 Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for coming. I am Heather Endershott and the Director of Graduate Studies for the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. And what we are going to do today, I'm going to give you a brief presentation. And some of it, hello Vivek, come on in. Some of it, and the tone of the day is going to be a bit like that. Hello, come on in because we have, I was just imitating what happened. We have a number of people stopping by who have, you know, 10 minutes between class. And so we made certain points to interrupt people to just say, oh, welcome Ian Connery, one of our colleagues only has a few minutes. But we wanted to get as many faculty as possible and lab managers and so on who could come by to sort of show their faces. You can ask them questions later. So there might be a colloquium later. And also they'll be introducing themselves. Shannon Larkin over here is our administrative assistant graduate officer, academic administrator. And she knows all. So she's a good person for you to follow up with about, you know, very specific questions like, wait, where do I put my GRE scores or, you know, this kind of stuff and deadlines and that kind of thing. And it's all on our website too. But there's so much on our website that it can be a lot to navigate. So she can help you with that as well. So I'll give a brief introduction. And then we'll, we already have one of our professors. Do you have a ball? Do you want to sit in here? This is sort of the official spot. And Anika is one of our grad students and Anika is one of our research scientists. So this is our beautiful building, which is just a few blocks away, looking very sort of Ridley Scott movie-ish there. And at CMS, we, as you can see, address the challenges brought about by ongoing and fundamental changes in the technologies and practices of media production, distribution and consumption. And we're not looking, there are a lot of programs out there that are, you know, TV studies, film studies, less than popular music, but things that are kind of siloed by media. And we try to do something that's more dynamic, genuinely comparative, historical, and multidisciplinary. One thing that is confusing for some people who come to the CMSW website is, depending on why they came to the website, what's CMS or what's W. So in a nutshell, comparative media studies merge with writing humanistic studies, I believe, as in 2012. And there are separate undergraduate programs where you can be a major in comparative media studies or a major in writing. A lot of those folks, you can imagine, most people come to MIT are not coming. We have a fabulous humanities program going on here, but they come in more often for engineering or they want to build robots, world domination, you know, that kind of thing. And then they realize how fabulous our humanities are that we require eight humanities classes for the undergrads, and they, you know, which is more than a lot of technologically oriented schools. And they end up double majoring in, you know, writing and rocket science. So we have these two undergraduate programs and we also have two graduate programs. We have the comparative media studies program and the graduate program in science writing, which was established in 1999. So we are part of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. If you've been following the minor, if you've been following the news, you might have noticed that we were recently ranked one of the three best universities for arts and humanities education, along with Harvard and Stanford. And then this was by Time Tire Education, which is a leading British education magazine. And then we ranked number one in the social sciences by that same publication a few weeks later. So that's the propaganda. We're great. We have graduated 90 students or so in comparative media studies. They work in a range of areas. They're about 30% of them go on to pursue doctoral degrees. This is Lacey Lord, another one of our grad students. Hello. I will have her introduce herself in a few minutes. And so about 30% of our class, and it seems to happen every year, if we take in 10 students, about three of them end up pursuing a PhD or some kind of next step in terms of degree. And about 70% go into various kinds of professional endeavors, game design, TV production, management, museum education, not-for-profit work, advertising, marketing. There's a strong civic orientation among a lot of students. So some people go kind of more corporate route. Some people go a more not-for-profit route and are getting into activism and social justice issues. So it's really a wide range. We get about 100 applications each year, and we admit about eight to 10 of that. It's very competitive. Often we want to admit 15, but we just can't pull it off. Part of the reason we can't pull off that large class is that we really want to fully fund everyone who comes in by hook or by crook. So some people come in with outside funding from, say, the Chinese government or, you know, there are various ways that people come from abroad and may have a funding from home, but generally most of the funding we do through research lab sponsorships, that if you come in, you would be assigned to a research lab working about, would you say, 20 hours a week? Is that kind of standard? And that pays your monthly stipend, which is how much currently, Shannon? Just over $2,500 a month. Just over $2,500 a month. That's the kind of crass question that we all have on our minds that I'm just going to tell you right now. Good to know. And it covers your tuition, which is quite a lot of money, right? So you will not come out in debt from having paid MIT tuition for two years. We assign you, you indicate your interest in a particular lab when you apply. We assign you to a lab, but we try to be flexible. We want to make a good match. And we generally do, but we want to make sure that you, we try to make sure that you're happy in your lab assignment. There's, well, I'll tell you about the core in a few minutes. So we'll wait to get to that and to give a sense of the courses you'll be taking if you were here. And I'll just mention that in addition to the coursework, there is a kind of team emphasis that a lot of people doing, working in groups and getting engaged in, you know, doing speaking engagements, publications, involved in service organizations, going to conferences together, this kind of thing. And, you know, when you're in a research lab, you might end up traveling somewhere, let's say over IAP independent activities period. You might end up going with your lab to Sri Lanka to gather data or something like that. So that's, wait, I just made that up, Sri Lanka. But you go to different, we do go to interesting places over, you know, throughout the year and over the breaks and over the summer. And over the summer, a lot of, Shannon remind me, over IAP you are, you may be expected to work in your research lab, but over the summer it varies. Yes, it depends on the lab. It depends on the discretion of the student. And at the discretion of the student. So many students between their first and second year will work on gathering data or reading lots of books or writing or whatever it takes to gear up towards their thesis, which they'll be writing in their second year. It's a very intense program. And, you know, even, you know, sometimes the first or second day, the new