c ms w . mi t .

e d u s p r i n g 2 0 1 4
S P R I N G E V E N T S C A L E N D A R I N S I D E , P A G E 3 1
The Paradoxical Arts of CMS/W
Digital Learning in the Humanities
Joe Haldemans Work Done for Hire
Faculty and Alumni Updates
Comparative Media Studies|Writing
In Medias Res
3
TO OUR RE ADE RS
A Focus on the Arts
Edward Schiappa
4
F E ATURE S
The Paradoxical Arts of CMS/W
William Uricchio
8
I NTE RVI E W
People of the Book: Whitney
Trettien, CMS 09
When I frst moved to Durham, I had 28
boxes of books and no furniture; I had to get
creative.
12
HI S TORY AND TE CHNOL OGY
Adrift in a Sea of Change
16
DI GI TAL HUMANI TI E S I
Class on Digital Humanities
Premieres with Tech-Savvy
Approaches
18
DI GI TAL HUMANI TI E S I I
How MIT Is Addressing the
Challenges of Digital Learning in
the Humanities
18
E XCE RP T
Work Done for Hire
19
ACADE MI C P UBL I S HI NG
Historians Look to Preserve
The Way Things Are in Digital
Publishing
The question is to what degree academic
associations, universities, and university
presses should continue to fnd ways to
protect the logic of how they operate today
in a changing climate or how deeply they
should push their profession into where the
world is headed.

20
P E OP L E , P L ACE S, THI NGS
She Became a Crowd-Sourced
Celeb
21
RE S E ARCH GROUP UP DATE S
The Latest from Our Groups
24
E VE NTS
Spring 2014 Talks

What theyre writing about science and
technology is astoundingly prescient and
true, Williams says. They could see over the
horizon. Taking an approach Williams has
used throughout her career, The Triumph
of Human Empire employs fctional works
as a window into the human response to rapid
social transformation.
Peter Dizikes on Rosalind Williams latest
book, p. 12
Although we do not meet under one
umbrella called Digital Humanities, our
projects contribute new programs, technolo-
gies, and pedagogy in a wide variety of areas.
Literature faculty use MIT-designed tools
like Annotation Studio (digital marginalia),
Locast (digital mapping), and MetaMedia
(multimedia archives), as well as an array of
open-source programs in their classes.
Wyn Kelley, p. 15
Chelsea Barabas, Heather Craig, Alex
Gonalves, Alexis Hope, and Jude Mwenda
are exploring the role citizen monitoring can
play in holding elected leaders accountable
for promises they make about infrastructure.
They are designing and piloting a mobile-
based tool called Promise Tracker.
Center for Civic Media update, p. 28
In my journey as a storyteller and war
correspondent, the OpenDocLab at the
MIT has been key in opening my mind to
unknown technological possibilities and to
start implementing tomorrows interactive
and immersive techniques for my current
project The Enemy.
Open Documentary Lab update, p. 30
Cover image: The Babbling Brook, 2014. By Catherine
D'Ignazio and the Institute for Infnitely Small Things.
S P R I N G 2 0 1 4
Comparative Media Studies|Writing
Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E15-331 and 14E-303
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 02139
617.253.3599 / cmsw@mit.edu / cmsw.mit.edu
cmsw.mit.edu/magazine

Head
Edward Schiappa, John E. Burchard Professor
of the Humanities
Research Managers
Federico Casalegno, Mobile Experience Lab
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Center for Civic Media
Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio
Fox Harrell, ICE Lab
Nick Montfort, The Trope Tank
Scot Osterweil, The Education Arcade
Philip Tan, MIT Game Lab
Sarah Wolozin, Open Documentary Lab

Staf
Jessica Dennis
Financial Assistant
Jill Janows
Grants Developer and Administrator
Shannon Larkin
Graduate Administrator
Karinthia Louis
Administrative Assistant
Michael Rapa
Technology Support Specialist
Alexandra Sear
Administrative Assistant,
Writing Across the Curriculum
Becky Shepardson
Academic Coordinator
Sarah Smith
Administrative Ofcer
Jessica Tatlock
Events Coordinator
Andrew Whitacre
Communications Director
cmsw.mit.edu/people
A B OU T I N ME DI A S R E S
spring 2014 3
A Focus on the Arts
By Edward Schiappa, Head of CMS/W
G
reetings! As the new Head of
Comparative Media Studies/
Writing, I welcome you to
this issue of In Medias Res.
Professor James Paradis stepped down this
past September after many years of service
that culminated in the merger of Compara-
tive Media Studies and Writing & Human-
istic Studies. After I spent most of the fall as
Interim Head, Deborah Fitzgerald Dean
of our School of Arts, Humanities, and Social
Sciences named me as Head on December
18, 2013. Professor Paradis is a hard act to
follow, but I will do my best.
This issue of In Medias Res features the role
of the arts in CMS/W. Anyone spending time
on the MIT campus will soon realize that in
addition to being the worlds fnest science
and engineering school, MIT has a vibrant
arts scene. By the time you fnish reading this
issue, you will have a good overview of the
ways in which CMS/W participates and con-
tributes to the arts.
Professor William Uricchio begins our
journey with his account of Comparative
Media Studies and the arts.
Whitney Trettien is now a Ph.D. candidate
in English at Duke University, and is an
alumna of Comparative Media Studies (SM,
2009). Here she completed a thesis titled
Computers, Cut-ups and Combinatory
Volvelles: An Archaeology of Text Generating
Mechanisms. She is interviewed in People
of the Book by Gretchen E. Henderson,
who recently completed a Mellon Postdoc-
toral Fellowship here at MIT.
Next up is an exciting excerpt from
Professor Joe Haldemans newest novel, Work
Done for Hire. Though this book will be far
from his last, it will be the last published as
an MIT professor as Joe has decided to retire
after spending the past thirty years teaching
and writing in the department. Save the date!
A retirement bash for Professor Haldeman
will take place on September 12, 2014.
Associate Professor Fox Harrells work in
his Imagination, Computation, and Expres-
sion Lab is a brilliant example of how work
being done in CMS/W contributes to the
arts, a fact recognized last year when his work
was included in CTheorys Artforum Top
10. This accomplishment and special events
are regularly featured on the CMS/W website
(cmsw.mit.edu), so if you fnd the articles in
this issue of In Medias Res intriguing, be sure
to follow us online (CMS/W events can be
followed on Twitter or Facebook, as well).
Another exciting example of an ongoing
project in the arts is the MIT Open Docu-
mentary Labs docubase project (docubase.
mit.edu), which gathers together a fascinating
collection of interactive, collaborative, loca-
tion-based, and community-created projects.
Later this spring, CMS/W will feature
a visit from Professor Jonathan Sterne of
McGill University. Professor Sterne writes
about sound and music, communication tech-
nologies old and new, contemporary cultural
studies, and a range of other matters. He has
two books: MP3: The Meaning of a Format
considers the mp3 as an historical, cultural
and political phenomenon. The Sound Studies
Reader collects and comments upon classic
work on sound in the human sciences.
Also featured in this issue of In Medias
Res is an overview of Professor Rosalind
Williams fascinating new book, The Triumph
of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson
at the End of the World (University of Chicago
Press). Professor Williams shows that for
Verne, Morris, and Stevenson, and their
readers, romance fantasy was an exception-
ally powerful way of grappling with the
political, technical, and environmental chal-
lenges of modernity.
Rounding out this issue is an update on the
important role CMS/W is playing in the de-
velopment of the digital humanities. From a
class jointly taught by Professor Paradis and
Principal Research Associate Kurt Fendt to
the development of platforms such as An-
notation Studio, a new way for students and
scholars to annotate texts collaboratively,
MIT is leading the way to exploring the
Digital Humanities.
As you can see, CMS/W contributes
in important ways to the arts at MIT and
beyond. We hope you enjoy this issue of In
Medias Res.
T O OU R R E A DE R S
This issue of In Medias Res features the role of the arts
in CMS/W. Anyone spending time on the MIT campus
will soon realize that in addition to being the worlds
fnest science and engineering school, MIT has a vibrant
arts scene. By the time you fnish reading this issue, you
will have a good overview of the ways in which CMS/W
participates and contributes to the arts.
4 in medias res
F E AT U R E
A
rt, like pornography in Justice Potter Stewarts view,
is one of those things that you know when you see.
Certainly in an era where artists, publics and markets
have challenged traditional arbiters of taste, Justice
Stewarts logic is hard to dispute. But despite what we as individuals
may think, the social reality of art of producing and assessing it,
of circulating and preserving it persists. Its culture, after all, and
therefore socially situated, even as it feels defned by the eye of the
beholder.
Scholars from Becker to Bourdieu have explored arts social con-
tingency and institutional forms, and education invariably enters their
stories. Whether as an agent of reproduction, a shaper of hierarchies,
or simply a microcosm of the larger order, education plays an instru-
mental role in the value chain of art. One of the great things about
MIT is that, even in the arts, it manages to be an exception to the rule.
Yes, it hews to the patterns that sociologists of art have discerned, but
it does so with a major diference. The Center for Art, Science and
Technology (CAST) marks MITs latest endeavor to push the bound-
aries of artistic convention, drawing on micro- and nanotechnology,
neuroscience and anthropology (among many other disciplines) for its
work. And ongoing activities in ACT (the Program in Art, Culture
and Technology) and MAS (the Program in Media Arts and Sciences
aka, the Media Lab) ofer their own variations, drawing on MITs
rich tradition of artistic innovation rooted in engineering and science.
At the same time that it pursues these outside-the-box innovations,
the Institute has been enormously successful in its commitment to
artistic excellence in a more traditional register theater, music,
the visual arts and in the process assuring a dialogue between the
known and the emergent, the established and the yet-to-be-defned.
CMS/W encapsulates this two-sided interaction, compressing
it into one department. Creative writing, especially in the hands
of such luminaries as Junot Diaz, Joe Haldeman, Helen Lee, Alan
Lightman and colleagues, speaks to artistic excellence of the known
and widely accepted variety. Indeed, they have garnered virtually
every literary prize of any importance. But others in CMS/W are
pushing the boundaries of art through less familiar means. Consider
Nick Montfort and Fox Harrells work with computational media;
or the courses that explore the making and expressive capacities of
games, flms and videos; or research projects that engage with civic
art (The Center for Civic Media), location-based storytelling (Mobile
Experience Lab) and interactive documentaries (the Open Documen-
tary Lab). Each of these (and many more like them!) has pushed the
boundaries of art, embracing new technologies and deploying them in
unexpected and unexpectedly powerful ways.
Given this elegant match, it would seem that CMS/W is the place
to be, infused by artistic currents both traditional and emergent, and
blessed with an abundance of excellence in both categories. But there
is a catch, and its not the W-word to the right of the slash.
an excursus on media.
Media may be central to how we experience the world, connect with
one another and represent ourselves, but, in Jack Roys immortal
words, they get no respect. Photography, flm, comic books, televi-
sion, games aesthetically speaking, each has its own history of being
treated with active indiference if not outright contempt. The roots of
this narrative might be traced to the Reformation, where the abstract
word trumped the visceral image. But by the end of the 19th Century,
concerns grew more specifc. Photography
and flm were initially dismissed as little
more than technological tricks, mere instru-
ments of mechanical reproduction. And while
any flm student can rehearse the theoretical
volleys of Arnheim, Bazin, Balzs, Kracauer,
etc. to recover the mediums aesthetic po-
tentials, Hollywoods mass popularity and
industrial mode of production introduced
another set of withering critiques to the mix,
including everything from (lowbrow) taste to
(corporate) authorship. And then there were
the social panics. Sweating palms, bad eyes,
demoralization a school in crime these
and even more lurid charges seemed to cling
like bad memories to popular media. Add the
Frankfurt Schools critique (as much an in-
dictment of the audiences critical capacities
as the ideological agenda of media industry),
multiply by Bourdieus wary stance (the con-
The Paradoxical Arts of CMS/W
William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies
iSkyTV, 2013. By the Institute for Infnitely Small Things with Sophia Brueckner. iSkyTV is an online artwork
that recreates Yoko Ono's video artwork "SkyTV". In iSkyTV you can point Google's StreetView cameras at the sky
anywhere in the world. Watch iSkyTV at http://turbulence.org/Works/iSkyTV/.
spring 2014 5
F E AT U R E
formity at the heart of all that is middle-brow), and the contours of
medias image problem begin to emerge.
True, artists from Fernand Lger and Erik Satie to Samuel Beckett
and Andy Warhol worked with the flm medium, Nam June Paik
and the Fluxus crowd with television, and nearly every -ism in 20th
Century modernisms lexicon had its media moment. For the reso-
lutely avant-garde, it approached something like perfection, doubly
outside the bounds of the respectably quotidian. The less popular the
form, the greater its artistic potential! But something like redemp-
tion for the pleasures associated with popular media seemed out of the
question until the arrival of British Cultural Studies and the ferment
in the feld that followed in its wake. The demystifcation of power,
the joys of fandom, the creativity of resistant readings, and more,
all ofered ways after decades of indiference to recover some
elements of value in legacy media, even if it wasnt exactly old school
art. Creative thinking about the cultural operations of media texts
hierarchization, afliation, anxieties, deployment and repurposing
opened the doors to long marginalized (and extremely popular)
forms, even in literature, music and advertising. The Pop movement
did its bit as well, (a Campbells soup can could be art when viewed
from the right perspective). And persistence even paid of, with the
flm communitys long-repeated claims to their mediums artistic
status fnding increasing traction atabout the time that flm reached
the grand old age of 100 (and the photo-chemical grain began to give
way to the pixel).
To the casual observer, it might almost seem as though respect-
ability (and thus aesthetic potential) in popular media is a relational
afair. Film entered the university as an object of study shortly after
television appeared on the scene and attracted the attention of the nay-
sayers. Television, in turn, became an object of study with the coming
of a more enticing target the computer game. And games gained
ground as fresh rounds of hand wringing attended the new kids on the
block Facebook, Twitter and their ilk.
But while todays computational media, with potentials for inter-
action, widespread participation and algorithmic creation, and their
mobile, app and social media cultures, pose new challenges, they have
also entered the scene diferently positioned than their mass media
predecessors. Tainted to some extent because of their popularity, they
also enjoy the allure and productive associations of their computa-
tional platforms. As a result, they have largely sidestepped the curse
of mass media. That said, despite the convincing eforts of their art-
ist-practitioners, they have not been deemed as sufciently mature in
their expression of aesthetic capacities. So they, too, remain caught in
something of a no-mans land, although for diferent reasons than flm
and television.
Like nanotechnology and neuroscience, media have rich aesthetic
potentials; unlike them, they are burdened by their troublesome
cultural histories and suspected for their popularity. So how might
we conceptualize them as objects of study? In what domains should
we place them? And how might their framing in an academic setting
bear upon our ability to see their aesthetic and expressive potentials to
move, to provoke insight, to foster afliation?
media, the academy and art
The disciplines that constitute the Humanities in many cases emerged
with 19th Century models of institutionalized education, at least
in the US. By mid-Century, as a wave of nationalism crystallized
Image from "Highrise/One millionth Tower," a short documentary celebrating the unique process of collaboration that brings the story of One Millionth Tower to life on the web.
