MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Television news provides a window into the cognitive processes commonly deployed to frame, explain, and reason about events. What Hart & Honore (1959/1985) show for courtrooms also holds for newsrooms: they rely on commonsense notions of causation to reconstruct events, assemble narratives, and determine responsibility. The media provide a vehicle for a finer-grained ethical process than is captured by the legal system, often holding people accountable to a higher standard than the law. These standards emerge out of the different voices that appear in the media, creating either a more narrowly elitist or a more broadly-based and inclusive social dialogue. The implied goal of this dialogue is to help move society towards a better and more skillful level of functioning; the media firmly holds that free will is real and that human intentions and actions are potent forces of history that cause social change. To achieve the intended results, however, journalists and others whose voices appear in the media must reconstruct events carefully, identifying possible windows of missed interventions and specific causal forks realistically. Illustrating the social debate in this Comparative Media Studies colloquium, Steen will examine the global media coverage of the July 22, 2011, attack in Norway, demonstrating that the news is not primarily about reporting what happened but about constructing narratives, performing event surgery, and assigning responsibility. Cultural values strongly influence the process of causal reasoning, subtly shaping the future direction of society. Francis Steen is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Library Communication Studies Archive, a multimodal research corpus of some 200,000 television news programs automatically annotated by two billion words from closed captioning and transcripts. He will demonstrate some of the tools developed for the project, along with results from the ongoing NSF/CDI collaboration with computer vision and text mining teams. He and Mark Turner jointly direct the Red Hen Lab, a globally distributed laboratory for research on multimodal communication.

What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research, pedagogy, access, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument, curation, display, editing, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead. Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes far beyond today’s e-books. The creators of electronic literature have developed new interface methods, new techniques for collaboration, and new ways of linking language, computing, and other media elements. How has electronic literature influenced other media, including the Web and the book? What are the implications of having literary projects in the digital sphere alongside other forms of communication and art? Katherine Hayles is professor in the literature program at Duke University. Her books include Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). Rita Raley is associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she directs Transcriptions, a research and pedagogic initiative on literature and the culture of information. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.

Participants: Bonnie Mak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), James Reid-Cunningham (Boston Athenaeum), Wyn Kelley (MIT Literature), Mary Fuller (MIT Literature) Moderator: Gretchen Henderson (MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies)

Participants: Christian Bök (University of Calgary), Bob Stein (SocialBook), Gita Manaktala (MIT Press) Moderator: Amaranth Borsuk (MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies)

Participants: N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University), Rita Raley (University of California Santa Barbara), Nick Montfort (Comparative Media Studies and Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, MIT) Moderator: David Thorburn (MIT Literature and Comparative Media Studies)

Kick-Off Performance by Christian Bök Participants: Opening remarks by Amaranth Borsuk and Gretchen Henderson, Introduction by Nick Montfort, and opening poems by MIT undergraduate writers Alvin Mwijuka and Aimee Harrison.

S. Craig Watkins studies young people’s social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig is also a Faculty Fellow for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan. He is the author of three books, including The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s research network on Connected Learning. Among other things his work in the network will include leading a team of researchers in an ethnographic study of teens and their participation in diverse digital media cultures and communities. Working with an Austin-based game studio Craig is also developing a game design workshop for young teens. The workshop will explore the connections between digital media, game authorship, literacy, and civic engagement. Craig blogs for dmlcentral, the online presence for the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub hosted at the UC Irvine campus, and the HuffingtonPost. For updates on Craig’s research visit his website, theyoungandthedigital.com.

New communications technologies are revolutionizing our experience of news and information. The avalanche of news, gossip, and citizen reporting available on the web is immensely valuable but also often deeply unreliable. How can professional reporters and editors help to assure that quality journalism will be recognized and valued in our brave new digital world? Jay Rosen is director of NYU's Studio 20, a master's level journalism program which uses projects to teach innovation in journalism. He is the author of the blog PressThink, and of the book What are Journalists For? Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at the Media Lab. He blogs at ethanzuckerman.com/blog. A Knight Science Journalism event. Co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Media; Comparative Media Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

David Kelley primarily works with digital video installation and photography, with recent projects involving performance and sculpture. His practice consistently interrogates the apparatus of photography and film to encounter narrative in the process of becoming. His latest films, set in Newfoundland and the Brazilian Amazon, draw on the genre of ethnography as a narrative device to rehearse the real and imagined social relations of these sites. In Newfoundland, Kelley participated in a remote art residency founded as a socio-economic redevelopment project on Fogo island, an outport community with a failing fishing industry. In Manaus in the Amazon, he filmed rehearsals of an independent film about drug-fueled indigenous suicides in the colonial Teatro Amazonas. The theater was funded by the fortunes of rubber barons and also served as the location for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Kelley will show selections of his recent projects and related narrative and ethnographic films, as well as rehearse a lecture/performance about architectural morphology and global tourism. Kelley is an artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Wellesley College. He received his MFA from University of California in Irvine and is a recent alumni of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Kelley’s work has been shown at MassMoCA, The Kitchen, BAK in Utrecht, and Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. His project with Patty Chang Flotsam Jetsam (2007) exhibited in New York at Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 New Directors New Films Festival and won the Golden Pyramid at the Cairo IMFAY Media Arts Festival.