students are like, wait, I'm supposed to know what my thesis is now? But actually, we try to bring in students who we feel like are tough enough to early on be like, yeah, I have some really definite ideas. And then you fine tune them and hone them in some people shift directions. But we are looking for people who come in with, you know, some sense of their purpose, why they're here, what they want to pursue, maybe afterwards, or at least in terms of their thesis. So I think, yeah, that covers that. So what does it mean to be comparative? What do we do across media? We do trans media work, that is computational media, the book, the history of the book, games, television, film and video. We do trans historical work, thinking across historical periods, trans cultural work and trans disciplinary work. And I think the trans disciplinary thing is one of the things that will really hit you the most if you're looking at our website and you look at, let's say you're looking at other schools to apply to, often within a program, you'll say, oh, everyone in this program went to an anthropology, has an anthropology PhD, or everyone in this program studied, you know, was a film studies major or, you know, this kind of thing, you get a sense of cohesion, right? We're cohesive, but diverse at the same time. We have a lot of different disciplinary backgrounds in humanities and social and computational sciences. Vivek, for example, American studies, right, as a PhD. I was in a film program in an English department studying television. Vivek, what was your? Informatics, part of computer science. Informatics, yeah. So that just gives you a little taste. Ian Connery, who'll be later, was in anthropology. So it's kind of all over the place, but we make it work. That's part of what's fun and exciting, is exposure to all these different methods and approaches and backgrounds. Who are we? Here's a sample of who we are. I presented via headshots. Look how short my hair used to be, just two years ago. So gives you a sense of who we've got here. And some of these people introduced themselves, I believe Sasha is coming as well. But I mentioned Ian Connery, our anthropologist who works on Japan. Sasha, over there, is civic media. Federico is a professor of the practice who runs the mobile experience lab. Vivek, who will describe this research in just moments. Fox, who does computational work and runs the ICE lab. Imagination computation and expression? Yes. Yeah, ICE. Me, I'm a historian of television. Broadcast media, I also work in conservative media culture. Nick Monfort, who does experimental poetry. That's not the right way to put it. He, computational experimental poetry. He literally teaches machines how to generate poetry for him. And he, look, like one of his side projects now is a book that is entirely written with three letter words. I believe it's called One for the Win. Yeah. I was in a car trip with him once for four hours, and he was like, let's talk about three letter words. Come on. He's just writing down all the three letter words. It's very intense about his words. It's fantastic. Jim Parody, unfortunately, couldn't make it. He's teaching right now. He works on digital humanities and surveillance. Jing Wang has just started an NGO. Is it NGO 2.0? Correct. My room correctly. So William Moricchio does all kinds of things. Television history, film history. He's got a book coming out on algorithms right now. He is the most proliferant and wide-ranging scholar, one of them that I can imagine. T.L. Taylor is a sociologist who focuses on gaming and competitive public gaming events. Esports. Thank you. Esports. You can tell I'm not a video game person. You know that thing with electronic sports. Esports. And Ed Schiappa is the head of our program overall of CMSW. And he's in rhetoric and persuasion. He does a range of media work and sort of classic rhetoric work to give you a sense of some of the more contemporary work. He's got a piece, I believe it's on Michael Moricchio, where he's looking at attitudes of people who view the film and how they are affected by the film, just to give you a specific example. So that's a little bit of who we are. We, as you know, have a number of research labs. These are all up on the website, Civic Media Ice Hyper Studio, which is for digital humanities, mobile experience. And is Federico coming? No. No. Okay. The Game Lab, Open Documentary, and the Creative Communities Initiative. The Trope Tank, that's Nick Monfort's project, and the Educational Arcade. So they do distinct things, but there's also clearly some overlap education arcade. For example, using, you know, digital tools for education is going to overlap in certain ways with Game Lab in terms of the end product, I think, right? That's fair to say. Here are the lab directors to give you a sense of the faces that go with each of these labs. We also have visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows. Some of them are associated with research labs, but not always. Sometimes they teach a course while they're here. So we just have a lot of talented and interesting people passing through. And these are just three examples. So if you go to, you can see there's a lift there if you, well, you can't really see it, but you can find it on the website to all of our postdoctoral and visiting scholars. So for example, Teresa Rojas is a comic scholar who was a predoctoral fellow and I was a postdoctoral fellow at work. She finished her dissertation and stayed on and teaches a range of courses for us, including comics, which is fabulous. Rita has made her, works on religion and media and culture. She's doing a lot of field work on Mormon media production. She's fun to talk to about the Book of Mormon. And Senator Rodriguez is a documentary filmmaker, among other things, associated with the open doc lab. So this is just a little sample of some of the people we have passing through. Some of them are here for more than one year. Some of them just for one year at a time. This reiterates, you know, this is directly from the website, but just gives you a sense of what the structure of things would look like if you were here. Okay, so in your first semester, it's pretty rigid, airtight, first semester, right? You're in media theories and methods one, which is kind of, since people come from a lot of different backgrounds, helps give you a common language for thinking about the theories and methods of media studies. Workshop one is a more sort of hands-on, team-oriented class, often with computational work. Major media texts is a class that I regularly teach that, you know, it's not very revealing. Major media texts, what is that? Gone with the wind or, you know, it could be sort of all kinds of things. I'm teaching this this year around electoral, major media texts of elections and thinking about political campaigns as texts. But the idea is you can take a range of content in this class as long as you are learning how to dissect texts and look at how they're put together. So that's a tool that you could use in your thesis, even if your thesis is not text-based. And then colloquium, which I'm hoping many of you will be attending today, is every Thursday from five to about seven o'clock. And we have a range of speakers, some from our town, some local folks, sometimes within our own department. And today we have an alumni panel. So this is a place to see a range of research, get a sense of