By Katarina Cizek. http://highrise.nf b.ca/onemillionthtower
6 in medias res
F E AT U R E
into invented traditions, disciplines joined in, forming professional
societies and reifying their identities (MLA 1883; AHA 1884). The
social sciences followed a bit later (AAA 1902; APSA 1903; ASA
1905). But the latecomers, the post-World War Two spate of studies
programs (American Studies; Womens Studies; Science, Technology
and Society; Film Studies), were cut from diferent stuf. American
Studies, for example, drew on history, literature, political science and
sociology for its work; and Media Studies were equally undisciplined,
drawing on art history, literature, linguistics and sociology among
other areas.
The point is simple: not only did media have a lingering whif of
suspicion about them, but when fnally admitted into the hallowed
halls of higher education, they were studied in a disturbingly undis-
ciplined manner. For media, this has proven to be something of a
blessing and a curse, with some universities distributing the study of
media into diferent faculties: media studies (flm and television) in
the Humanities; mass communications (press and broadcasting) in the
Social Sciences; media making in the Arts; and new media in an
array of locations, including Computer Science.
MITs constellation of perspectives as embodied in SHASS ofers a
great opportunity, since CMS/W courses make sense variously within
Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts frameworks. Some courses
explore the work of texts, styles, systems, meanings and contexts;
while others consider their social operations and reception patterns;
and still others are concerned with the art and design practice of
making and evoking. The problem is that from a disciplinary per-
spective, where even one of these tents can seem over capacious,
this seems somehow, well wrong. It violates the inherently con-
servative, tradition-steeped commitment to a particular intellectual
stance. But from a CMS/W vantage point, where precisely the ability
to make comparisons across theoretical domains and to broker the
creative tensions between mens et manus is core to our mission, what
could be fner?
What to do with this awkward (from a disciplinary perspective) or
perfect (from a CMS/W) ft? It poses a dilemma common to studies
areas, but one that gives comparativists their particular dynamic. Art
as practice and site of critical refection and even activism is central
to the mix. But somehow, media both legacy and emergent
keep slipping from sight in the arts agenda. Is medias shadowy past to
blame? Or should we look to their refusal to be properly disciplined as
part of the problem? Or might we turn the question around, get out
of a defensive posture, and look at whats really being done with media
at places like CMS/W?
art!
Is it art? Taking Howard Beckers art worlds perspective, one would
look to endorsements by authorized interpretive communities such
as the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports Fox Harrells
media work in the Imagination, Computation, Expression (ICE) Lab
and the work of the Open Documentary Lab (ODL); or MITs Visiting
Artists Program, which supports Emmy Award-winning documentary
maker Kat Cizeks year-long residency with ODL. One would consider
the actual practices that students and faculty engage in the games
and videos made, the interactive poetry programs and documentaries
produced. One would look to the Civic Art program at the Center
for Civic Media and Catherine DIgnazios remarkable public space
projects or Marisa Jahns activist art, including the NannyVan. And
one would look to discourse from the many artists who have spoken
at the CMS Colloquia, to the framing of the creative work coming
Docubase from the MIT Open Documentary Lab, opendoclab.mit.edu.
spring 2014 7
F E AT U R E
from the classroom. And of course, one would look to the programs
graduates and especially those active as storytellers, creators of virtual
worlds, flmmakers, and digital artists. Media and media at CMS/W
as art? Becker would certainly answer in the afrmative!
Art as act, as production practice, as mode of interrogation, as a
means of engaging, connecting, mobilizing defnes a robust and
coherent strand of work in CMS/W. Much of that work plays out
with emergent media forms and in newly-enabled constellations of
networked publics. Like the embrace of neuroscience or micro-tech-
nology for aesthetic ends, this work is highly exploratory, defning
the ever-shifting borders of artistic engagement. In the case of
media, the legacy of inherited prejudices also happens to be a font of
knowledge that can inform ongoing artistic practice on the frontiers
of the new. And better, the triangulation of humanities, social sciences
and arts perspectives on media enriches each, revealing developmen-
tal patterns, ofering context and yielding insights into the reception
process.
So whats the balance? On one hand, when it comes to art, the
(mass) media seem unduly burdened by their popularity, limited
by their technology, and challenged by their lack of disciplinary
coherence. On the other, these very elements constitute the sources of
their power. Popularity holds the potential of broad aesthetic engage-
ment, not art as a mere ornament of distinction and taste hierarchiza-
tion. As the aesthetic interest in nanotechnology attests, we inhabit
an increasing technologized age what better means to inscribe and
refect upon in our artistic practice? As the pace of change acceler-
ates, not only does technologys relevance but also our awareness of its
importance to the artistic practices of the past, and media in this sense
bring extra value to the table. And as for the challenge of the undisci-
plined, can there be a stronger endorsement of radical potential?
The pages of In Media Res, like CMS/W research labs and class-
rooms, like the work of many of our colleagues, students and graduates,
all attest to a deeply rooted engagement in artistic traditions and
those from the humanities and social sciences and to an ongoing
commitment to artistic practice.
Created by REV- (lead artist: Marisa Jahn) in collaboration with The National Domestic Workers Alliance, the NannyVan is a bright orange mobile design lab and sound studio
that "accelerates the movement for domestic workers' rights nationwide." With its pull-out table, colorful design, and acoustic recording booth, the NannyVan convenes domestic
workers workers and employers alike to produce and provide new fair care tools.
F E AT U R E S
8 in medias res
I NT E R V I E W
Reprinted, with permission and minor changes, from the Ploughsares
blog (http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/people-of-the-book-whitney-tret-
tien/). People of the Book is a Ploughshares interview series gathering
those engaged with books, broadly defned. As participants answer the
same set of questions, their varied responses chart an informal ethnogra-
phy of the book, highlighting its rich history as a mutable medium and
anticipating its potential future. This interview from January brings us
former Mellon Scholar Gretchen Henderson and Whitney Trettien, an
09 Comparative Media Studies graduate
1
and now Ph.D. candidate at
Duke University. Trettien is fnishing up a dissertation on the Little
Gidding Harmonies, a set of seventeenth-century cut-and-paste biblical
concordances. She schemes on a variety of projects related to old books and
new media. Visit her online at whitneyannetrettien.com.
Gretchen Henderson: How do you defne a book?
Whitney Trettien: In ordinary use, book for me means codex,
a physical form in which a stack of relatively fat material is bound
along one edge, and can be opened or closed. Its a media platform.
E-book, then, is a bit of a misnomer: the electronic tablet is the
platform, delivering long-form (that is, book-length) content.
How do you engage regularly with books, beyond reading?
In my research, I spend a lot
of time examining books
as artifacts, studying their
binding, their paper, how
theyre put together, looking
for traces of readers interac-
tions. Museums and even to
some extent reading rooms
have taught us to gaze upon
old books as time capsules
physically embodying the past
so when we hover over the
glass-encased Beowulf manu-
script in the gallery at the
British Library, we marvel at
how old it is, and what that age
1 Her CMS masters thesis is Computers, Cut-ups and Combinatory Volvelles: An Ar-
chaeology of Text-Generating Mechanisms: http://cmsw.mit.edu/archaeology-of-text-gener-
ating-mechanisms/
signifes within the history of English literature.
In my work, I try to hold this inherited interpretive framework in
abeyance in order to see the accreted remnants of all moments in a
books existence. Thus the Beowulf manuscript contains not only a
text scratched on vellum near the end of the tenth century, but also the
sixteenth-century ownership mark of Laurence Nowell, damage from
a fre in 1731, paper frames added in 1845, and two sets of foliation
marks all of which it shares with the three other manuscripts that
it was bound with in the seventeenth century. Although we tend to
think of old books as enabling time travel literally putting us in
touch with a distant past they are in fact palimpsests that condense,
remediate and reconfgure history. More than reading books, Im
interested in excavating bibliograph-
ic evidence of how various owners,
authors, readers, and institutions, at
multiple points in time, saw them-
selves in relation to their inherited past
and an imagined future.
What has been your most unusual
interaction with books?
My most unusual interaction is
probably also my most mundane: I use
them as furniture. My cofee table is
four stacks of Readers Digest Condensed
Books a lovely set, each cover similar
People of the Book: Whitney Trettien, CMS 09
Q&A with past MIT Mellon Scholar Gretchen Henderson
Whitney Trettien
Stump
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.
spring 2014 9
F E AT U R E S I NT E R V I E W
in design but diferently colored
topped with an old printers letter-
case salvaged from a warehouse full
of antique junk. The Story of Civili-
zation makes a lovely window seat
topped with plants; several Funk
and Wagnalls are a sturdy endtable.
Old dictionary bindings frame
woodcuts from The Faerie Queene
and cover light sockets. Pages that
fell out of a paperback copy of
Flannery OConnors The Violent
Bear It Away shade the bulbs in my
chandelier. When I frst moved to
Durham, I had 28 boxes of books
and no furniture; I had to get creative.
Ive since started using books for art projects, too like a tree stump
sculpture that I built during a residency at Elsewhere in Greensboro.
Do you have favorite tidbits from the history of books?
I love moveable parts in books. The history of early European printing
is full of these paper mechanisms. Nested discs called volvelles were
used as calendars and astrolabes for calculating dates and the position
of the stars; in one particularly fascinating example, the baroque
poet Georg Philipp Harsdrfer created what he called the Fnfach-
er Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, or Five-fold Thoughtring of the
German Language, a kind of generative dictionary made from fve
nested paper wheels, each inscribed with a syllable. Turning the discs
constructed new words by combining syllables.
In the sixteenth century, Vesalius, considered the founder of modern
human anatomy, instructed readers to cut out his printed images of the
human body and reassemble them in order to learn how the diferent
parts ft together. His pedagogical use of cut-outs blossomed into
the genre of fap anatomies, printed broadsheets showing the human
form pasted with printed organs the kidneys, the uterus, the lungs.
Readers (users?) could lift these delicate paper organs in succession,
performing a kind of live dissection on the body.
Moving parts had other uses, too. In a 1570 vernacular edition of
Euclids Elements we fnd pasted-down faps that allowed the reader
to transform a fat printed square into a three-dimensional pyramid,
thereby teaching geometric principles through interaction. Eigh-
teenth-century fapbooks were used to instill gender identities in
children; Jacquiline Reid-Walsh has been studying these marvelous
artifacts and has secured a grant to build a digital archive of them.
Other faps were used to conceal portraits, inviting readers to engage
in a playful revealing and concealing of authorial identity.
Although these examples seem unusual, moving parts are far more
prevalent in early printed books than we might think. In fact, theres
much to be learned about the history of printing and binding by
studying them. Early books are not just pages of linear text; theyre
assemblages of paper technologies, designed to embody and produce
diferent material relationships between a reader and an idea.
What material part of the book interests you most?
Recently, the fore-edge, opposite the spine. The fore-edge is our
entrance into the book, where our thumbs frst dig in and pull open the
covers; it leads us to a world of surfaces that compose the books pages.
Yet its also where the codex makes visible its own depth, showing us
the third dimension of paper. In other words, the fore-edge is where
paper becomes a page, and pages turn back into paper that magical
transformation upon which the technology of the book depends.
The fore-edge has also been the site of designs both functional and
aesthetic. Before we began shelving printed books vertically and spine
out, they were often stacked fat and spine back; as a result, some
early book owners wrote the title on the books fore-edge for easy
fling. Fore-edges have also been gilded, gaufered, and painted with
designs, sometimes in such a way that the image is only revealed upon
opening the book.
A particularly lovely seventeenth-century example of fore-edge
painting is a Bible and Book of Common Prayer at Harvards
Houghton Library. Although the closed edge is gilded, when opened,
the gentle slope of the books large, folio-size pages reveal King
Charles II, staring at you while you read. He disappears again behind
gilt as the book closes.
The practice of painting the fore-edge in this way reached new
heights in the nineteenth century, when misty romantic landscapes
became popular. The Boston Public Library has digitized its sizeable
collection; browsing it online gives one a good sense of how detailed
these small paintings can be. Some books even feature a double
painting, such that diferent images appear and disappear depending
on which direction the pages are fanned. This charming art lives on
today in the work of Martin Frost, whose exquisite fgures almost
seem to shimmy with the movement of the pages.
If your house was burning and you had to take three books,
which would you save? Why?
Im really not sure I would take any! That isnt to say they arent
precious to me. The annotations in my copies of Chaucer, Wittgen-
stein, Calvino or Woolf would be missed, though not for their content
so much as their concretization of hard-fought Knowledge. My small
but growing collection of pop-ups is dear to me, as are a few beautiful
Anatomical fugitive sheet.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
My most unusual interaction is probably also
my most mundane: I use them as furniture.
My cofee table is four stacks of Readers Digest
Condensed Books a lovely set, each cover
similar in design but diferently colored
topped with an old printers lettercase salvaged
from a warehouse full of antique junk.
10 in medias res
F E AT U R E S
10 in medias res
I NT E R V I E W
nineteenth-century childrens books Ive picked up over the years,
mostly chromolithographs (my favorite form of book illustration).
And of course there are a handful of books owned for sentimen-
tal value, like a copy of Gustave Dores illustrated edition of Dantes
Inferno, once owned by my Great-Great Aunt Helen, a schoolteach-
er who scandalously rode a big-wheel bike. Strange, I know, that
someone so enamored of the materiality of books wouldnt miss any
of her own if they were lost in a fre but true. Most books can be
replaced, and thankfully sentiment doesnt burn as easily as paper.
What about the current moment for books interests you?
Our current era of mass digitization is radically reconfguring the re-
lationship between past and present. Photographs of old or rare books
show them frozen in time by endlessly reproducing and repeating a
single moment the moment when the book was photographed. At
the same time, the physical object (in most cases) continues to exist
in a library somewhere, accreting history, aging. Add to this Dorian
Gray-ish scenario the fact that photographs of a single copy represent
an entire edition, which itself may exist in variant copies, and the
signifcance of this transformation for research begins to become clear.
Were living in a moment that loves the idiosyncrasy of biblio-
graphic oddities, from annotated copies and Sammelbnde to books
that have been cut-up or otherwise bear evidence of readerly ma-
nipulation. Yet its also a moment of reproducibility, in which pages
once viewed in person by a privileged few are accessible to a wide
audience in both facsimile and plain text form. Thus a digitized copy
of the Geneva Bible a copy that is no doubt itself variant in some
way becomes the Geneva Bible; a digitized nineteenth-century
edition of King Lear becomes, through Project Gutenberg, simply
King Lear, its dense editorial history eradicated under the banner
of open access.
Book historians and librarians are acutely aware of this tension.
Mitch Fraas recently tweeted two very diferent looking pages from
two photographed books of the same edition in order to highlight why
we need multiple digitized copies. This kind of historical knowledge
the realm of book historians and librarians is needed now more
than ever, and should be part of the conversation about digitization
practices.
