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Comparative Media Studies Comparative Media Studies Established as a graduate program in AY2000 and as an undergraduate major in AY2008, Comparative Media Studies (CMS) infuses the study of contemporary media (including film, television, and digital systems) with both a broad historical understanding of older forms of human expression and an awareness of the constant interplay of emerging technology and new media. The program embraces theoretical and interpretive principles drawn from the central humanistic disciplines of literary study, history, anthropology, art history, and film studies and aims for a comparative synthesis that is responsive to the distinctive emerging media culture of the 21st century. Students in the program are taught to explore the complexity of our media environment by learning to think across media and to see beyond boundaries imposed by older medium-specific approaches to the study of audiovisual and literary forms. The comparative and cross-disciplinary nature of both the graduate and undergraduate programs is embodied in a faculty drawn from the Anthropology; Foreign Languages and Literatures (FLL); History; Architecture and Art; Literature; Music and Theater Arts (MTA); Philosophy; Writing and Humanistic Studies (PWHS); Science, Technology, and Society; Media Arts and Sciences; Political Science; and Urban Studies and Planning programs. Approximately 25 faculty members teach subjects in CMS. The graduate program consists of a two-year course of study leading to a master of science degree. The program aims to prepare students for careers in fields such as journalism, teaching and research, government and public service, museum work, information science, corporate consulting, media industry marketing and management, and educational technology. Our recent graduates are working in fields such as higher education, teaching, journalism, and photojournalism, and at media and technology consulting firms, media production companies, and software firms. The undergraduate program, formally approved by the Institute’s faculty as an interdisciplinary major in 2008, mirrors the graduate program in concept and ambition and has been experiencing steady growth since its inception. As in the past, CMS has an impressive roster of funded research projects and outreach activities. The program is still regrouping from the a turning point reached in 2009, when, despite great achievement, CMS was still unable to grow beyond its initial two full-time faculty members and lack of section status. As a result, it lost professor Henry Jenkins, founder and one of two directors/faculty members. Graduate admissions have been frozen for AY2010 and AY2011 while the undergraduate program continues unaffected. Research Themes CMS research themes cross academic disciplines and involve both traditional and emerging communications media, establishing a focus for public presentations, research agendas, and curricular initiatives. The primary research themes are: MIT Reports to the President 2009–2010 5–20 Comparative Media Studies • The GAMBIT Lab—creation and study of innovative entertainment digital gaming • Convergence culture—understanding the new media landscape • The education arcade—pedagogical potentials of computer and video games • Informed citizenship and the culture of democracy • Global culture and media • Media in transition • Transforming humanities education These research themes infuse our academic program, help to shape our outreach activities, and attest to our commitment to bridging disciplines within the Institute and between the Institute and the world. The themes find tangible form in the research projects described below. Projects The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (http://gambit.mit.edu/) is a five-year research initiative that addresses important challenges faced by the global digital game research community and industry. This initiative focuses on identifying and solving research problems using a multidisciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore’s digital game industry. Funded by the Media Development Authority of Singapore, the initiative builds collaborations between MIT students, faculty, and staff and their counterparts in Singapore, who bring a range of competencies, including technical skills, conceptual design, game design, visual arts, and sound design in order to translate research into small, polished, playable games. Sister laboratories in Cambridge and Singapore facilitate the necessary multidisciplinary interaction, creative exchange, and agile software development among GAMBIT’s international researchers, students, and developers. In 2010, the Princeton Review and GamePro Magazine identified GAMBIT as the 8th Top Game Design School in a survey of 500 schools across the US and Canada. Microsoft will distribute the sequel of “CarneyVale: Showtime,” GAMBIT’s grand prize winner in Microsoft’s 2008 Dream-Build-Play Challenge and finalist in the 2009 Independent Games Festival. “CarneyVale: Showtime” was also selected the winner of the 2009 PAX 10 Independent Games Showcase at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Developed with CMS’s Education Arcade, the educational game Waker was a finalist for the 2009 Indie Game Challenge in Las Vegas. Waker and Dearth, a puzzle game developed with CSAIL, were also selected for the Boston Indie Showcase at PAX East, a Boston game convention with over 60,000 attendees in 2010. Snap Escape, GAMBIT’s photography game for Facebook, was nominated for Best Social Game at the Flash Game Awards in San Francisco. These projects and others—including research on new animation tools and applications of artificial intelligence, digital games for the blind, emotion and metaphor in games, cultural differences in aesthetics, and games for learning—have led GAMBIT to be featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, MIT’s Technology Review, USA MIT Reports to the President 2009–2010 5–21 Comparative Media Studies Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, Wired, bOING bOING, The Onion, EDGE, Gamasutra, and Kotaku, and on the Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, MTV, and CNN. GAMBIT’s researchers, developers, and students have presented their work at SIGGRAPH, DiGRA, the Game Developers Conference, FuturePlay, Media in Transition, the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference, and the Foundations of Digital Games conference, and have contributed essays to such peer- reviewed publications as ACM Transactions on Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, the Symposium on Computer Animation, the Journal of Communication, Games and Culture, New Media & Society, Eludamos: the Journal for Computer Game Culture, and The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. GAMBIT researcher Jesper Juul has published A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and their Players with MIT Press. Series editors William Uricchio, Geoffrey Long, and Jesper Juul are planning to launch the Playful Thinking series of short books with MIT Press in 2011. The MIT Center for Future Civic Media (http://civic.mit.edu/) was established in 2007 as a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and CMS, bridging two established programs at MIT—one known for inventing alternate technical futures and the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change. Funded by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation, the center is developing technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information to support the flow of news in local communities. Examples include developing new technologies to support and foster civic media and political action, serving as an international resource for study and analysis of civic media, and coordinating community-based test beds both in the US and internationally. The center hosts weekly research meetings at MIT, community forums and public events, and the annual Knight News Challenge winners’ conference in June. Highlights from this year include “The Future of Civic Engagement in a Broadband-enabled World” (http://civic.mit.edu/event/the-future-of-civic-engagement- in-a-broadband-enabled-world/), “Communications Forum: Government Transparency and Collaborative Journalism” (http://civic.mit.edu/event/communications-forum- government-transparency-and-collaborative-journalism/), “Communications Forum: Civics in Difficult Places”http://civic.mit.edu/watchlistenlearn/video-civics-in-difficult- ( places/), “Using the Web to Connect Your Community and Encourage Civic Engagement in Cambridge” (http://civic.mit.edu/event/using-the-web-to-connect-your-community- encourage-civic-engagement-in-cambridge/), “The Emerging Fifth Estate: Can the Likes of Twitter, YouTube, and Other Social Networks Help Solve Real Government Problems?” http://civic.mit.edu/event/the-emerging-“fifth-estate”-can-the-likes-of- twitter-youtube-and-other-social-networks-help-so/), and “The Future of News and Civic Media: Knight News Challenge Winners” (http://civic.mit.edu/conference2010/). The center’s research has also been mentioned widely in the press, including Boston television station WBZ, The New York Times, Dan Rather Reports, Philadelphia Metro, and The Boston Globe. The Education Arcade (http://www.educationarcade.org/) seeks to identify the pedagogical potential of games as a medium and to find ways to use games for learning both in and out of the classroom. This year, the Education Arcade completed work on the Kids’ Survey Network, with support from the National Science Foundation. The project developed games that introduced young players to concepts
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