different kinds of methods with when we bring in alums, it's useful for current students to see, you know, what are the kinds of things you might do when you're graduated, when you're done and ask some questions, do a little networking perhaps. And then we eat falafel or chicken on sticks. Or shrimp, we had shrimp last week. So it is a little modest reception, it's very nice. The second semester you continue theories and methods too. That's a class I have and teach. And it ends with your thesis proposal, which could change, right? Because then you have the summer to work on it. But the idea is you're sort of lining up, putting all your ducks in a row, as they say, towards writing your thesis. And so you submit a proposal, a continuation of workshop from the first semester on colloquium again. And then you have an elective, which, hooray, there's a million different things to choose from at MIT. And also you can take classes at Harvard at Wellesley, which a few people do because it's a bus ride, but there it's an option. Maths Art. Yeah, Maths College of Art. So it's a range, but most people, if they leave MIT for that elective end up going to Harvard. And then in your second year, media and transition is a history class. Wow, that doesn't sound historical transition, right? But it's looking at transitions from period to period. So if you think about, for example, rise of electrical communication, you could start with a telegraph in the 19th century, go into the telephone, television, or you could back up, like William Marikio does work on television from the 19th and 18th century. How is television imagined as the technology was still slowly developing and didn't quite exist? So it tries to mix up, get away from that kind of teleological historical approach and looks at moments of transition as new media's emerge and new media's. There's a great book by Carolyn Marvin called When Old Technologies Were New. All new technologies become old technologies. So that's a classic goes into those issues and then you've got colloquium again and then two electives, hooray. And then in your last semester, you're doing colloquium and writing your thesis. Some people split the thesis up into two semesters. They sort of do half that first semester and half the second. And if that works well with your work style, that's a good idea. Okay, so then you write your thesis. And I'm sorry, this text is a little small, but these are a few samples of theses from a few years ago. Rather than reading through all these titles, because I do want to move on and stop talking so much, I'll just say that you can go to our website and see a list of former theses that have been written by our students. And most of them are linked up. That is correct, right? Yeah, all of them. There's a few rare examples. Like there's one person I know who worked on industry stuff and it interviewed a lot of people and they were like, you can put this in your theses, but it's kind of off the record. And really it was more, it wasn't full of scathing exposés. It was just she wanted to go into the industry and she was like, I'm not sure I want all this stuff. So that one's available by request. But basically everything is up there. So you can take a look at what's happened before. They're generally 100-page documents, 330-page chapters, 5-page internal conclusion just to give you a general idea. There's some variation. And some of them have a strong creative component where someone say is doing a big data visualization project and then they might write less text and do more coding. But usually it ends up around 100 pages. I'm going to skip that one. Here's a nice example of one of our star graduate students who wanted to graduate school. She's still in graduate school, Molly Sauder, but her book just came out about civil disobedience on the internet with a strong focus on anonymous Molly Sauder. There's a full list of our alumni online. So you can take a look. This is just a nice range of, you know, you can see the kinds of things they do. Digital Directorate of Health Swim. Auditability from 10, Class of 10. SAM4 from 07 is a VP of Innovation Engagement at Fusion, which is an ABC Univision joint venture. We've got Flourish Clink doing transmedia storytelling. What's the name of her TV series? East Low High? Yeah. That's what she's. She's one of the big creative talents on that. I've got someone at the NYU Game Center who's an associate arts professor, someone at Microsoft Research. So you can get a full list online, but that gives you a bit of an idea. I already told you about colloquium. So I'm speeding up now because I want to move on. We have a conference every other year called Media and Transition. This one, unfortunately, we had to cancel. We were a little short staffed. We had so many professors on leave because we all had these big projects to finish up and so on. But you can read a kind of precy of, you know, the last eight media and transition conferences and get an idea of some of the, they always have a central organizing theme and it's a sort of smallish conference where I believe we don't even have competing sessions. Is that right? Is it all, I think it's just linear. So it's a really interesting conference. And that's really it. There's our home page of the website. So I want to open it up to Q&A, but I also wanted to hear from our visitors who come in. So maybe we could start with Veevap. Okay. So my name is Vivek Bald and I've been here, I'm not coming on seven years now. It's 2008. And my background before I decided to get, I got a PhD later in life and my background before that was as a documentary filmmaker, but working very much in DIY style, very small. And my work, both in documentary and now as a scholar, as a historian, has centered around specifically the South Asian diaspora and stories of migration and immigration from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh to the US and Britain. So my documentary films have included a music documentary about South Asian youth and music and anti-racist politics in Britain, another documentary about South Asian taxi cab drivers in New York City. And my current work is a little bit more historical about South Asian undocumented immigrants in the late 19th to mid 20th century who settled in African American neighborhoods. And so that work is work that I'm now pursuing across different media. So this last project that I mentioned, which is called the Bengali Harlem Lost Histories Project exists as a book that was published in 2013. And currently I'm working on a feature length documentary about the same subject as well as an interactive documentary slash or history site, which I'm making under the auspices of the open documentary lab. Is that website available and live at the moment? Not currently. Okay. Do we have an ETA? Because I want them to look. It's so wonderful. I've seen sort of the prototype. I would say sometime in the spring, late spring. Because what, I mean, he's got all these, I mean, you probably describe rather than I can, but he's got these photos up and people go and they're like, that's my grandfather. So you have unidentified photos and you invite people who say immigrants to New York at a certain time to look there and find their relatives and tell their stories and add them. So there's a level of genuine interactivity that I think is really impressive and interesting. There's some weaker interactive documentary