Where do you go to fnd and/or give away books?
I gravitate to those places that are fnd and give away where our
media detritus is sucked up and spit back at us in all its ugly, ephemeral
glory.
In Maryland, near where I grew up, theres a used
bookstore (and record shop, and video rental) called
Wonderbooks. Its the kind of place that specializes
in old sheet music, Christmas albums, and the odd
assortment of Desktop Physicians. As a kid, I would
comb its tall, disorderly stacks for cheap and curious
bits of literature and poetry inevitably in the form
of a decades-old Penguin paperback, its binding
glue so dry that the book would start faking pages
halfway through reading it.
This desperate, greedy bid for knowledge wouldnt
have been possible without Wonderbooks indiscrim-
inate BUY/SELL/TRADE policy. We tend to think
of libraries as the storehouse of our cultural memory,
but they dont store the past so much as package and
present it in a way that channels our vision of the
future. Places like Wonderbooks, though, ofer a
much broader glimpse of our history, shoring up all
the detritus excised from our more venerated institu-
tions.
Ive also found many of my favorite books in
dumpsters. When working in a public library, I
learned just how many discarded books are tossed in
the bins out back especially books of the kind I
collect, old dictionaries and encyclopedia sets. Ever in
search of more shelf space, public libraries are shedding their reference
works like dead skin, replacing them with computers and database
subscriptions. Their loss is my gain; I love these extinct dinosaurs,
with their faux leather covers and absurd claims to a universal or
total printing of language and knowledge. (Websters and Ency-
clopedia Britannica played an important role in furnishing middle
class homes, displaying upwardly mobile aspirations toward erudition
through their sheer, shelf-sagging enormity.)
Im not sad these books are being replaced by more efcient, up-
to-date electronic reference works; but I do like to save the ones I
spring 2014 11
F E AT U R E S I NT E R V I E W
fnd. A kind of secondary dumpster where I fnd books are the bins
labeled FREE that dot the halls of universities. A decent living
might be made as a kind of modern day rag-and-bone man, repurpos-
ing and reselling abandoned books found at the fringes of libraries
and colleges only instead of saving old rags to be made into paper
for books, youd be saving old books from destruction in the face of
digital databases.
How do you foresee books evolving in the future?
There was a time when I thought a more experimental brand of
highly-designed digital books might emerge books in which
design bore some of the weight of the texts argument. That thought
has evaporated, though. Digital publishing formats are becoming
(perhaps already are) calcifed, even more so than those
of printed books, and I dont see many interesting de-
velopments in that vein (the occasional iPad pop-up
book aside).
A renewed interest in the materiality of the codex
is generating some of the most experimental experi-
ments in hybrid print/digital publishing. Im thinking
of Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouses Between Page
and Screen, in which the book is read by holding
printed codes before a webcam, as well as Caitlin
Fishers recent augmented reality art. If networked
digital culture continues to dissolve into everyday
objects into a pair of glasses, or the heel of a shoe
then we may begin to see more printed digital
books, which are read the old-fashioned way but
experienced as something wholly diferent. I hope so,
anyway. Reading an augmented reality printed paper
e-book seems to me a far richer experience than
tapping through videos embedded in longform text
on an iPad.
What question do you wish that I had asked
related in some way to books? Ask, then answer
it.
Q: A copy of the Bay Psalm Book recently sold for a
record $14.2 million. Why spend that much on a book
that is available to all in digital form?
A: The Bay Psalm Book is a perfect example of what
I described earlier as our relationship to old books as
time capsules of the past. Its certainly not the rarest
book one could own; eleven copies of its frst edition
are extant a small number, to be sure, but hardly
the smallest. (Isabella Whitneys A sweet Nosgay (1573),
considered the frst secular book of original English
verse written by a woman, exists in a single incom-
plete copy.) Nor is the Bay Psalm Book the most
beautiful printed book, even by a loose defnition
of that very subjective adjective. Rather its value lies
in its being the frst book printed in America, in a
culture obsessed with frsts (itself a function of our linear, progressive
conception of time). To own it is to own in a very real way a
piece of history.
Given that, it makes sense that digital facsimiles couldnt substitute
for the object itself. Photographs on a screen show us the content of an
artifact, but dont put us in touch with it. Of course, now that theyre
circulating, these digital images add one more layer to the dense his-
torical, cultural, and material palimpsest that we call the Bay Psalm
Book, reproducing and distributing it in a way that subtly transforms
our experience of the $14.2 million object. In the perceived gap
between these mutually constitutive mediations the single, jaw-
droppingly expensive book and the worthless excess of its digital re-
productions is the state of the book right now.
Between Page and Screen
The Bay Psalm Book
12 in medias res
F E AT U R E S H i s t o r y a n d Te c h n o l o g y
I
n 1890, living in Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson sent a letter
to his fellow writer Henry James, explaining a momentous
decision on his part: Disillusioned with a rapidly changing,
technologically driven world, Stevenson intended to remain
in exile on the island, never to return to his native Britain.
I was never fond of towns, houses, society or (it seems) civili-
sation, Stevenson wrote, explaining his choice. Indeed, he died in
Samoa four years later.
But how exactly did Stevenson, who grew up in a well-of family
of Scottish civil engineers, wind up lamenting technological progress
and its social efects from a remote island in the South Pacifc? And
how should we understand this kind of uneasy response to technologi-
cal advancement more generally?
Those are among the questions MIT historian Rosalind Williams
addresses in her new book, The Triumph of Human Empire, just
published by the University of Chicago Press. It is a study of three
famous authors Stevenson, Jules Verne, and William Morris
and their complicated responses to technological and social change:
embracing some innovations while lamenting that many changes were
diminishing our sense of connection with the natural world and the
past, and even creating new social inequities.
Much as the current day is awash in technology-based innovation,
so too was the Victorian era: As Verne (1828-1905) noted in an 1891
interview, he had lived through the introduction or popularization of
trains, trams, the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, steamship, and
commercial electricity.
In the book, Williams analyzes how the works of Verne, Morris
(1834-1896), and Stevenson (1850-1894) while often remembered
for their fights of enjoyable fantasy are actually deeply grounded in
this decisive turning point in the human story, as she writes, when
they could see that human needs, desires, works and actions would
more and more dominate the planet in the future. That also speaks
to our world, she believes, as we are confronted with resource scarcity,
climate change, dangerous military conficts, and changes in behavior
oriented around technology.
There is a deep belief in progress of science and technologies that
you can see in the 19
th
century, and is extremely powerful today, but
there is also the anxiety that comes from that belief, says Williams,
the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology
in MITs Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). This
book is intended to explore that paradox.
They could see over the horizon
Signifcantly, none of these writers had a lifelong, reactionary
distaste for technology. Stevenson took pride in his familys engi-
neering feats, for instance, while Verne gained renown for his stories
about futuristic submarines, moon landings, and even penned a (post-
humously discovered) novel about life in Europe under a radically
changed climate. They all shared, Williams asserts, a geographic link
around the North Sea that made them especially interested in human
exploration through water, but they thought about the impact of
many technologies.
What theyre writing about science and technology is astound-
ingly prescient and true, Williams says. They could see over the
horizon. Taking an approach Williams has used throughout her
career, The Triumph of Human Empire employs fctional works
as a window into the human response to rapid social transformation.
Science and technologies have [created] astonishing accomplish-
ments, and real material changes, Williams says, but Im most inter-
ested in how they have an efect on peoples lived experiences.
Those rapid changes form a recurring tension in Vernes works, in
which technology enables previously unimaginable journeys and feats
Adrift in a Sea of Change
In a new book, MIT historian Rosalind Williams examines the deep tension authors Jules Verne,
Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Morris felt about technology.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Ofce
spring 2014 13
F E AT U R E S
of exploration, yet traps people in its grip. After all, Pierre Arronax,
the scientist narrator of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) is im-
prisoned by Captain Nemo aboard the Nautilus privy to remarkable
views of life undersea, but unable to escape.
Morris response to technology was more explicitly political:
Famous for his poetry, in the 1880s he threw himself into left-wing
politics, and founded a noted decorative arts company. As a writer,
he suddenly started translating Icelandic sagas as a way, Williams
thinks, of aligning himself with a more pristine society than heavily
technologized Britain.
Our civilisation is passing like a blight, daily growing heavier
and more poisonous, over the whole face of the country, Morris
wrote.
Stevensons grasp of the global efects of technological change
seems to have emerged as he journeyed frst to America by steamship
and then across the United States by train, in pursuit of his future
wife, Fanny, who was then living in California. The trip appears to
have been an epiphany for Stevenson, as he realized how many of
the worlds travelers were not journeying by choice, but as migrants
displaced by a rapidly globalizing economy. After a few years in
California, he set forth on a sailboat cruise of the South Pacifc
in search of a healthier climate, new adventures, and new income
based on travel writing.
All of them had to do some sort of pivot, Williams says. They
grew up in one world and had to realize they were living in another
one.
The Triumph of Human Empire has been praised by colleagues; John
Tresch, a historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania, has
called the book engaging, highly informative, and entertaining.
The rolling apocalypse
Williams concludes The Triumph of Human Empire by observing
that Verne, Morris, and Stevenson all seemed to experience techno-
logical change not as a clean break from the past, but as a long-term
rolling apocalypse in which their cherished worlds were erased
over time.
I think this shows two coexisting visions of history, Williams
says. One is history as progress, but there is also this other vision
of history as rolling apocalypse. A lot of us are living with that
ambiguity today, which is a very ambivalent moment in history.
You cant just say [changes] are good or bad but we need to un-
derstand their complexity.
This means, Williams says, that we should not regard the tales
of Verne, Morris, and Stevenson as sheer escapism; that escapism is
telling us something about their times.
In each of their cases, their personal reinventions were as writers,
too, Williams observes. It just shows how important writing is.
Part of the subtext of the book is to take art seriously. Thats the frst
place to go to fgure out whats going on in the world.
Learn more about the work of Rosalind Williams at rosalindwilliams.com.
In the coming year
After discarding a bakers
dozen of the fiers and papers
that were given out, one will
fnally seem worth keeping.
After hearing the horsemans
command to halt, several people
will decide not to attend at all.
A graduate student who hasnt
showered will obsessively
elaborate his dissertation
without adding to the main text.
An explosive bark will resound
and no injuries will ensue.
A potbellied pig, given
one shoe to snif, will help
its owner locate the other.
At some point, a desire for
bean curd will go unfulflled.
Cowboys and ballerinas
will have a coastal dance party.
Desperate for a more rustic
life, a resident of suburban
Middlesex County will draw up
plans for a privy that is
detached from the main house.
Having lost her house key
at lunch, the bride will decide
to go on with the ceremony.
In Oregon or Washington,
a drive-through restaurant
will ofer pots of melted cheese
to be eaten with long forks.
In the center of the capitol,
a textile exhibit will attract
more praise and attention than
the newly restored architecture.
Luckless individuals will hear
in archaic English of their debt.
People will love hanging out
at the homey diner, even though
the path there runs along a clif.
Some will react to their
fate by making fun of it.
The frst three dumplings
will be boiled as usual, while
the next will have been prepared
diferently and not fried.
The land originally allotted
for small yuppie dwellings will be
afor use as a soup kitchen.
The railing near the bottom
of the counter will fall of at
the height of summer. The tape
that had held this piece in place
will have melted and unraveled.
The senior faculty members,
clad in orange vests, frustrated
at failing their search for a buck,
will fre on a Bambi-like creature.
The woman, walking past three
Of-Of-Broadway venues, will
relax and notice that the ache
along her right instep is gone.
-/-
two thousand fourteen
afternoon wed shutout
draft newton outhouse
fourth wonton sauteed
heat unwound footrest
northwest auto fondue
seafront tutu hoedown
snout hunted footwear
stow handout fourteen
surefooted town haunt
tenured fawn shootout
theaters unwound foot
townhouse turf atoned
unanswered tofu tooth
unfortunates doth owe
unwashed footnote rut
weft outshone rotunda
whoa softened turnout
whoso taunted fortune
woof detonates unhurt
H i s t o r y a n d Te c h n o l o g y
Nick Montfort New Years Poem for 2014
14 in medias res
F E AT U R E S Di g i t a l Hu ma n i t i e s I
Class on Digital Humanities Premieres with Tech-
Savvy Approaches
New class ofers MIT students the chance to pair technical know-how with real-world art and
humanities projects at local museums.
From the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
F
irst ofered in the spring 2013 term, and taught by Professor
James Paradis and Principal Research Associate Kurt Fendt
of MITs Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing,
CMS.633 (Digital Humanities: Topics, Techniques,
and Technologies) gave MIT students the chance to pair technical
know-how with real-world humanities projects for such clients as
the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (ICA) and the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum.
Students were introduced to key digital humanities concepts,
including data representation, digital archives, user interaction, and
information visualization, and given opportunities to apply these to
a variety of challenges. In addition to devising solutions for the two
Boston museums, students also took on the MIT-based Comdie-
Franaise Registers Project and the Edgerton Digital Collections,
grappling, in both cases, with a common digital-humanities problem:
how to make use of vast amounts of data.
Digital humanities is a fresh approach, Paradis says. Its thinking
about how new forms of representation can be used to solve problems.
Its applied humanities.
Putting ideas into action
Because this class took place at MIT, where many students are adept
at computer programming, participants were able not only to concep-
tualize the tools that might prove useful to their clients, but also to
build them.
Many other schools who are prominent in the digital humanities
ofer more traditional humanities courses than we do, Fendt says.
They simply dont have students with the building experience that
MIT students have.
MIT student teams immediately put their ideas into action:
Those working for the Comdie Franaise Registers Project and the
Edgerton Digital Collections developed tools to help scholars mine
rich new sources of data; those working for the museums found new
ways to use technology to enhance the visitor experience. Students
could really examine real-world problems and experience what these
institutions are dealing with, Fendt says.
Information tools for museum visitors
For the ICA, the challenge was to make better use of the museums
large lobby. Students responded by designing the i SEE a Portal,
which employs a user interface and Python game module to engage
visitors in a display intended to be installed in the lobby. Its dynami-
cally rearrangeable, so its a playful, interactive service, says Dmitri
Megretski 13, an electrical engineering and computer science major.
For the Gardner, students were challenged to design media for the
hallways connecting the museums original building which has a
no-mobile policy to the Gardners new wing, a space that welcomes
new technologies and interactions. Students developed a digital
guestbook that doubled as an interactive artwork. Employing data
visualization techniques they had learned in class, students proposed
diferent ways to display visitors tweets about the museum. In one,
the letters of each message appeared to fy of the page, changing in
real time as new messages came in. In another, the tweets appeared
as a succession of word clouds. People want to see what they wrote,
see their mark, says Birkan Uzun 15, an electrical engineering and
computer science major.
