Net Vitality Index measures countries qualitatively to determine how
well they are performing in a global competitive environment.

On the Politics of Punk Media and Peru

Global Internet Development Viewed Through the

Net Vitality Lens

Sep 17 | 7pm | Bartos Theater | Special Event

Nov 5 | 4-231

Join us and Harvard Book Store as we host Jane McGonigal to discuss

SuperBetter with our own Scot Osterweil of The Education Arcade.

Tom Levenson asks why it took more than 50 years until Einsteins
general theory of relativity for science to change its mind about the
existence of an unseen planet.

Sep 24 | 3-270 | Communications Forum

Nov 12 | 3-270 | Communications Forum

Melissa Nobles, new Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and

Social Sciences, looks at whether the de facto segregation that exists
in many Northern cities was a result of the lack of forced integration
of the type that took place in the South?

Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet TV

shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral curve.
Political consultant Mary Anne Marsh and children/teens book
author Ellen Emerson White look at the connections (if any) we can
draw between representation and reality.

Oct 1 | 4-231

Nov 19 | E51-095 | Registration required, see cmsw.mit.edu

Hiromu Nagahara, Associate Professor of History at MIT, explores

Japans first mass media revolution, in the 1920s and 30s, when
technology expanded the number of media product consumers.

Learn about our two-year masters program in Comparative Media

Studies, and stick around for the 5pm Alumni Panel. Register at
cmsw.mit.edu.

Oct 8 | 3-270 | Communications Forum

Nov 19 | 4-231

Jane McGonigal discusses her new book

SuperBetter with Scot Osterweil

Jim Crow and the Legacy of Segregation Outside of

the South

Hierarchy and Democracy in Modern Japans Mass

Media Revolution

From the Neolithic Era to the Apocalypse: How to

Prepare for the Future by Studying the Past
Authors Charles C. Mann and Annalee Newitz talk about how ancient
civilizations shed light on current problems with urbanization, food
security, and environmental change.

Einstein, Mercury, and the Hunt for Vulcan

Women in Politics: Representation and Reality

On-Campus Information Session, CMS Graduate

Program

CMS Alumni Panel

On the heels of the days graduate program information session, join
us for our annual colloquium featuring five alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.
Dec 3 | 4-231

Oct 15 | 4-231

The Adventures of Ms. Meta: Celebrating the Female

Superhero Through Digital Gaming
Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist and researcher whose work
explores how video games and comic books can engage in a dialogue
with identity, gender and civic awareness.
Oct 22 | 4-231

From Firing Line to The OReilly Factor

How did political TV and radio move from honest intellectual combat
to become a vast echo chamber? CMS Professor Heather Hendershot, who has a book on Firing Line forthcoming in the summer of
2016, will answer this difficult question.

42 in medias res

The Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project:

Documenting South Asian Americas Interracial Past
Vivek Bald discusses his transmedia project documenting the lives
of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the
United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era and quietly
settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican
neighborhoods from Harlem to Trem in New Orleans and Black
Bottom, Detroit.
All talks are at 5pm unless otherwise noted. 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.

MIT Comparative Media Studies | Writing

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