out there where the interaction is just like, click on this and you'll see something different that if you click over here, it just doesn't strike me as very interactive. And this is a really genuinely interactive project that grows and develops through the interaction with visitors. It's really sort of committed to the idea of people's histories and also histories of undocumented populations that have existed throughout the 20th century and trying to record, document those stories, those histories through family stories and family photographs in a kind of ongoing way. And the Open Documentary Lab, for those of you who are interested in that, is a relatively recent but very fast growing initiative that we have here that is focused on new forms of documentary storytelling that have opened up with various different kinds of technological changes over the last decade from kind of the ubiquity of cameras on cell phones and what that does to documenting kind of political and historical events to game and virtual reality interfaces as a way of telling what might have been in the past documentary non-fiction kind of story. And we should have the director of that research lab here later, Sarah Wolzen, so she can fill you in more and you can ask some questions too. So yeah, thank you. Thanks. Before we move on to Anika, I just want to note there's coffee and cookies over there and you can get up any time. Don't worry about like, you know, someone's talking, just like go ahead and one of them is only subtly Martika, so if that's what you're going for or not, just take a look at the top of the box to be certain you're getting what you want. But anyway, dig in. Anika, thanks. So I'm a second-year graduate student in CMS and before I came to the program, I studied journalism in my undergrad and worked as a journalist for several years as a science and technology writer in the United States and then also in New Delhi, India. I also did a lot of work with collaboration within journalism and journalism innovation. So I started, while I was living in India, I started a grassroots network devoted to collaboration between journalists and other forms of technologists and then I also did a lot of work with digital product management within the media industry and that was doing, that is what I was doing before I applied to CMS. And so one of the things that brought me here was this joint focus both on media historically as well as exposure to the technology driven culture of MIT and the Media Lab. And yeah, so that's, and then now I'm here and I'm doing my thesis work around issues of how user-generated content interacts with news organizations and using that as a way to understand better how news organizations are reacting to changes in the composition of and relationship they have with their audiences. Great, thank you. I think before we go to Mika maybe Lacey Lord is here. Could you stand up and I'm sorry we don't want you sitting up here, but she is also a second-year, yeah stand up. My name is Lacey Lord. I'm also a second-year master's student. My background, I actually came straight here after undergrad. My background is in English literature and I came in thinking I wanted to work on transmedia type experiences and I have worked on transmedia storytelling projects in the past. I'm actually a research assistant with the Creative Communities Initiative which is it takes an anthropological focus. So if you have questions about that please let me know. And my thesis work is dealing with tablet-based digital comics and particularly looking at considerations of the senses and how haptic editions change the comic experience and also how the panel relates to this great itself. So yeah that's great, thank you. Could either of you mention just a few other thesis projects just so they have a kind of idea of what people are working on? Sure I can actually I realized when Lacey was talking one of the things I didn't mention is that I'm a research assistant in the mobile experience lab also known as the design lab depending on the project involved but and I can I'm happy to answer more questions about that lab for anyone who's interested. And then in terms of thesis projects we have a huge variety. One of our colleagues who's working in the Center for Civic Media, so Sasha knows them well, is interested in creating a new platform for live streaming, civic live streaming, so he's building that platform in partnership with developers there and hoping to actually launch that and or has started testing it in many different contexts. Called DeepStream, right? DeepStream, yeah. So you can go you can go look it up if you're interested. So that's what he's doing is his thesis work. Another one of our good friends and colleagues is looking at she came in with a background in video games and she's an avid player as well and so she's looking at she's actually working with Mika and looking at feminist narratives within video games which is really an interesting space. Whom else? Another one, Lily, another one of our classmates is she actually did a lot of work in radio and she used she's interesting because she kind of has used CMS as a chance to explore a totally different discipline and so she has now started doing a lot of work with urban planning and she spent the summer doing a bunch of research in New Zealand working with an organization there and she's now doing a thesis related to urban planning and has people on her committee from that department too. Okay, so that gives you a nice sample and we're going to hear from Mika. Thank you so much. Mika and then Sasha Kasantistak just came in who works in civic media so we'll do that you too and then I promise Q&A. Okay, so yes my name is Michael Jacobsen and I'm a research scientist at CMS but I'm also the research coordinator for the MIT Game Lab and I think I can describe both my research and what the Game Lab does by how you might interact with me or us if you become a grad student here. So first of all we have teaching so we have for instance an introduction to video game theory class which is a heavy reading class going through in particular the last 10 years of game studies what are the big themes what are the big topics and issues and it's a great grounding for a grad student if they want to write their thesis on anything games related. I also use TAs from the program in that class and that just makes you have to read all that literature even harder. We also play games and practice analyzing them and writing criticism on them in that class. I also teach another advanced class only for grad students on playful and social interaction design so if you're interested in interaction design and exploring research questions by building things that that is somewhere where you can take your project and it's more of a workshop type class where we work on them together and discuss the different topics based on what our projects are. What we also do at the lab is research so my current project is on couch co-op gaming and I've done sort of critical feminist reading of how the second player is being treated in these games and by these socio-technical systems basically what what you find is that there is this idea of the first player being male being a skilled gamer and being someone that almost needs to have their experience protected against what player two is going to do to mess it up when they get introduced into this picture. I think it's