Tools for asking new questions
Visualizing data was also a central concern for students working
on the Edgerton Digital Collections, an efort to provide the frst
online access to the research notebooks of MIT pioneer Harold
Doc Edgerton (1903-1990). To enable scholars to glean informa-
tion quickly, the students developed a timeline spotlighting Edger-
tons interactions as referenced in the original source materials. You
can see what kind of experiments Doc Edgerton was working on and
who he was working with, says Chau Vu 14, a biology major, noting
that the tool also allows users to click through to view the original
notebook pages.
Facilitating historical research was likewise the focus of the Co-
mdie-Franaise team, which developed a visual search engine to
assist the ongoing efort to make the complete registers of the Co-
mdie-Franaise theater troupe (1680-1800) accessible online. The
tool makes it possible to search the theaters extensive records (which
until 2007 could only be seen in Paris), flter results by such catego-
ries as date, genre, title, and playwright, and represent them through
dynamic visualizations.
Like many projects in the digital humanities, this one allows
scholars to ask new questions about the material, Fendt says. The Co-
mdie-Franaise usually performed two plays a night, a comedy and
a tragedy. So how did they decide on those pairings? Such questions
cannot be easily answered by poring over handwritten documents one
by one, but tools like this can help us gain new insights.
All of these exploratory projects demonstrate the breadth of projects
being undertaken by those involved in digital humanities. Both Fendt
and Paradis say they look forward to seeing what direction the class
will take next term, when a new set of students will address fresh
challenges.
This was our frst run and we have big hopes for this course,
Paradis says.
spring 2014 15
F E AT U R E S Di g i t a l Hu ma n i t i e s I I
How MIT Is Addressing the Challenges of Digital
Learning in the Humanities
Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature and Participating Faculty at HyperStudio
This article
1
, just out, has already made its way to Twitter and is
generating many comments at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Quoting respected digital humanities scholars like Johanna Drucker
(who visited MIT in 2012), Todd Presner (with whom Drucker co-
authored the volume Digital Humanities), Brian Croxall, and Miriam
Posner, Marc Parry presents a balanced assessment of debates over
questions in the digital humanities, especially in relation to students
interests and needs: Do they even need a DH program? Should it be
a major? A minor? A new department? How broadly do you defne
digital humanities? Looking closely at Miriam Posners class, DH101
at UCLA, Parry follows students as they engage in critical exercises
evaluating data, texts, and problems in using digital information. His
main point? The humanities have traditionally allowed students to
read closely and to think critically about new technologies, including
writing and print. They continue to do so in the digital age: The
humanities, he [Todd Presner] says, can humanize digital media by
helping users understand what technology can and cant do, by posing
ethical questions, by providing social and historical perspective, by
illuminating cross-cultural diferences. As Parry concludes, These
are core values of the humanities, Mr. Presner says. They need to be
core values of the digital, too.
1
How the Humanities Compute in the Classroom, The Chronicle
of Higher Education, Jan. 6 2014.
Having recently
attended two excellent
conferences debating
the value of (digital)
humanities one at
Hofstra University on the
occasion of their opening
a new Digital Research
Center and the second at
Northeastern University
in Boston, called New
Media and American
Literary History I
can say that we in Litera-
ture, CMS/W, Foreign
Languages and Lit-
eratures, HyperStudio,
History, the Humani-
ties Library, and all across SHASS, are doing innovative work in
the digital humanities much of that work initiated, I might add,
among our graduate students, lecturers, and other junior staf as well
as by professors. Although we do not meet under one umbrella called
Digital Humanities, our projects contribute new programs, tech-
nologies, and pedagogy in a wide variety of areas. Literature faculty
use MIT-designed tools like Annotation Studio (digital marginalia),
Locast (digital mapping), and MetaMedia (multimedia archives), as
well as an array of open-source programs in their classes. CMS/W
now ofers a class called Digital Humanities: Topics, Techniques, and
Technologies. The HyperStudio is developing timelines and other
forms of visualization along with Annotation Studio, for which it has
received an NEH Implementation Grant. MIT Foreign Languages
and Literatures has led the way in its uses of digital language-study
tools, and History faculty are partnering with Hart Nautical Collec-
tion at the MIT Museum to digitize their maps and collections for
classroom use.
These are just a few of the eforts that refect MITs response to the
challenges of digital information. But MIT has in many ways gone
beyond what we might consider the fundamentals of digital learning.
As the title of an MLA (Modern Language Association) session taking
place in Chicago suggests, we can start thinking about whatever is
Beyond the Digital that is, going beyond big data, visualization,
and archival storage to what the session identifes as a critical next step:
Pattern Recognition and Interpretation. Our students, like those in
the classes this article describes, can not only grasp, organize, and
store data but also see the meaningful patterns and modes of interpre-
tation information can inspire. Thoughtful use of these tools can
stimulate critical thinking and reading across a range of disciplines
and open up learning for our students in unanticipated ways.
Wyn Kelley
These are just a few of the eforts that refect
MITs response to the challenges of digital
information. But MIT has in many ways
gone beyond what we might consider the
fundamentals of digital learning. As the title
of an MLA (Modern Language Association)
session taking place in Chicago suggests, we
can start thinking about whatever is Beyond
the Digital that is, going beyond big
data, visualization, and archival storage to
what the session identifes as a critical next
step: Pattern Recognition and Interpretation.
Our students, like those in the classes this
article describes, can not only grasp, organize,
and store data but also see the meaningful
patterns.
spring 2014 17
F E AT U R E S E x c e r p t f r o m Wo r k D o n e f o r H i r e
Wounded in combat and honorably discharged nine years ago, Jack Daley
still sufers nightmares from when he served his country as a sniper, racking up
sixteen confrmed kills. Now a struggling author, Jack accepts an ofer to write
a near-future novel about a serial killer, based on a Hollywood script outline.
Its an opportunity to build his writing career, and a future with his girlfriend,
Kit Majors.
But Jacks other talent is also in demand. A package arrives on his doorstep
containing a sniper rife, complete with silencer and ammunition and the frst
installment of a $100,000 payment to kill a bad man. The twisted ofer is
genuine. The people behind it are dangerous. They prove that they have Jack
under surveillance. He cant run. He cant hide. And if he doesnt take the job,
Kit will be in the crosshairs instead.

1
A
friend called me this morning and asked whether I
could go shooting, and I said no, I couldnt. I made up
something about work, but the fact is, I couldnt.
I was a sniper in the desert, in this war that it seems
no one can really stop. I didnt volunteer for the job, not initially,
but I wasnt smart enough to miss the targets in Basic Training. And
sniper sounded cool, so I signed up for the school when they ofered
it.
I count back on all my fngers and its been nine years. Sometimes it
feels like yesterday, literally. I wake up in grainy grime and shit smell,
the slimy cold of the damned plastic suit. Cold until the sun comes up
and tries to kill you. That sounds too dramatic, but Ill leave it. The
sun bakes you and broils you and disorients you, and it makes you a
target. They have rifes, too. Not so many snipers.
In sixteen months I killed maybe twenty people, sixteen confrmed.
What kind of a prick keeps track? Besides, as often as not, you cant
tell. The recoil usually knocks you of the sight picture, and with
the scope at maximum power, it takes a second or two to get back.
Your spotter will say, Good shot, but whats he going to say? Youre
usually shooting at someone whos peeking out of a window or from
behind the edge of a wall, and if an ounce and a half of lead buzzes
by his ear at the speed of sound, hes not about to stand up and shout,
You missed!
So I dont know whether Im going to burn in Hell sixteen times or
thirty or forty, or whether they even make you burn in Hell for not
being smart enough to miss the god-damned target in Basic Training.
I suspect Ill go wherever the people I killed went. But I dont expect
to meet them.
I had a girlfriend all those sixteen months, and she e-mailed me
every afternoon, morning her time, and I wrote back whenever I was
near a hot point. We were going to get married.
But I know Im not as nice in person as I am at the keyboard. That
must happen all the time.
She put up with me for three or four months after I got out of the
hospital. I think she still loved me for maybe half that time. But how
long can you love someone who goes into bars just to beat people up?
To get drunk enough to start fghts. And then cry in movies. You
can cry for Bambi or Meryl Streep, but crying in a zombie movie is a
symptom that something is loose in your head.
That sounds so drama queen. I didnt really get that bad a deal,
wounded once and out. The bullet that blew of my left pinkie also
smashed a rib and bounced into my left lung, serious enough to get
me six weeks in Bethesda and an early honorable discharge. Eighty
percent disability pays for the rent and groceries and some of the beer.
For a few years the rest of the beer came out of the GI Bill, while I
fnished college and got an easy Masters. When that cow ran dry I did
this and that, temp jobs like typing and answering phones. But I dont
take orders well anymore, and tend to raise my voice. So I had lots of
jobs, none of them for too long.
Ive always written poetry, not a fast track to fame and fortune, and
started writing stories when I was in the hospital. I actually sold one,
for $150, before I was out of rehab. So the idea of doing it for a living
was pretty natural. How far could it be from Ellery Queens Mystery
Magazine to the best-seller list?
I still dont know, but its more than nine years.
I wrote a novel and it did about as well as most frst novels, which
is to say my mother bought ten copies and a few thousand other
people must have thought I was a relative. It did get two or three good
reviews, and a couple of poisonous ones, notably from the Times. It
bothers me to know that I probably got into graduate school because I
got reviewed in the Times. They hated the book but evidently thought
it was important enough to warn potential readers away.
I guess every writer whos been a soldier has to write his war novel.
I cant stand to read the damned thing anymore. Though I hate to
think that maybe the Times was right.
Second novels are a hard sell, especially if you dont have cheerful
blurbs from the frst. Puerile, shouts the New York Times. A worth-
while journeyman efort, mumbles Publishers Weekly. My hometown
newspaper called it a good read, but I went to high school with the
reviewer. So my second novel has been to some of the best addresses
in New York, according to my agent, but it hasnt been invited to stay.
The agent, Barb Goldman, probably took me on because shes a vet,
too. Twice my age, she was in the hundred-hour war that started the
whole thing. Before 9/11 and Gehenna. When I go up to New York
we get drunk together and remember the desert. Old sergeants whom
we sincerely hope are dead by now.
Drinking with her, Ive never felt the crazy urge to fght. Maybe
because shes older than my mother and would die of embarrassment.
Maybe because the bars we go to are a little nicer than the ones I
frequent in Florida. Get into a fght in the Four Seasons and you might
hurt somebody who could buy your book.
So she called and asked whether Id like to make some easy money
doing work for hire, and of course I said, Who do you think I am?
She knew exactly who I was, and said I could make ffty thousand
bucks, writing a sort of novelization of a movie by Ron Duquest. I
said it sounded like a fun way to pay for the next two thousand cases
of beer, and she said thats good, because shed already accepted. She
knew I liked fantasy and horror, and this was going to be a horror
movie.
And that was not all, not by a long shot. Duquest had asked for me
18 in medias res
F E AT U R E S
specifcally. She showed me the note that had come with the request:
Ronald Duquest
Hollywood
If you got this you know my number
I really liked High Kill, by your client Jack Daley.
Good natural storytelling talent. Could he write a short
book for me? We got an idea sounds right up his alley
a sci-f monster and a returned vet. I can put a little
up front: Ten grand to write the book, and he keeps all
the book rights. Well send another contract if we like
the book for a movie: basically $50,000 for an 18-month
option against $500,000 if the movie gets made. Make
that start of principal photography. Dont want to
haggle but I have the check right here if you want it.
(signed) Duke D.
I wasnt sure quite how to take that. But Id seen several features by
Ron Duquest, and liked his light touch. I asked her what he meant
by a short book, and she said a novella, between a hundred and two
hundred typed pages.
Sort of the opposite of what I normally thought of as a noveliza-
tion, which would be taking an existing movie script and cranking
out a novel based on that. This might actually be easier, though. I
could probably write a hundred pages of acceptable prose in a couple
of weeks. For twice what I got for the last novel.
It would be a work done for hire in that Duquest would own the
copyright. But since Id keep the book rights, and also make a small
fortune if a movie came out of it, what the hell.
She zapped me the two-page description. Pretty good story; the
main character was my age and had gone to my war. Hes a lawyer and
a private eye but unsuccessful. I like that in a lawyer.

I spent the morning not writing. Id never done anything like this,
purely commercial stuf, but I had taken a screenwriting course in
graduate school, and this was sort of the opposite. So I fgured Id do a
diagram frst, breaking down the supposed movie into acts and scenes,
which I could reassemble into a book narrative.
While I was immersed in that, the phone rang and it was my current
pelvic pal, Kit Majors, wondering whether Id forgotten about lunch.
I told her I was on my way out the door, and then I was.
I really should make myself notes. It was normally a ten-minute
bike ride to the Irish restaurant, but I made it in fve, sweating a little
bit.
When I walked in, she signaled the bartender, and he started tapping
me a Guinness. I was actually going to get us a nice bottle of wine, to
celebrate, but that could come later. Kit liked to be in control, which
was usually okay with me.
We kissed. I got a job.
Jesus, youre kidding. Someone put up a plaque.
You peasants may laugh, but in fact it is a real job, real money. Im
gonna be a literary prostitute for ffty large. As much as a half million
down the road.
Wow. Room in that bed for another one? Kit was a poet as well
as a mathematician.
You wouldnt want to do it. Novelization of a horror movie.
Ew. People who go to those things read books?
Big words and all. This ones by Ron Duquest.
Im supposed to know who that is?
He did the Bradbury remake you liked, Dandelion Wine.
That wasnt horror.
Depends on what scares you. The bartender brought the beer and
took our food order, a steak for her and a Cobb salad for me.
Youre gonna waste away.
Not for a while. Ive always been what they call big-boned,
but had never had to watch my diet, until the past year or so. I had to
admit I was getting paunchy.
Your mother called.
What, she called you?
She gave me a look. No, she called the bartender. I couldnt help
but overhear.
All right. She always calls my cell. But I turn it of when Im
working.
She said you promised to fx the porch, once it stopped raining.
Oh, shit. Of course Im gonna fx the god-damn porch. Its not
like I had to write a book or something.
I could come help.
Nothing to it, really. Replace a step and stain it. But yeah, I could
use the company. Talk to Mom, distract her.
Tell her about our sex life?
No. She snores. You drive over?
What, you biked?
Two hundred calories. And the guy in the screenplay bikes. We
could swing by Hawkeyes and pick up a plank and some stain. Then
go surprise the old lady.
You pay for lunch?
Im a big Hollywood guy now. We always pay for lunch.
Yeah, but you get blow jobs.
I rolled my eyes at her. Everything has a price in this sorry world.

The Monster
by
Christian Daley
Chapter One
He was so big that people couldnt help staring at him. If you
guessed his weight, you might say four hundred pounds, but it was
more like fve. A relatively large head with small features pinched in
the middle. Straggly long hair and no eyebrows. Ugly as hell. If he
were on a television show hed have a sweet disposition. In real life he
was quite otherwise.
F E AT U R E S E x c e r p t f r o m Wo r k D o n e f o r H i r e
spring 2014 19
On police blotters in four states he was called Hunter. He was a
monster, so far uncatchable, unobserved.
He hid his windowless van in a cul-de-sac and labored up a hill to a
location hed scouted out earlier. A jogging trail that had thick brush
for cover, but by moving a couple of steps to the left and right, he
could see a hundred yards or more in both directions.
He could hear for a mile. There was no one coming.
He tied a length of monoflament fshing line to a sapling and laid it
across the path. It was almost invisible.
He hid in the bush and quickly applied military camoufage makeup
to his face and hands, matching the green camoufage suit hed made
out of a tent. He snapped the wire up a couple of times, testing. It
would do, catching the runner midway between ankle and knee.
The frst jogger down the trail was a beautiful teenaged girl, blond
hair streaming out behind her, breasts bouncing softly, her scarlet
silken outft clinging with sweat. He salivated at her beauty but let her
pass. He was doing boy-girl-boy-girl and didnt want to confuse the
police analysts. Not yet.
The next one was a boy, but he was too close behind, probably
striving to catch up with the girl. If he made a noise, she might hear.
If she saw the fat man at work, she would call 9-1-1. That would make
things too complicated.
They both were well out of sight, though, when the next one came
up, clearly exhausted, almost shufing, a man of about forty. That
was all right. He yanked on the monoflament and the man fell fat
on his face.
He was up on his hands and
knees by the time Hunter had
lumbered out to the trail. He
punched him once in the back of
the head with a fst the size of a
bowling ball, knocking him fat.
He picked him up like a sleeping
child and carried him back to the
van.
The rear door was open. He
laid the man out and wiped the
blood away from his mouth, then
slapped duct tape over it. Then
he bound his hands and feet with
tape, working quickly for one so fat, and handcufed him to an eyebolt
on the side, then quietly eased the door shut. The whole process took
less than a minute.
He got a gallon jug of water out of the front seat and cleaned of
the camo makeup. Then he took of the outft; he had regular shorts
and a tee underneath. Then he carried the water back up to the trail,
made sure no one was coming, and rinsed away the spatter of blood
the mans face had left. He thumbed open the large folding knife he
always carried, severed the monoflament, and wrapped it around the
jug as he walked back down to the van.
From the cofn-sized cooler in the back, he took out two quart
bottles of Budweiser. Then he got in the drivers seat, the van dipping
to the left in spite of its custom springs.
A lot of people drink beer while theyre driving in Alabama. He
decided to not take the chance. He drank both quarts sitting there,
and fnished of two bags of hot peanuts and a bag of bacon rinds. Life
was good.
He put the empties and wrappers in a plastic bag and washed his
hands and face. He ignored the faint sounds from the back and headed
for the interstate.
2
After I fnished that little chapter, I checked the e-mail and lo, there
was an $8,500 PayPal deposit from my agent, Duquests down payment
minus her ffteen percent. I actually clapped my hands together.
Duquest sent an e-mail, too, all lower case: good so far. Hey,
dont give me a swelled head.
Of course once the novella was in Duquests hands, he could screw
it up any way he wanted. But hell, he was paying for the privilege.
I didnt much like surrendering control, even if it is a work done for
hire. But I wrote HALF A MILLION BUCKS on a three-by-fve card
and taped it over the computer, in case I start to get depressed.
I decided to go buy a nice bike, like the private eye does in the
story. Maybe Ill go buy a pistol, too; see how a 9-mm feels. But if
somebody calls and tries to hire me to fnd a fat guy who kills joggers,
Im so outta here.
I printed out the frst chapter and quit to clean house. Kit said her
parents wanted to meet me, and
I had ignored the voice inside,
screaming Ah-ooga! Ah-ooga!
Dive! Dive! and invited them
over for dinner. So I had to weigh
my options: good impression
or self-defense food poisoning.
I opted for the former, but took
the chicken out of the fridge a tad
early. Let the gods decide.
Maybe its odd that I havent met
them, since theyre only like ten
miles away and Ive been seeing
Kit for almost a year. The frst
couple of months you wouldnt
have wanted to take me home to Mother; some asshole decked me
with a Jack Daniels bottle, which broke my nose and knocked out a
tooth under a split lip. The VA fxed me up, but it took a while.
That was a good bar, but I dont go there anymore. The bartender
turned out to be the owner. He bitched about the damage, and I sort
of picked up the broken bottle and ofered him a colonoscopy. He
went for the phone and I decided to go bleed somewhere else.
Kit met me about a week later at a branch of the library, where I was
giving a reading from my second novel, which I think I will retitle
The Fucking Albatross. It had to be the worst reading in the history
of literary indecent exposure. I sounded exactly like a guy with a
nose full of cotton, and with the temporary cap on my front tooth, I
whistled every time I tried to pronounce s or th. We had a beer
F E AT U R E S E x c e r p t f r o m Wo r k D o n e f o r H i r e
He was so big that people couldnt help
staring at him. If you guessed his weight, you
might say four hundred pounds, but it was
more like fve. A relatively large head with
small features pinched in the middle. Straggly
long hair and no eyebrows. Ugly as hell. If he
were on a television show hed have a sweet
disposition. In real life he was quite otherwise.
20 in medias res
F E AT U R E S
afterwards and she took me home for a mercy fuck that turned out to
be a yearlong hobby, maybe more.
So now to meet her parents. Shave, clean shirt, fnd some socks.
Hide the porn. I left my desk a random hellhole I probably couldnt
fnd anything if I neatened it but closed the ofce door.
Kit once asked me why male writers had ofces and female ones had
studios or writing rooms. Maybe its so we can pretend were working.
I clicked random classical on the living room pod and made a
salad and put it in the fridge. Dumped some coals in the grill and
soaked them with starter fuid and waited. Normally, Id make a drink
at fve, but that might not be a good idea. Wait and ofer them one. I
had a wild impulse to roll a joint; theyd be almost old enough to be
hippies. No, that was the sixties and seventies. They were probably
just born. Besides, Kit didnt smoke, so her parents probably didnt
either. The family that smokes together croaks together.
They were exactly on time, and of course dressed down, for a picnic.
Her father, Morrie, was wearing a T-shirt that half exposed a Marine
Corps anchor tattoo on his beefy bicep. But it was a Princeton crew
shirt, a little cognitive dissonance. Her mother, Trish, was delicate and
quiet. Quietly observant.
Kit had brought the ingredients for sangria and took over the
kitchen to make a pitcher. So I dumped a bag of potato chips in a bowl
and escorted her parents out to the patio. That made things a little
awkward, with no mediator. I braced myself for the usual so youre a
writer excruciation.
It was worse. Kitty says you were a sniper in the war, Morrie said.
In the army, was it?
Guard unit, actually.
Same same. Not a good sign when a civilian uses military slang.
How long did they keep you over there?
Sixteen months.
Not fair. He shook his head. Aint it a bitch, as we used to say.
He glanced at his wife, and she gave him a tiny nod. It wouldve been
less if youd gone RA.
That was often a topic of discussion.
He smiled a kind of Princeton smile. I can well imagine.
Morrie was in the Marines, Trish said, somewhat unnecessarily.
Just a grunt, he said. We didnt get along with the snipers too
well.
We heard about that. They had a high opinion of themselves.
Their school was a lot harder than ours, though.
Yes. No question it was a difcult job. A lot of lying in wait.
Like an alligator, I said.
Alligator?
I used to spend a lot of time watching them, down in Florida.
They lie still for hours, until all the other animals accept them as
part of the landscape. One gets too close and they strike, fast, like a
rattlesnake.
Have you seen that? Trish asked.
Once. He got a big blue heron.
I like alligators, she said. Why was I not surprised?
Did you watch him for hours? he said.
Yes, I did. With a camera. But it happened too fast. All I got was a
picture of his tail, sticking out of the water.
Drowning the bird?
Thats what they do.
Are you guys talking about the war? Kit brought out a tray with
the pitcher of sangria. Three glasses with the wine punch and one of
ice water. Her father took that one. Two vets get together
Not the war, I said. Alligators.
She handed me a glass. Thats good. Some of my favorite people
are cold-blooded animals.
You even vote for one every now and then, her father said.
Morrie
Sorry. No politics.
Ill get the coals going. I escaped to the lawn and squirted some
fresh starter on the charcoal, then lit the pile in several places.
Nobody said anything until I came back. I picked up the drink and
sipped it; extra brandy. Thanks, sweetheart.
Kitty says you write books, Jack, her mother said.
Ive written two and a half. Taking time of right now to do a
purely commercial one, a kind of novelization.
To their blank look Kit said, Thats normally when they make a
book out of a movie. In this case, Jacks writing the book frst.
Her father tilted his head. I wouldve thought that was the usual
way.
Kind of. Nobody seems eager to make a movie out of one of my
books. But this isnt actually a movie yet; just a pitch.
Her mother shook her head slightly, with a blank look. A pitch is a
sales job, her father supplied.
My literary agent actually came up with the deal, Jack said. She
was talking with a producer/director, Duke Duquest, and my name
came up. He had a vague idea about doing a horror movie with its
roots in present-day war. My war novel had just come out, with good
reviews.
It has a sort of horror angle, Kit said.
Well, Id call it fantasy. This one is real horror, though, a monster
who hunts people.
Like you, her mother said.
What?
Isnt that what you did? She looked honest and sincere and not
judgmental. Like a hunter after deer? With a rife?
I suppose it is.
If the deer had guns, her father said.
Its good money, Kit said. As much as a thousand dollars a page.
My word. How many pages can you write a day?
Four or fve, on a good day. Two or threes more common.
Still damned good pay, her father said.
I was lucky to get it. I decided not to mention that it would only
be ffty pages. Kit said nothing to disillusion them, either, so the rest
of the evening passed convivially, the Majors mistakenly thinking that
their daughter was dating a budding millionaire rather than a starving
artist. After they left, Kit rewarded me with a night of uncharacteristi-
cally inventive sex.
I didnt sleep well. Dreams about hunting.
F E AT U R E S E x c e r p t f r o m Wo r k D o n e f o r H i r e
spring 2014 21
F E AT U R E S Ac a d e mi c P u b l i s h i n g
Historians Look to Preserve The Way Things Are in
Digital Publishing
Sam Ford, CMS 07
Sam Ford is Director of Audience Engagement with Peppercomm, an
afliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the
Western Kentucky University Popular Culture Studies Program, and
co-author of Spreadable Media (2013, NYU Press). He is also a con-
tributor to Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
T
his summer, the American Historical Association issued
a statement that set of deep debate in the academic
community so much so that it produced the rare efect
of being noticed and amplifed by the general interest
press. The request: that universities that automatically publish history
department doctoral dissertations online should allow young scholars
to embargo those tomes for up to six years.
The reasoning was built on two related premises: that university
presses are less likely to publish a book if the dissertation it is based
on is widely available online and, as a result, that the availabilities of
these dissertations afects the ability of young scholars to seek tenure.
The AHA says their statement came in response to two contradic-
tory impulses in academia: the desire to engage the world with new
thinking and the requirements the universitys models/logics of pro-
fessionalization.
But presuming that these two must necessarily be in contradiction
means believing the world will always be as it is today (or that it hasnt
changed already). After all, disruption rarely comes from within an
industry but rather from changes outside it. As communication studies
scholar Amanda Lotz has researched, institutions often hang on to
existing logic until it becomes completely untenable, rather than pro-
actively adjusting to acclimate to the world as it changes.
The AHAs statement has driven a wide range of responses. Many
commenters from the historian world responding directly cried out
that the institution was bowing to institutional pressure rather than
becoming powerful advocates for how academic institutions should
change tenure review. The Atlantics Rebecca Rosen evokes the Digital
Public Library of Americas Dan Cohen and historian Adam Crymble
in challenging the AHAs presumption that, because history has been
and remains a book-based discipline, that publishing a book will
always be the primary means for promotion. Trevor Owens laments
that the AHA should have put their emphasis on thanking and sup-
porting doctoral students fghting to make their dissertations publicly
accessible, rather than issuing a statement based on coping strate-
gies with the world as it is. And, writing in The Chronicle of Higher
Education, David Bell asks whether the issue is a model by which an
academic spends years writing a dissertation, followed by spending
several more years turning that dissertation into a book instead of
moving on to new research.
The problem, of course, is not merely a theoretical one, nor is par-
ticular to historians. Newly minted Ph.D.s come out of roughly a
decade of higher education and into an over-saturated job market in
almost every discipline, with the need to earn a living. Their ability
to fght for changing the way
things are is heavily shaped
by their need to feed them-
selves and their families, and
their leverage as a new professor
to challenge tenure processes
or the academic publishing
industry is limited. Meanwhile,
the institutional demands and
wear and tear of the tenure
process leaves many once they fnd tenure less likely to put
their energy toward changing the system that exists for those coming
behind them.
To be clear, as Jacqueline Jones and others told The New York Times
Noam Cohen, the AHA is not demanding scholars not publish their
work online but rather that they have the choice of whether they want
their work to be shared online at the point they have completed their
dissertation.
But the question is to what degree academic associations, universi-
ties, and university presses should continue to fnd ways to protect the
logic of how they operate today in a changing climate or how deeply
they should push their profession into where the world is headed.
After all, the ability for academic research to be seen more quickly
and more widely than ever before is a good problem to have. The
purpose of academic institutions has traditionally been to conduct this
research for improving our cultures understandingthus, educating
students, educating the public, and furthering knowledge. Somewhere
along the way, it seems academia has lost sight of that goal and instead
acted in favor of preserving strategies that were built in response to
realities that are no longer the case.
A professional logic built in a world of information scarcity no
longer makes sense, yet tenure processes at universities and uni-
versity press business models all still operate on it. In the process,
the academy is not responding to its primary charge of engaging with
and helping increase the knowledge of the world outside universi-
ty campuses. In particular, far too little progress has been made in
helping the rest of the world, as citizens and as professionals, under-
stand what academic research has to teach them.
The AHA is investing in protecting scholars from the world as it is.
In doing so, it seems to be admitting to having very limited purview
and impact. Rather, what if institutions like the AHA and, of
course, university presses and university administrators across the U.S.
put their energy toward creating systems that teach scholars how to
share their research to various publics and advocating for systems that
reward young scholars for such public engagement that get ideas into
circulation as broadly, efciently, and efectively as possible?
Perhaps wed fnd out what the historian of the 21
st
century should
look like, rather than how to protect the career path of the 20
th
-cen-
tury historian for decades to come.
Sam Ford
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
22 in medias res
Emily Anthes (Science Writing, 06) book,
Frankensteins Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotechs
Brave New Beasts, came out last March, and
she has been traveling around the country
giving lectures and talks as part of her book
tour. The paperback is due out in April, and
she is now back to freelancing full-time and
mulling over ideas for the next book.
Marcia Bartusiak from the Graduate Program
in Science Writing was invited to give a talk
at the 27
th
Texas Symposium for Relativis-
tic Astrophysics in Dallas in December. The
only non-scientist invited to participate, she
was there to help celebrate the 50
th
anniver-
sary of the conference. The premiere forum
for the feld, it which meets every two years
at locations around the world (but which still
retains the name where it was frst held in
1963). Bartusiaks talk was titled Bermuda
Triangles of Space: How the Public First Met
Black Holes.