based on old negative stereotypes about female gamers that we need to get rid of and actually that's a little bit where Curie Coldwell's thesis project comes in because as you said she's interested in looking at what we tentatively call warm interaction between players or between player and player characters or between different player characters and I think that's a field that we can mine for coming up with better asymmetric co-op gaming experiences. So while I'm planning the next step of my project where I want to work together with developers on coming up with these new interaction modes in co-op games she's looking at what could those be in terms of interaction modes that aren't just instrumental like say you have a game and you need to climb up a ladder if you had another player suddenly you need to climb on the other player to get over the wall but it's kind of the same thing you're doing still if we're introducing different types of interaction modes like caring for other players rather than just helping them over a wall if that's part of the goal of the game then I think we can have more interesting interactions going. So that's the second way you can be involved she is a research assistant in the lab so she's working with me on this project in between mine my project and her thesis project the third thing that is like the third pillar of what we're doing in the game lab is actually playing games we think it's really important to not just study through books or other literature or think about these things but we think we actually have to or build these things we have to also do the activity itself to really have an insight understanding of what it's all about so we're doing a lot of that and we're involving the students a lot we try to play games at least once per week what we're doing right now is we've been playing a lot of board games that have themes based around imperialism and colonialism and we're doing a critique where there's going to be a series of blog posts and maybe a journal article on the problems we see with how these themes are dealt with my blog post is tentatively titled stories of imperialism and colonialism retold somewhat lovingly so I think that's problematic. Thank you Sasha would you mind coming over here because this is where our microphone is for the live stream and I guess is the camera right at the computer right there? Yes. Maybe Sasha can just take my chair. Okay we're trying to look like a group photo. Hi so I'm Sasha Kostanza-Chak I'm associate professor of civic media in comparative media studies and writing. The work that I do and the kinds of projects that I work on with students are projects at the intersection of social movements and media and media technology practices and the way that we like to work is typically through participatory action research and participatory design so for example we have one large project that we're working on which is the transformative media organizing project and we're working with LGBTQ and two-spirit organizations around the United States to learn about what what kinds of queer media activism is happening now what types of tools and technologies are organizations sort of using and that's paired with a Skillshare series where community organizers from groups that are working at different intersections of race and class and rural urban location and disability justice and the prison system and queer organizing are every month sort of doing an online Skillshare where they'll talk a little bit about the work that they're doing and then do some type of hands-on yeah Skillshareing with other groups that are participating you know remotely via Google Hangout. So tomorrow actually at noon eastern if you go to transformativemedia.cc you can see a Skillshare by the two-spiritsjournal.com which is a new project that's launching out of the work that we're doing to sort of highlight the histories of various genders that existed in many native communities in the United States prior to settler colonialism and the erasure of those other genders. So we're doing that. I teach this course that I am really proud of which is the Collaborative Design Studio and that course is different every time we do it but the basic principle is always that we're partnering with a community-based organization or a number of them to develop some type of media or technology project together and in the past we've focused on surveillance and counter-surveillance technology so we partnered with the Cambridge Domestic Violence Working Group to develop a project around you know people who are being surveilled by their intimate partner who's abusing them and the different apps and tools that abusers are using and how do you detect if those apps have been put on your phone or we partnered with Detention Watch Network which is a nationwide advocacy organization that's looking at the detention and deportation system under the Obama administration which is deported over you know two million people since Obama came in and they developed a sort of interactive sort of mini-documentary piece about that system and what it means and where it came from and where it might be going. In the spring we're going to be doing the co-design studio focused on cooperative worker-owned cooperatives so there's this interesting conversation happening right now. You probably see there's sort of a backlash happening around Uber and Airbnb so there's a conversation about the on-demand economy and what it means for workers and what it means for sort of the future of jobs as well as of course what it means in terms of you know as consumers are accessed to these services so the idea is that you know Silicon Valley is disrupting a lot of industries in ways that might be beneficial for consumers and in some cases might also be beneficial for workers but they're also sort of setting themselves up as intermediaries to capture a lot of value on the transaction fees from you know something like Uber taking a ride so the question is can we do disruption that does more than just replace the crappy old boss with the crappy new boss that has even more information about everybody in the system and so in the spring we'll be partnering with worker-owned cooperatives to develop new platforms for the on-demand economy that would be actually owned by the people doing the labor in these systems or their organizations. So there are some of the types of projects and I think it's all sort of guided by sort of shared sort of commitments to these ideas these principles of both research and making that's done in partnership with existing community-based organizations and that ends up sort of owned by the community that you're working with so rather than sort of coming in to do sort of extractive research about a community or get an idea for your startup that you kind of like take from a design process that ends up sort of benefiting you as an individual most or your company or the venture capitalists who back to you our sort of ideas are about like how do we build things in community with organizations that that already have emerged organically from communities that are most sort of targeted by structural racism, gender inequality, heteronormativity, etc. So yeah thank you thank you well I believe we have we're going to have some lab managers starting to come in around three o'clock that clock is not adjusted for daily savings time so we have a good 17 minutes or maybe a