Taylor Beck (Science Writing, 12) is a free-
lancer in New York, writing mostly for Fast
Company and occasionally for GQ, about
topics related to neuroscience, tech, Japan, and
innovation. She recently fnished reporting
on a documentary about sleep, for former
HBO producer John Hofman and his non-
proft production company The Public Good
Projects. She does book research, editing,
and fact-checking for authors like Susannah
Meadows of the NYTimes Magazine, D.T. Max
of The New Yorker, and Shane Snow of Wired,
Fast Company, and the New Yorker. (Shane also
co-founded Contently, a free platform for
writers which you all may fnd useful for ag-
gregating your stories online). Taylor covers
topics ranging from creativity in tech start-up
founders to alternative medicine to Japanese
robotics, culture, art, and business. Her goal
for 2014 is to branch out to new venues, take
on longer feature stories, and fnd a book she
wants to write.
Visiting Fulbright Professor Mine Gencel Bek
gave a presentation on the alternative media
in Turkey at the international conference The
Point Is to Change, in San Francisco. She also
taught an online Media and Childrens Rights
masters course in the Distance Learning
Center at Ankara University. During IAP,
she taught Media and Ethics. She submitted
an edited book on Media, Children and Youth
in Turkish. Currently, she is polishing an
article on digital inequality and identity to
submit to an international refereed journal.
She started to write a blog for T24, a Turkish
left wing online newspaper. She managed to
fnd another grant from the Turkish National
Science Academy and thus will be able to stay
at MIT until June 2015.
Jim Bizzocchi (CMS, 01) reports, Its been
a great year. Finished my sabbatical now
making good use of what I learned from my
time reconnecting with CMS and with Henry
Jenkins at USC. Great to be teaching again,
and to continue my own research. Beginning
a three-year research grant developing my
computationally generative video sequenc-
ing and presentation system. Very pleased to
be doing this in partnership with William
Uricchio and the Open Documentary Lab.
Kristina Bjoran (Science Writing, 11) is now
working for a communications frm (Forum
One Communications), which works ex-
clusively for non-profts and government
agencies. She works with high-profle, Se-
attle-based global health non-profts. She
manages web and communications devel-
opment and designs user interactions and
marketing/fundraising campaigns.
Eugenie Brinkemas frst book, The Forms of
the Afect, will be coming out in March via
Duke University Press. She will be giving
invited talks at the University of Rochester
(on The Human Centipede) and Univer-
sity at Bufalo (on rhythm, language, and
pornography) in February and April.
Alison Bruzek (Science Writing, 13) started
working at WGBH News as Project Manager
of the Forum Network, an online video
lecture series.
Anita Say Chan (CMS, 02) is currently
an Assistant Research Professor of Com-
munications and an Assistant Professor of
Media Studies in the Department of Media
and Cinema Studies at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research
and teaching interests since completing her
masters with CMS continue to focus on glo-
balization and digital cultures, innovation
networks and the periphery, and science
and technology studies in Latin America. Her
manuscript on the competing imaginaries of
global connection and information technolo-
gies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripher-
ies: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital
Universalism, is forthcoming with MIT Press
in early 2014. Her research has been awarded
support from the Center for the Study of Law
& Culture at Columbia Universitys School
of Law and the National Science Foundation,
and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at
The CUNY Graduate Centers Committee
on Globalization & Social Change, and at
Stanford Universitys Introduction to Hu-
manities Program.
Second-year grad student Denise Cheng has
been a busy bee trying to round up all of the
knowledge historical analysis, primary
qualitative research around supporting
workers who earn income through peer-
to-peer marketplaces. Shes been traveling
between economic workshops and media
conferences, awed by the diversity of people
who are interested in the topic. Her most
recent output is a piece for Harvard Business
Review, and during IAP, she is leading focus
group research and compiling a needs as-
sessments of peer economy providers in San
Francisco.
USA Today was the latest to pick up Professor
Ian Condry work on the completely virtual
Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku. And she
only got so popular because Crypton never
People started making up their own stories. She
became a crowd-sourced celeb.
spring 2014 23
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
gave the character a back story. People started
making up their own stories, says Condry.
She became a crowd-sourced celeb. And in
October, Condry discussed his latest book,
The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and
Japans Media Success Story, with the Think
podcast run by the Texas public radio station
KERA.
Anne-Marie Corley (Science Writing, 09) is
a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas.
Grad student Rodrigo Davies spent the
summer as an Innovation Fellow at the San
Francisco Mayors Ofce of Civic Innova-
tion, where he helped build Living Inno-
vation Zones, a new program to open up
public space in the city, and designed an
open data format for public notifcations.
Since returning to MIT he has continued to
develop his research on civic crowdfunding.
He has been invited to speak on the topic by
the Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
the Library of Congress and SXSW Interac-
tive, and has been quoted by Wired, Salon
and NPR. He spent January in Kansas City
as an MIT Public Service Fellow, support-
ing the non-proft BikeWalkKCs campaign
to build a bikeshare scheme for the city, and
running crowdfunding workshops for local
community groups. In April Rodrigo will
co-host Build Peace, a conference on new
technologies for peacebuilding that is being
sponsored by the Center for Civic Media.
The event is being held at the Media Lab on
April 5 and 6.
Josh Diaz (CMS, 09) is in Seattle, working
at ArenaNet and living with his love and
their three cats. He has earned skill ranks
in: baking, Mandarin and is collecting sci-f
and fantasy from authors of color, playing too
much Puzzle and Dragons and contemplating
woodworking.
Junot Dazs 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winner
book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
received one of its coolest endorsements, that
of rock-and-art legend David Bowie. The
recommendation was part of an exhibition on
Bowie in both Ontario and Londons Victoria
and Albert Museum in which Bowie listed
his 100 must-read books. Diaz was elected to
PARMESH SHAHANI, CMS 05
DRAWING INSPIRATION FROM MUMBAI
By Vijaysree Venkatraman, MIT Technology Review
Every big city
has an
e t hos
of its own: Paris (romance), New York
(ambition), and Beijing (political power).
For Mumbai, that distinguishing trait
would be jugaad, says Parmesh Shahani.
He translates the Hindi term as innova-
tively making do with tremendous con-
straints. Thanks to Mumbais energy and
cultural reputation, the megacityIndias
fnancial capitalis now bursting at the
seams. While the physical infrastructure
demands immediate attention, the intellec-
tual architecture of the city should not take
a back seat, he says.
Mumbai is Shahanis hometown and inspiration. He earned his frst degree from
Bombay University in fnance in 1996, then a postgraduate diploma in flm and televi-
sion from the Xavier Institute of Communication in the same city. He reported news for
the Bombay Times; founded FreshLimeSoda.com, Indias frst online youth magazine;
and worked in business development at Sony Entertainment Television. He got another
degree, in education, in 2003, and won an award for promising teachers. And that was
all before coming to MIT to pursue comparative media studies.
After graduating from MIT, Shahani returned home to set up a venture capital unit for
the automobile manufacturing corporation Mahindra & Mahindra. Since 2010, he has
worked with the Godrej Group, an industrial conglomerate headed by Adi Godrej 63,
SM 63.
In 2011, he founded the think tank Godrej India Culture Lab to promote Mumbais
cultural oferings through collaborations between the citys academic, corporate, and
creative spheres. The lab aims to stimulate discussions of what it means to be Indian and
modern, and it organizes both private gatherings and large public conferences on topics
such as youth culture, the Indian diaspora, and urbanism. He also runs public Friday
Funda gatherings, featuring talks, music, or flms, on the Godrej campus.
One topic that remains close to his heart is the issue of gay rights. During his stay in
Boston, where he was openly gay for the frst time in his life, Massachusetts became
the frst U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage. Inspired, he made homosexuality the
subject of his graduate thesis. He returned to India and wrote Gay Bombay: Globaliza-
tion, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India. In 2009, India decriminalized
homosexuality. Since then, Shahani has advocated for corporate diversity policies that
specifcally prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. He often speaks on
LGBT-related issues at corporations including Googles India ofce.
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
24 in medias res
the Society of American Historians. And he also appeared on the Colbert Report, where
he was on the receiving end of the familiar
teasing of studying writing at an engineer-
ing-focused university. Writing at MIT?
said Colbert. Isnt that like teaching engi-
neering at Juilliard?
January 17
th
was the frst day of classes for Ana
Domb (CMS, 09) at the interaction design
masters program she designed and runs at
Veritas University in Costa Rica. Sixteen
people have trusted us to join the program.
Im excited and nervous as can be. In
October, she and CMS grad student Eduardo
Marisca joined forces in a board game design
workshop for kids in Guatemala. They will
be writing about that experience in February.
In mid-September, Stephanie Dutchen
(Science Writing, 09) moved from the NIH,
where she had been for four years since MIT,
to Harvard Medical School, still as a science
writer-editor. Its been a blast returning to
Boston and getting to know the Longwood
community.
Katie Edgerton (CMS, 13) moved out to Los
Angeles the summer after graduating CMS
and just fnished her frst semester in USCs
Writing for Screen & TV M.F.A. program.
Garret Fitzpatrick (Science Writing, 12)
had a report published in the December
issue of the 2013 NASA Tech Briefs magazine
referencing a white paper he co-wrote at
the Johnson Space Center in 2010-2011,
titled Advanced Hybrid Spacesuit Concept
Featuring Integrated Open Loop and Closed
Loop Ventilation Systems.
CMS graduate student Sean Flynn helped
with the launch of the Open Documentary
Labs Docubase, started working with the
video4change network on impact assess-
ment research, and attended the Sundance
Film Festival to represent ODL and write a
series of articles about their New Frontier
section. Outside of MIT, he completed his
third year as Director of the Points North
Documentary Forum at Camden Interna-
tional Film Festival, which received a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts
in November.
SONNY SIDHU, CMS 13
Checking in
from the West Coast with warm
greetings and a happy update for
the CMS/W community!
After graduating from the CMS
masters program in June, I
recently moved to Los Angeles
and started working as a designer
at the Burbank, CA-based
videogame developer Insomniac
Games.
Were currently in production for Sunset Overdrive, an upcoming title being released
exclusively for Microsofts new Xbox One game console. Sunset is a unique gamea
stylish, satirical open-world shooter in which a mutant apocalypse unfolds against a
backdrop of rampant consumerismand Im thrilled to be working on it.
Insomniac itself is a unique company, too. Unlike most other developers of large-scale,
mass-market (or AAA) console games, Insomniac is 100% independent, which grants
us an unusual degree of creative freedom and artistic control over our work.
But unlike most other indie developers, we have the resources to compete in the
AAA market, making games that reach millions of players and stand alongside the very
biggest productions the medium has to ofer.
All of which makes Insomniac a particularly good ft for someone like me.
After all, at CMS my focus was on AAA games (my thesis was about spectacular
setpiece sequences in popular console-based shooter games), but I also loved reading
and thinking about experimental gameplay forms, doing indie game development with
the MIT Game Lab, and conducting forward-looking design, narrative, and artifcial
intelligence research with the ICE Lab.
As a player and scholar, I am most interested in videogames as a mass medium of play,
yet I believe that this medium is simply too young and too full of unexplored potential,
unexamined theoretical possibilities, and unexpected experimental applications to yield
completely to the dictates of the commercial market and the established conventions of
existing AAA genres.
At Insomniac, I have the chance to make big, fun games in an environment where
creative independence, aesthetic rebelliousness, and a spirit of inquiry and experimen-
tation are encouragedan attitude that not only agrees with me personally, but also, I
believe, serves the long-term interests of this medium I love.
Im excited and grateful for this opportunity, and humbly indebted to the CMS/W
community for preparing me for it in so many ways!
spring 2014 25
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
Sam Ford (CMS, 07) has published pieces
with the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier,
Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, PR
News, The Firm Voice, The Public Relations
Strategist, and most importantly of all
the CMS/W site. He has also been featured
this fall in the Tribeca-award winning docu-
mentary Lil Bub and Friendz, and documentaries
Soap Life and Who Shot the Daytime Soap?, as
well as The New York Times, NPR Marketplace,
and The Los Angeles Times, among other pub-
lications. Over the past few months, Sam has
presented at the Word of Mouth Marketing
Association Summit, the Annual Insurance
Executive Conference, the Association of In-
dependent Kentucky Colleges and Universi-
ties, and the Luxury Marketing Council and
participated virtually in sessions for Social
Media Today and the Argentinian confer-
ence Vi Encuentro International through
the NeoTVLab in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile,
Sam and his wife Amanda Ford (former
CMS employee) had a bittersweet November,
enrolling daughter Harper (2) in pre-school,
but are comforted by daughter Emma (4)
now being able to read them bedtime stories,
rather than the other way around.
The MetroWest Daily News highlighted the
storied MIT Game Lab in its role of co-host
of Septembers Festival of Indie Games. Rik
Eberhardt, the Festivals co-producer and
the Game Labs studio manager, told the
Daily News that The festival is a great place
to open up the process behind game devel-
opment to a wider community, adding that
part of the labs mission is to educate the
public on the development and use of games.
People who attend the festival can not only
see games made by local developers but get
a chance to talk with them at our digital
and tabletop showcases. We have some great
talks and flms programmed to help people
understand the community of game develop-
ment, the importance of games in peoples
lives, and the potentials of games that still lie
untapped.
The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge
in December awarded the Game Lab Best
Student Developed Serious Game for their
game A Slower Speed of Light, an exploration
of how to more intuitively teach the theory
of relativity. And the Labs game Movers and
Shakers, which looks at how players commu-
nicate based on conficting perspectives, was
nominated as a best indie game of 2013.
Last May, Anne Glausser (Science Writing,
09) became ideastreams Coordinating
Producer for QUEST Science (www.quest-
science.org), in Cleveland.
Robin Hauck (CMS, 03) left Digitas in 2012
and has been at EF Education First since then.
She have been running the creative group,
The Studio of EF Tours, as Director of
Project Management. In February she takes
on a new role as Director of Group Sales
and Marketing for Go Ahead Tours, EFs
adult travel business. Her family is doing
well. Haley is 15, Lucy 13, and Coco 9, with
husband Steve is continuing to love life as an
entrepreneur, launching into another new
venture with his partner. They live in Dover,
Mass., just outside of the city, but, Robin
says, EF is in Cambridge right down the
road from MIT if anyone wants to grab cofee
or lunch sometime and reconnect.
In January 2010, Lissa Harris (Science
Writing, 08) and her wife Julia Reischel
started watershedpost.com, an online local
news website for the rural Catskills in upstate
New York. The site runs general news, but
they have a focus on water politics, land use,
environment and agriculture issues that are
key in the Catskills. More recently, they have
been going analog, with a series of niche
magazines; in November, they launched our
frst print Catskills food guide.
Professor Heather Hendershot was featured
in September by the MIT News Ofce. She
described how growing up in a Quaker
family in otherwise conservative Christian
Birmingham, Alabama, came to infuence
her interest in gender studies and her focus on
the fre and brimstone versions of conser-
vative television shows and activist battles to
have particular shows taken of the air.
Liwen Jin (CMS, 08) is currently working for
the Marketing Strategy and Planning team in
Liberty Mutual Group Boston ofce great
team and exciting projects. He got married
in October 2012 to Dawei Shen a former
Ph.D. student in MIT Media Lab. They
moved to Brookline, Mass., in January. Life
is good! says Liwen.
Trent Knoss (Science Writing, 13) is the
digital editor at Backpacker Magazine in
Boulder, Colorado, reporting on bears,
mountaineering, and the Arctic.
Hannah Krakauer (Science Writing, 12)
accepted the role of Senior Communica-
tions Specialist at the Allen Institute for
Brain Science, a Seattle nonproft institution
dedicated to accelerating the pace of neuro-
science research using a big science approach.
In October, Alan Lightman, Professor of the
Practice of the Humanities, published The
Accidental Universe: The World You Thought
You Knew. The book is a meditation on
the unexpected ways in which recent scien-
tifc fndings have shaped our understanding
of ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
Ovations came from the Boston Globe
(Readers will appreciate the passionately
argued belief that human perception and un-
derstanding can accommodate a physical and
a spiritual universe, and that both the known
and the unknown are causes for scientifc
speculation as well as pure wonder.) and
Salon (Whatever the subject, he writes with
a limpid serenity and frankness that feels as
fresh and as clarifying as a spring rain.)
In September, Allison MacLachlan (Science
Writing, 11) started a new job at Owlkids,
a childrens book and magazine publishing
company in Toronto with a great non-fction
and science focus. She is enjoying writing
print and online content, managing projects,
and working on marketing strategy. She also
blogs regularly for the Canadian Science
Writers Association.
Lauren Maurer (Science Writing, 12) got
married on January 4
th
to Noel Trew, a
classmate before she came to MIT, and who
was my main support/sounding board/
fanboy during my time in the Science
Writing program which is at least part of
why I decided I wanted to marry him.
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
26 in medias res
Stephanie McPherson (Science Writing,
11) married Jacob Miller, an S.M., 11, in
Mechanical Engineering, on October 6
and who was the frst person she met at MIT.
Assistant Professor Seth Mnookin partnered
with literary agent Andrew Blauner and
fellow writers Dennis Lehane, Susan
Orlean, and more on Our Boston: Writers
Celebrate the City They Love. $5 from every
sale of the anthology went to the One Fund,
a group aiding Boston Marathon bombing
victims and their families. Mnookins work
on the autism vaccine controversy was also
included in the Open Lab 2013 anthology of
the best science writing online.
In January, the Boston Globe highlighted
Associate Professor of Digital Media Nick
Montforts talk on the Atari 2600, part of
the Game Labs Push Button series during
IAP. The Guardian followed up by naming
Montforts book Racing the Beam one of
their Six best gaming books. Montfort
has also has been completing the book Ex-
ploratory Programming for the Arts and Humani-
ties for MIT Press, giving presentations and
workshops in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and
the U.S., and developing several creative
projects, including pi-based poem Round,
Duels Duets with Stephanie Strickland, the
collaboration Three Rails Live, the computer-
generated book World Clock, and the VIC-20
demo Nanowatt, which was done with one
MIT and one remote collaborator. Montforts
book of poems #! (Shebang), which consists
of sections of code followed by output, will
be published by Counterpath Press. In March
Montfort and Icelandic/American artist Pll
Thayer will have an exhibition at the Boston
Cybararts Gallery, Programs at an Exhibition.
Montfort is continuing work on Slant (a col-
laborative story generator), on other systems
that model literary and poetic processes, and
on investigations of porting, translation,
modifcation, adaptation, the issuing of new
editions, and other ways of developing digital
media work from existing digital media
sources.
After graduating from the inaugural class,
Maywa Montenegro (Science Writing, 03)
spent fve years as an editor and staf writer
at Seed magazine in New York. She is back
on the academic circuit, halfway through her
third year as a Ph.D. student at the University
of California Berkeley. Her dissertation is
still in lump-of-clay state, but she is inter-
ested in the politics and political ecology of
food systems, with a likely emphasis on seeds.
Susan Nasr (Science Writing, 06) is grad-
uating from medical school this April,
becoming a family doctor, and is writing a
newspaper article on how the Afordable
Care Act is beginning to change primary care
in Rochester, NY.
The Education Arcades creative director
Scot Osterweil authored a piece hosted on
Boston.coms State of Play blog about his
work developing the ethics-focused game
Quandry with Learning Games Network,
Fablevision, and Marina Bers of Tufts Uni-
versity. He repeated our shared chorus when
it comes to the purpose of games: We dont
believe that playing the game will automati-
cally help players take better perspectives in
their own lives, but we think the game rep-
resents a playful way of introducing ideas that
can be further developed through refective
conversation with others.
Salt Lake Citys Deseret News interviewed
recent grad Chris Peterson (CMS, 13) about
the Minerva Project, an attempt to provide
Ivy-quality education (and Ivy-level profes-
sional credibility) online. He was doubtful
it would reach the non-elite, as intended.
Peterson said he believes that Minervas
cost, though lower than costs at top-tier
U.S. universities, will still be out of reach for
many meritorious students, especially those
from Third-World countries. Peterson also
reclaimed my throne as King of the Internet
for MITAdmissions, where I direct digital
strategy, lead several strategic recruitment
initiatives, and help decide whom to admit to
MIT. He has been teaching in CMS/W, as a
TA for CMS.950 in the fall and as co-instruc-
tor for CMS.400 in the spring, and continues
some research projects in the Center for Civic
Media on mapping banned books.
Just after the fall term began, lecturer John
Picker had the pleasure of welcoming baby
Eleanor to the world. She, along with her
mother, is doing well, and she smiles often,
especially at her older brother Alexander
and her refection. During all that and while
teaching, Picker put the fnishing touches on
a chapter about the origins of the telephone
booth for the revised edition of The Auditory
Culture Reader (due out sometime this year
or next) and joined the editorial board of
Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences,
whose inaugural issue will be published by
Bloomsbury in 2015. A paperback edition
of The Victorian World, containing his essay
Auditory Anxiety and the Advent of
Modernity, was published by Routledge in
November, soon to be followed by a Kindle
version.
Talieh Rohani (CMS, 09) has been working
for Rosetta Stone since April. She was one
of the product owners of the Advanced
English for Business Solutions, which has a
web and mobile presence. She also launched a
prototype for an oral fuency application that
has a powerful speech recognition engine.
Currently, she is working on enhancing
the LiveMocha community platform and
launching a new product line for kids. Over
the past year, Rosetta Stone has transformed
itself, from selling boxes in the airports to
creating mobile/tablet applications and end-
to-end e-learning language solutions. It has
also entered brain ftness and Math/Science
market. Talieh is engaged to Arash Shahan-
gian, whom she met via Facebook. They are
planning to get married in the fall and visit
Japans Snow Monkeys for their honeymoon.
Over the past few months, she have developed
a passion for K-drama and has started learning
Korean. She highly recommends Boys Over
Flowers as well as Personal Taste.
Aviva Hope Rutkin (Science Writing, 13)
recently started as a reporter at New Scientist.
Interim Head of CMS/W Edward Schiappa
was named Head, proper, in December.
His textbook with John Nordin Argu-
mentation: Keeping Faith With Reason was
released by Pearson in August, and his most
recent scholarly book, Classical Greek Rhetori-
cal Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, was
spring 2014 27
P E OP L E , P L AC E S , T HI NG S
released in paperback in January. He also gave
several talks at a conference in November,
including The Phenomenal Text of Michael
Moores Sicko (with Daniel Ladislau Horvath
and Peter B. Gregg), Discussion of the 2013
Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and
Prop 8, and Boston Strong: Commodity,
Identity, or Both?, each presented at the
Annual Meeting of the National Communi-
cation Association in Washington.
In November, Megan Scudellari (Science
Writing, 08) received the Evert Clark/
Seth Payne Award from the National Press
Foundation, given to one top young science
writer annually for outstanding reporting and
writing. She also moved back to Boston in
and is happy to be a Massachusetts resident
again. Megan and her husband welcomed
their second child, a boy, born December 5
th
.
They also have a two year old girl.
Morgan Sherburne (Science Writing, 09)
recently left her job of three years as the
outdoors and environment reporter for the
Petoskey News-Review in Petoskey, Michigan.
She has started as a science writer for the Uni-
versity of Floridas Health Communications.
David Spitz (CMS, 01) is now President and
Chief Operating Ofcer of RebelMouse, a
freemium content publishing and distribu-
tion platform from the team behind Buzzfeed
and Hufngton Post. As of January, Rebel-
Mouse was reaching roughly 20 million
unique individuals a month across hundreds
of thousands of sites.
Abe Stein (CMS, 13) is working in the com-
munications ofce at Wheaton College,
applying knowledge he garnered in the CMS
program to many diferent projects. He is also
working as a researcher and strategist with
Azubu, an eSports web-streaming company,
which keeps him active and engaged in the
sports media and videogame felds. After
graduation, he and wife Morgan and son
Ezra moved to their new house in Pawtucket,
Rhode Island, and are enjoying living in the
wee bitty state tremendously.
I think were going to see continued growth
on the indie side, Philip Tan (CMS, 03) told
the Boston Globe about Fire Hose Games
launch of a Boston-based game industry
incubator, but Im not sure were going to
see anywhere near the same rate of growth
on the Triple-A side, referring to big-budget
game development. The barrier for entry is
always dropping, and I think were going to
see more opportunities for very small teams
to recover their costs and make a proft on
top of it.
Associate Professor T.L. Taylor had a busy,
but exciting fall semester. She keynoted at
Viennas Future and Reality of Gaming con-
ference, as well as being invited as plenary
speaker at the Association of Internet Re-
searchers conference and McGills Partici-
patory Condition symposium. Her article
Words with Friends: Writing Collabora-
tively Online (co-authored with Boellstorf,
Nardi, and Pearce) was published in the ACM
journal Interactions. She was also featured on
the Social Media Clarity podcast, discussing
her latest book project on live-streaming, as
well as quoted in pieces at NBC News and
Pomona College Magazine.
Iris Monica Vargas (Science Writing, 08)
published her frst book in September, and it
has remained on Amazons Bestsellers List for
the past four months. It is a poetry book about
the process of dissecting a human being for
medical purposes, written from the perspec-
tives of the medical student who performs
the dissection and the donor who ofered his/
her body to medicine. It has received great
reviews and it seems to have a life of its own
considering it was published by Terranova,
a very small publisher of fction in Puerto
Rico.
Kenrick Vezina (Science Writing, 11) left a
year-long tenure with the Genetic Literacy
Project, jumping into freelancing and looking
for new opportunities.
Professor Jing Wangs two articles Culture
as Leisure and Culture as Capital and The
Global Reach of a New Discourse: How
Far Can Creative Industries Travel? were
published in Chinese Media, Routledge, 2013.
She also fnished editing a special issue for
Positions: Asia Critique on Reconsidering
the MIT Visualizing Cultures Controversy.
In October, she few to Lund, Sweden, to
give a talk at Lund University on Change
Makers and New Media Technology: In-
troducing NGO2.0 and a Civic Hackathon
Model in a conference on ICT for Develop-
ment in China. During the same month, she
visited Rice University and participated in
the review of the Chao Asian Studies Center.
Qi Wangs (CMS, 02) frst book, Memory,
Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema, is
to be published in August by the Edinburgh
University Press, as part of its series Edinburgh
Studies in East Asian Film. She is an assistant
professor of flm and media studies at the
Georgia Institute of Technology.
Genevieve Wanucha (Science Writing, 09)
is starting her second year as the writer for
Oceans at MIT, a publication reporting on all
ocean-related research at MIT and partner
institutions such as WHOI. In tandem, she
writes for the website of the MIT Program
in Oceans, Atmospheres, and Climate. She is
at work on her frst book, which will be a
creative work of science writing on human
emotion, plunging into the lives and minds
of neuroscientists, afective scientists, clini-
cians, and patients with a fatal brain disease
called frontotemporal degeneration, a lesser
known dementia that steals emotional insight
and personality.
After graduating from the Science Writing
program in October, Erin Weeks (Science
Writing, 13) started work as a science writer
at Duke University, where she has taken over
from another program alum, Ashley Yeager
(Science Writing, 08).
Michelle Woodward (CMS, 02) has been
living in Beirut since 2011. She has a daughter,
Amina, born in 2009, and her husband,
Waleed Hazbun, teaches at the American
University of Beirut. Woodward is still
working freelance as a photo editor for
Middle East Report magazine (merip.org)
and is also the founding editor of the photog-
raphy page on the e-zine Jadaliyya (photogra-
phy.jadaliyya.com). This semester she has
been teaching a history of photography class
at a local university.
R E S E A R C H G R OU P U P DAT E S
28 in medias res
Going into 2014, were focusing on two
main areas of research: building tools for
community organizers and tools to analyze
online media content.
Chelsea Barabas, Heather Craig, Alex
Gonalves, Alexis Hope, and Jude Mwenda
are exploring the role citizen monitoring can
play in holding elected leaders accountable
for promises they make about infrastructure.
They are designing and piloting a mobile-
based tool called Promise Tracker, which
allows citizens to see evidence documenting
the origin of a promise, collect data about
the status of a promise and then take action
if the promise has not been fulflled. Promise
tracker is being piloted in Brazil in early 2014.
Catherine DIgnazio and Ali Hashmi
are working on new tools that leverage the
Berkman Centers Media Cloud database.
These include The World According To, a
web-based visualization tool that geoparses
information in the database and maps media
coverage by country, and Topic Detector,
which takes a machine learning approach to
analyzing information from news corpuses.
Using Media Cloud in a real world setting
Erhardt Graef, Matt Stempeck and Ethan
Zuckerman conducted a detailed analysis of
media attention surrounding the Trayvon
Martin killing. Their results are outlined in
The Battle for Trayvon Martin: Mapping a
Media Controversy On- and Ofine which
has been accepted for publication.
More than a billion people a month visit
YouTube. Often, they watch the same video.
A fascinating new project is What We Watch,
a browser for trending YouTube videos
developed by Ed Platt and Rahul Bhargava.
Some videos trend in a single country, and
some fnd regional audiences. Others spread
across borders of language, culture, and
nation to reach a global audience. What We
Watch lets us visualize and explore the con-
nections between countries based on their
video viewing habits.
civic.mit.edu
The Education Arcade has undertaken a new
research project in collaboration with Nick-
elodeon. We are surveying the felds of neu-
roscience and congnitive psychology for the
latest fndings on development in children
ages 3-6, and in the light of those fndings
assessing tablet-based apps targeted for those
children. We will assess the current state of
apps, and suggest promising directions for
future design. Caitlin Feeley and Ling Zhong
are leading this efort. Our results will be
presented at our annual Sandbox Summit
(sandboxsummit.org), which will be taking
March 24th and 25th at the Stata Center.