little more for just Q&A open discussion and you can address your questions generally or to anyone specifically up here. Hi I'm wondering about what some of the grad students were saying about people who came in and then were pursuing a slightly different view from what they came into so for me my ethnographic work is in diaspora but I also started working at a non-profit that does literary advocacy and I'm interested in doing stuff that helped me build tech for that setting project and I'm wondering how much how that's possible to do two projects within the standard material thing or at most that we will be streamlined depending upon. Okay before you answer can I ask that you either summarize or repeat the question for the microphone for our online viewers? Uh-oh uh this person what's your name Jill Jill has two different projects and is one and one of the oh my goodness I was paying attention but I'm having trouble summarizing um she's wondering about you know in terms of how her end product or thesis is she going to be able to do both of these things will she have to merge them together and you know ultimately a thesis has to be focused on you know one thing so unless your topics kind of merge toward each other in certain ways you're probably going to end up pursuing one essay a major project for a class or even for two classes I mean they're different you know I encourage in my own classes you know okay the class is major in media text maybe we're not doing textual analysis but is there a topic you can pick that would segway into a chapter of your thesis um with further revisions and so on and so um there are different ways you can pursue you know separate interest sets but you don't want to be overly ambitious with a thesis that is too ungainly and is more like a phd dissertation than a master's thesis. Sure um I to add to that I was going to mention that both of the things that you specifically mentioned but also I'm sure this is true for other people who have multiple interests both of those like both the tradition of like ethnography as a basis for analysis and drawing conclusions as well as building tools for civic intervention and participation are things that have like a strong tradition within CMS as well as a really rich and vibrant community in the broader Cambridge area so I know that people have also kind of addressed that by potentially participating in like working groups or finding other partners to work on projects for example like this the second space that you mentioned is I think you could find people who would be really interested and have a lot of experience and be willing to talk about that with you even outside the thesis environment and I think people do do that yeah as well. Thanks that's helpful. Yeah and it points to I mean there's a lot of resources in Cambridge, Massachusetts it's like a yeah or you know in the area in Boston too it's like a kind of brain trust in a lot of ways so you can always you can reach out and find things outside of just this little tiny area. Yeah it's hard not to find them actually there's so many yeah exactly. Can I ask a question? Sorry no you're here you go. Hi I have a question more for the students in the program. I know you said that you came straight from undergrad I too I'm a senior now in undergrad so I was just asking if you have any tips for people who don't have these years of professional experience who are coming straight from undergrad how to strengthen your application and what to focus on when you are applying? I'll just repeat if you come straight from undergrad how do you strengthen your application since a lot of people applying have more experience etc. So general tips I will say I thought it would be more I thought there would be more of a difference between me and other students who had had more years of experience and really what it boils down to is that there really is not a whole lot of difference in how the program works for you. I will say general tips as far as like focusing like when you're applying I took the route of focusing on projects that I worked on and kind of they were very like CMS in focus in a lot of ways so that kind of helped but I essentially you know provided projects that I worked on I said here's how this would fit into what I would like to do with my masters but I would I would say don't worry too much I think it'll be fine if you have other specific questions. I'm sort of coming from the both side of that where I've been working for a few years so I'm just wondering like of the applicant pool like is it mostly undergrads of any professionals or is it going to be split and the makeup of the classes to 8 to 10 students is it typically even? The question was is there someone who's been working for a few years and wants to get a sense of what the mix is of the kinds of applicants we get and it's a mix we generally get fewer people straight out of undergrad and those people who we accept are straight out of undergrad are special because they have a special sense of direction and so on because often there's a just a kind of maturation as a scholar, as an intellect, as an activist whatever you're doing that comes with having a little space in between so you know in many ways you're at an advantage for having done something between the two you know but I would say in your application don't be worrying like how can I spin this just say what you're interested in what you want to do okay yeah. As far as the breakdown goes I will say our cohort has has quite a wide range of career yeah so on one hand we have Gordon who has been working for many years and we have a few other people who've been working for years and then on the other end we do have a few people who are either I'm just out but then there are a couple of that have only had like one or two years between undergrad and grad and I would say the new cohort is a little more skewed to the just like a couple of years out of school age range but still still varied and when we put together the class we're seeking diversity on a variety of levels and we like to have a cohort that you know they're not all similar right they all they're doing different kinds of things and sometimes if we're debating between two candidates it's it's not they're both great it's just their work is too similar and which one can we pick which you know which one is a better fit so we really want to have an interesting range of people. Other questions? Hi my name is Chelsea and I'm wondering if you expect from prospective students to come in with a specific research method on top of the research goal because or do they have more opportunity to explore a lot of methods in the first year because for me for example I am interested in designing a social platform or technology to include digitally isolated people and I was wondering if you're looking for a more specific method to do that. So the question was so we're looking for people who come in who have already sorted out their method what they want to do and how they will do it I can answer that but does anyone else want to address it? Thoughts? I mean we're here to learn things together you know so if you there's no reason for us to accept students who are already really done you know they already know all the answers they've sorted out everything and they're just going to you know check us off their list or something we want them to come in and experience new things and you know you're if you really you came in without enough background to even have a sense of what's a method and why should I have one look that's you're too raw right but if you come in and you're like not sure what kind of method you want to use while you're here that's why we have classes called theories and methods one and theories and methods two that are your core required classes to introduce you to a variety of methods and get you thinking about which one is the right match for you and how you want to pursue it and some people come in already knowing I'm an ethnographer this is my method this is my you know my research questions and they pursue that or they get here and they're like actually not so much I really want to look at this instead and so that that can happen to you and that's productive that's not like a mistake that's a good thing because you're learning and growing I'll just add something to that which is that it is really valuable to you know figure out before or in the process of doing your application you know which of the research groups you're most drawn to um that will you know that's you'll have seen that's a question on the application and it's important that you not just kind of check it off and say well this one sounds great but really do some research on them so that you can talk meaningfully in your application about why what you want to do might fit within the goals of the research groups yeah that's really helpful and I think some people will check off like all the research groups don't do that they think they're being helpful like I'm so flexible I like everything but actually it's more helpful for us to you know limit it and you know see really where your where the best fit might be for you can I ask a question or two from the youtube apps can I say a thing more about oh that's straight in my eyes I know I just wanted to say also that we we are looking for people who have a strong sense of direction and know what they want to do when they come here but I also think that if you ask the students who have graduated that most of them would agree that the years they spend here is a deeply transformative experience it might be in terms of which methods you're using or a theoretical framework but it could also be like on the level of your worldview so I think that's after all what we're aiming for here to to create change in you as as persons and as scholars but that doesn't mean we want to see a sense of direction already when you're applying yeah so we have a few questions coming from our online participants do you want to stand over here so I have to repeat your question or do you think you're sure yeah thanks hey Andrew webs I'm the person who's answering the chat the question was what does the program look for in a candidate what makes a strong candidate and a strong application and especially they were very concerned about GRE scores I guess that resonates my GRE scores in math were not very good so I'm sympathetic to those people you know uh you know okay I shouldn't say but um uh we we don't have a numeric cutoff like this is the GRE you know um and I believe the scores come in with percentages yes yeah so what percentage you're so that's very helpful for me when I'm looking at applicants I'm like if you're in the bottom 30 percent in your verbal skills that's a red flag that you know you don't have the skills that you're going to need here um but once we get above 80 percent or so I'm like okay you you may be a poor tester you may not be good at these standardized tests and so on so forth so there's no hard like this is the number where we cut off on GREs we do see your GPA as an undergrad and you know that's relevant you know if you're a straight C students you're probably not a good applicant for us and you might you all might be thinking I'm here because I'm a straight A student that's great but you know we get a range of applicants so um so there's a level on which numbers matter um you submit a writing sample and uh that is something people ask a lot of questions about what are you looking for in a writing sample and it's great when a writing sample feels like a really strong match with what we do here in terms of the topic area um but at least when I'm reading them I'm I'm also thinking you know who's a good writer who can really express himself well and so uh if I get a a writing sample on a WC without a technical angle of like modern incarnations you know that doesn't seem directly relevant to our transmedia project I don't automatically go well that's not really right I look at well what's the writing what's the argumentation style try to be flexible um about the topic um if you have something that's very relevant to us that's great uh but some people have a sort of finite group of undergraduate papers and they're like this doesn't seem exactly right but it shows how I express myself great send that send that in so hopefully that that helps a little bit I don't know if anyone who has as anything to add is um yeah I had um sort of an elaboration of that also I seem to remember that when I was doing the application now like a couple years ago um there was a space where I could put in like links to additional portfolios and work and I think I sent links to some of the journalistic articles I had done and I'm wondering if I think there's still a space where people can submit like artistic work or a design portfolio maybe even a tech portfolio and that's something that's looked at also yeah that can be very useful to see of all this person's doing interesting podcasts or they have a blog or just to get a sense again of how they express themselves and so on yeah that's still part of the application process and that can be very handy I think in general we you know we look at all these all the different elements of the application um you know quite holistically there's no one thing yeah um uh but certainly certainly as we've as we've said that um we're we're looking for people who have some um some clarity of direction in terms of of why they've chosen to go to graduate school why they've chosen this particular school um yeah and uh and having a clarity uh the clarity of a project that that person wants to pursue is also you know really um important thing to see um even if as people have said even if once they're here it might go in other directions and I'll add um this is a question students often have and Shannon can you help me with this um of the not the the the recommendation letters there's a certain number that need to be scholarly versus we'd like it if they're if they're all scholarly yeah but um if you if that means you're calling up someone that um you haven't had a class with since freshman year and they probably can't remember you don't use that person use someone who knows you well and can really respond to your ability to succeed in graduate school yeah so we we like all the recommendation letters to be scholarly but if there's one there from you know you were just uh a journalist said interesting you know working magazine or newspaper and your boss writes a good letter for you like that's fine that's a nice part of the of the package but we wouldn't want all the letters to be from that direction in most cases there might be some exceptions but that's the kind of rule of thumb uh Kurt Fent just came in uh do you mind we we have we're we're live here and we can only really hear people they're standing in the