We have also received a grant from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to pilot
games that promote academic literacy. The
games themselves are based on an earlier
Gates funded ESL product, Xenos, created
by our not-for-proft spinof Learning Games
Network. The games were designed by CMS
alum Dan Roy, with contributions from Jesse
Sell. Carole Urbano and Jesse are leading the
pilot. Xenos itself was recently evaluated in
a pilot with Spanish-speaking adult immi-
grants, and results from 13 weeks of game
play exceeded those from comparable or
longer periods of traditional instruction.
In the Scheller Teacher Education Program
(home base for Ed Arcade activity) work
continues on our massively multi-play-
er on-line role playing game, the Radix
Endeavor (www.radixendeavor.org), with
an open beta test beginning this spring. Led
by Eric Klopfer, this project has included
contributions from much of the STEP lab
staf. Eduardo Alvarez has been involved in
quest design, and the development of tutorial
materials.
educationarcade.org
Work on Annotation Studio, a tool to support
close reading and collaborative interpretation
of texts, is well underway. With an NEH
Digital Humanities Implementation Grant
we continue developing and expanding ot.
Kurt Fendt, HyperStudio's Executive
Director, discussed "Humanities as Data"
at Wentworth Institute of Technology's fall
Digital Humanities Speaker Series.
Kurt and Wyn Kelley both gave keynote
addresses about the tool at Hofstra Univer-
sitys Digital Thinking/Critical Thinking
conference where Web Developer Jamie
Folsom also presented Annotation Studio.
We made signifcant progress on our
US-Iran project, including an extensive
redesign of the web application interface, and
a cleanup of the OCR text in the database,
thanks to our resident data wrangler,
Gabriella Horvath. Kurt presented the ap-
plication to the Advisory Board of the Center
for International Studies.
Kurt and Jamie attended a meeting
with French collaborators on the Comdie
Franaise Registers Project where they
presented the work of the lab to a group of
researchers and members of the Labora-
toire dexcellence at the Universit de Paris/
Nanterre. We hosted Writing in Digital
Margins, a workshop on using Annotation
Studio in the classroom.
Weve also added a few new faces to the
HyperStudio team. In the fall, Liam Andrew
and Desi Gonzalez, both graduate students in
the Comparative Media Studies class of 2015,
joined. Rachel Schnepper started as Commu-
nication Ofcer, providing outreach.
Liam and Desi will give a presentation
on HyperStudio: Collaborating with Col-
leagues and Cultural Institutions at The Hu-
manities and Technology Camp, College Art
Association edition. They will discuss a new
project, tentatively titled ArtX, which will
empower users to discover cultural events,
exhibitions, and objects in the Boston area.
hyperstudio.mit.edu
spring 2014 29
R E S E A R C H G R OU P U P DAT E S
The MIT Game Lab started the academic
year by hosting the second annual Boston
Festival of Indie Games, bringing over 5500
attendees, 100 digital game companies and 25
tabletop game designers to the MIT campus
in September. The family-friendly event
included flm and speaker series, a game jam,
and live musical performances.
The Culture of Digital Fighting Games,
written by our researcher Todd Harper, hit
the bookshelves/tablets in 2014. Harper in-
troduced a new class to the MIT syllabus:
CMS.S60 Game Design for Expression. He
recently presented his work at the AoIR in
Denver and the No Show Conference in
Cambridge. At the Digital Games Research
Association conference in Georgia Tech, both
Harper and Mikael Jakobsson gave talks and
represented the lab. Research afiate Kon-
stantin Mitgutsch also edited and released
Context Matters! Exploring and Reframing
Games in Context, collecting the proceedings
of the 2013 FROG Conference in Vienna.
Real-time visualizations developed
by the MIT Game Lab for eSports were
recently featured in several tournaments
such as the prestigious Global StarCraft 2
League in Seoul. Several of our games have
been featured at festivals, including Movers
and Shakers at the IndieCade and A Slower
Speed of Light at the World Science Festival,
Otronicon, and Start//Expogame. Phantoma-
tion was named Best in Show in the Inter-
national Serious Play Awards at the Serious
Play Conference in Redmond, and A Slower
Speed of Light also won Best Student
Developed Serious Game at the Serious
Games Showcase & Challenge at I/ITSEC
conference in Orlando.
In 2014, we also hosted the Global Game
Jam, the QUILTBAG jam, and the Push
Button Game Jam, which was accompanied
by a lecture series on arcade games. We will
ofer the second iteration of our short program
for professionals, Game Development for
Software Engineers, in summer 2014.
gamelab.mit.edu
The ICE Lab published a number of
articles, released multiple projects, and added
new members to its core team. Director Fox
Harrell published his newest book, Phan-
tasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination,
Computation, and Expression (MIT Press), to
wide critical acclaim. U.C. Irvine professor
of informatics Paul Dourish has argued that
the book provides a new basis for under-
standing human-computer interaction and
artifcial intelligence. Likewise, George
Lewis, a professor pioneering research on
computational approaches to improvisa-
tion at Columbia University has called it a
bold and audacious view of the relation-
ship between computing and the imagina-
tion, adding this is what a groundbreaking
book looks like. The team welcomed new
graduate researchers in Comparative Media
Studies, Jason Lipshin and Ainsley Suther-
land both talented theorist-practitioners.
Computer Science and Artifcial Intelligence
Ph.D. students Chong-U Lim and Dominic
Kao have been thriving and pushing forward
in the areas of modeling identity in social
media, games, and related educational tech-
nologies. With the semesters new infusion
of energy, the team was able to make strides
on several projects related to Chimeria, a
platform for creating nuanced social catego-
rization models in digital media such as social
networks and video games. Chimeria was
used to build a computer role-playing game
scenario that models phenomena such as social
stigma, stereotyping, and racial profling.
An article about the system was designated
an exemplary paper at the Foundations of
Digital Games 2014. Finally, ICE Lab alumni
Jia Zhang is now a graduate student nearby at
the MIT Media Lab; Sonny Sidhu is a game
developer at Insomniac Games; and Ayse
Gursoy is a now a Ph.D. student in the School
of Information at the University of Texas.
icelab.mit.edu
The Mobile Experience Lab steered a
workshop Designing Interactions: Rethink-
ing the MBTA Ridership Experience in
collaboration with Massachusetts Bay Trans-
portation Authority (MBTA). The workshop
explored the question: How can new media
technologies be used to connect the Boston
MBTA station services to public transit pas-
sengers by designing innovative experiences?
Through the workshop participants from
multiple disciplines developed and tested
concepts. Students worked in clusters to
conduct ethnographic research of the transit
system and develop working prototypes.
The lab also initiated a project in collabo-
ration with ENI, an Italian multinational oil
and gas company to imagine a fuel station for
the future. Future fuel stations must consider
both physical architecture and digital
services. The focus involved research on user
trends and station capabilities. Findings from
ethnographic and secondary research were
distilled to develop a CAVE (computer aided
virtual environment) pump experience that
was implemented at the ENI headquarters in
Milan, Italy.
The Jiangnan University School of Design
in Wuxi, China awarded Federico Casalegno,
the Director of the Mobile Experience Lab,
an honorary professorship. Research papers
authored by researchers at the lab have been
accepted by various journals and confer-
ences. Designing synchronous Interactions
for the Fenestration System of a Prototype
Sustainable Dwelling was accepted as a
research paper by ASCAAD 2013 in Saudi
Arabia. Social Sustainability in Design: The
Window as an Interface for Social Interac-
tion and Reinventing Financial Learning
for the Unbanked and Under-banked in
Brazil have been accepted for the Human
Computer Interaction Annual Conference to
be held in June 2014 in Greece.
mobile.mit.edu
R E S E A R C H G R OU P U P DAT E S
30 in medias res
OpenDocLab began the semester with a new
visiting fellows program. From a confict
photo journalist creating interactive installa-
tions around issues of combat to a flmmaker
exploring gender through an interactive
game experience, these artists, technologists,
and scholars joined the OpenDocLab team to
experiment and push the boundaries of docu-
mentary storytelling and scholarship. Open
Doc Lab has been a great space for profes-
sional growth, said fellow and interactive
documentary maker Suvi Helminen, for
sharing and discussing ideas about emerging
documentary forms, and for getting qualifed
feedback on the development of my own
interactive work. Added fellow Karim
Khelifa, In my journey as a storyteller and
war correspondent, the OpenDocLab at the
MIT has been key in opening my mind to
unknown technological possibilities and to
start implementing tomorrows interactive
and immersive techniques for my current
project The Enemy.
Katerina Cizek, an Emmy-winning in-
teractive documentary pioneer from the
National Film Board of Canada, is back as
a Visiting Artist this year. She is collaborat-
ing with MIT researchers on a documen-
tary about digital citizenship in suburban
and urban highrises around the world. She is
creating a survey tool on an i-Pad that will
collect data and serve as the basis for her doc-
umentary.
OpenDocLab continued its speaker series
including a talk from Glorianna Davenport,
Media Lab Research Scientist and interac-
tive cinema pioneer, and Professor Vincent
Harding, a historian from Harvard who uses
digital mapping and data visualization as part
of his research practice.
We are working with the Tribeca Film
Institute to create a Social Justice Media
Impact Working Group. The group will
consist of researchers and practitioners in
a variety of media-related felds who are
currently looking at questions of social
impact and how to measure it. Prof. Sasha
Costanza-Chock is the lead principal inves-
tigator on the project. We are organizing a
March convening.
The other big news is the launch of
_docubase (docubase.mit.edu), a curated,
participatory database of the people, projects,
and technologies transforming documenta-
ry in the digital age. Katie Edgerton, CMS
alum worked tirelessly all summer to fll
the database with interesting projects and a
robust taxonomy. Research Assistants Julie
Fischer and Sean Flynn continued the work
in the fall preparing the database for its soft
launch in November at the International
Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, the
premiere documentary festival in the world.
As William Uricchio explains, The goal is
twofold: to attract audiences and participa-
tion from across disciplines to inspire cross
disciplinary and participatory innovation and
to use the database as a tool to study language
and categorizing trends in the feld. It is in
beta form and we are continuing to build it
out. Take a look. Wed love any feedback.
opendoclab.mit.edu
Recent research in the Trope Tank has
focused on story generation by collaborat-
ing systems, comparing digital works and
their ports and remakes, and the development
of electronic literature in Poland. Dr. Piotr
Marecki is focusing on the last of these; he
joined the Trope Tank in November thanks
to the support of a Fulbright fellowship. Dr.
Marecki came to MIT from Krakow, where
he has served since 2009 as executive director
and chairman of the board of publishing
house Ha!art. This January, an author who
was frst published by Dr. Mareckis press in
2013 received Polands major literary prize,
the Paszport Polityki.
Speaking of presses, Bad Quarto Press
lurched into action in October as Trope
Tank researchers and an afliate from fandom
restored, set up, and used the labs Kelsey
Excelsior 3x5 printing press from the 1890s.
On January 29 the Trope Tank hosts an IAP
workshop on BASIC programming using
fve real Commodore 64 systems from the
1980s. The Trope Tanks Purple Blurb series
of presentations of digital writing, emphasiz-
ing practice and creative work, resumes in the
Spring semester. Finally, two recent Trope
Reports (technical reports from the lab) have
been issued: Videogame Editions for Play
and Study by Prof. Clara Fernndez-Vara
(now at NYU) and Prof. Montfort and No
Code: Null Programs by Prof. Montfort.
trope-tank.mit.edu
Located in MIT Building 14N, room 233
E V E NT S
spring 2014 31
Feb 13 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Play in the Age of Computing Machinery
Games scholar Miguel Sicart of the IT University of Copenhagen
looks at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play
in the age of computers.
Feb 20 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Who Tunes Whom?: Auto-Tune, the Earth, and the
Politics of Frequency
McGills Jonathan Sterne gives a cultural history of auto-tune as a
form of signal processing, drawing on patent documents, interviews,
operational protocols, tuning standards and competing acoustemolo-
gies. The obvious artifce in its most extreme forms points us back
to a centuries-long project to technologize human voices through
standards and tuning. This spring Sterne is a visiting researcher in
the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England and
a visiting scholar in the Department of Music at Harvard Univer-
sity He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The
Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and
numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture.
Feb 27 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Music, Culture and Transformation
Meredith Schweig explores the gender politics and practices of the
Taiwan rap scene, drawing on long-term feldwork with the islands
hip-hop community and invoking emergent scholarly discourses on
East Asian and global masculinities.
Mar 6 | 5:00 PM | E14-633 | Communications Forum
Henry Jenkins Returns
Legendary former MIT professor and housemaster Henry Jenkins
returns to the Forum for a conversation about his time at the Institute
and the founding of CMS as well as his path-breaking scholarship on
contemporary media.
Mar 13 | 5:00 PM | 4-231
Kate Crawford
Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (Social
Media Collective), a Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic
Media, a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU,
and an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales.
She researches how people engage with networked technologies, and
analyze the political, cultural, legal, philosophical and policy-making
implications. She has done interview-based studies in Australia, India
and the US, in big cities and in very small towns. Crawford is in-
terested in how networked data becomes part of our understanding
of knowledge, privacy, democracy, intimacy and subjectivity. Her
frst book Adult Themes was published by Pan Macmillan, and she is
currently working on a new book.
Mar 20 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
The Antidote: Reporting from Inside the World of
Big Pharma
Barry Werths most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big
Pharma, gives an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at how a
cash-starved startup became one of the great triumphs of American
bio-tech innovation.
Apr 3 | 5:00 PM | Location TBA | Communications Forum
Science in Fiction
Hanya Yanagihara, Alan Lightman, and Rebecca Goldstein discuss
the unique challenges of respecting the exacting standards of science
in fctional texts.
April 10 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Natural Vision vs. Tele-Vision: Defning and
Managing Electronic Color in the Post-War Era
Susan Murray on the discourses that framed and managed color use
and reception not only in the standardization period, but also during
RCA and NBCs early attempts to sell color to consumers, sponsors,
and critics.
Apr 24 | 5:00 PM | 66-110 | Communications Forum
Online Reading and the Future of Annotation
Using the tools of online textual annotation, readers can collaborate
on annotating or interpreting a work, make their annotations public,
and respond to interpretations by others.
May 1 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
Tarleton Gillespie
Gillespie is a Professor in the Department of Communication at
Cornell University and the author of the book Wired Shut: Copyright
and the Shape of Digital Culture. He is currently teaching at the Commu-
nication department of Cornell University, as an associate professor,
with an afliation with the Information Science program and the
Science & Technology Studies department. He also serves as a non-
residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society
at the Stanford Law School. Gillespie has been awarded the Young
Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in the College of Agriculture and
Life Sciences at Cornell University; he was also the commencement
speaker for the Information Science/Information Science, Systems
and Technology majors at Cornell University for 2007.
May 8 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
(To Be Announced)
Stayed tuned to cmsw.mit.edu.
A current schedule, including conferences and special events, is available at
cmsw.mit.edu/events.
Miss an event? Catch up at cmsw.mit.edu/podcasts.
Spring 2014 Talks
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Building E15, Room 331
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 02139
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