area of this microphone would you guys mind coming back here yeah um uh and introduce yourselves and uh this is uh one of our grad students who's working in the lab with Kurt uh yes i am okay why don't we just turn it off so that we're not although i like the spotlight okay do you want a certain do you want to sing a song or something text to quote no no i don't want to empty the room i have to go teach but uh i'm looking forward to reading your applications so okay great welcome it's great to see so many of you interested in in in cms uh so my name is Kurt Fent i direct hyper studio digital humanities at MIT and that's i'm evan i'm a first year student and um one of my lab is hyper studio yeah exactly so we want to briefly talk about you know five minutes yeah um what hyper studio does uh and also how a graduate student an r.a. in the hyper studio is involved in the work that we do so primarily hyper studio deals and explores the ways digital technologies impact the way we do research and we teach and learn in the humanities arts and social sciences so that's basically the the the framework for that uh as part of that we work with faculty at MIT and other universities outside we also have international collaborations on projects that explore on the one hand on a scholarly basis how can we rethink how we do research uh one of the projects for example is with jeff revel here in in this building he's in history he's a professor of uh theater history french theater history so it's exploring how ticket sales of the comédie français which is the major theater in in france it was troupe of the king how they built their repertory and is really looking at the ticket sales from 1680 on how decisions were shaped by influences from uh the political side uh from you know the the creative side and so on so we build tools that allow that but also engage you know an international audience of scholars uh into into that project some of these projects are ongoing for a very long time and we've had many graduate students and r as involved in this project looking at data visualization doing other kinds of research so that's one of the possibilities uh another project that we do in the educational realm is a project that's called annotation studio and that looks at digital aspects collaborative community aspects of close reading and how this is shaped by a social environment in which students go very deep into uh a text it could be a media text right now it's primarily written text but it will be media text fairly fairly soon and how to make connections to other uh texts for example when you read mobidic or any other literary texts of course there are precursor texts you want to make connections to those there are implementations and adaptations in uh different kinds of media you want to link to those so it's really brings up a different understanding of a text uh and uh you know how this could be read and shared and and used for interpretation in a different way so this is these are just two of the projects that we work on and it's always a co-design approach we work with faculty very closely and I'm sure um um you've heard about co-design units which is a very important aspect uh that we do faculty are involved in the team the developers are involved the RAs are involved in the team uh and this is really important we look at the actual need uh that faculty students or other scholars have uh in this project and then we decide you know what's the best approach to do that it's never that the technology is at the forefront you know technology comes in we use open source technology our technology is open source and so on so that's we do that uh in in a range of different projects right now we have four or five five ongoing projects right now but always you know they are different stages um and we also teach a class in digital humanities we contribute to other classes um right and one of the graduate students or you know depending on next year might be more you know are also involved as TAs uh in this class we have an outreach uh you know we do occasionally talks uh workshops and so on and we have a weekly newsletter which you know it's called H plus D uh insights and this is a great newsletter because it basically gives you know sort of our perspective on digital humanities what's going on and right now there are about 700 subscribers to to that newsletter so it's it's a really great and the newsletter is always done by one of the graduate students so I'll hand it over to Evan so he can talk about what he's working on um I also have to go so um thank you for coming thank you all and and any specific questions feel free to email me um thank you um do you want to sit down here um okay on that one again um so uh yeah um I work on a couple different projects of hyper studio um the main project that I spend most of my time working on is a it's sort of a collaboration with um one of the writing professors so like the w and the cmsw um and his name his name's Ken Manning and he he writes about um mostly about like African-American scientists um and so he's had this he's had this uh archive that he's been collecting over the past few decades of um biographical records of um black medical professionals from 1860 to uh 1980 and it's it's like at this point it's it's up to 23,000 um different specific doctors and they have all this great like associated material that is um like correspondence unpublished uh works autobiographies like this whole treasure trove of of content and um so so Ken really wanted to get that content out there for scholars and um and just lay people to start looking through and using um in their own work and so I think um I was you know very early on assigned to this project when I first came in but the great thing about working um half uh in hyper studio is that we can we can use a lot of the the hyper studio tools and resources for this content to create like sort of an online archive for it um and and yeah so so this is what I've been spending most of my time doing and um as far as like what I actually uh do in terms of concrete things it's it there's sort of like three different categories I do I spend a lot of time doing research um like down in the archives looking through the different documents and cataloging them and getting to know them and getting familiar with I also um spend a lot of time thinking about the what the final product for this will be what the the archive will be how it will function who's going to use it what they're going to need to access how they're going to need to access it um and then also just doing sort of uh promotional work um like right now I'm writing a blog post about it we've applied for um a conference presentation about this um this resource uh so yeah um as far as like what my actual time in lab is done it's sort of a combination of those three things okay thank you um do you guys have some questions for them or more generally I'm not great um so this is a question that I guess is directed at everyone but maybe perhaps mostly for the currently world students um certainly I'm really intrigued in the way that CMS is bringing together a diverse range of approaches to media diverse approaches diverse labs and I'm wondering if there and there's certainly a lot of collaborative opportunities within CMS's program and I'm wondering if those collaborative opportunities also resonate across MIT as a broader organization um certainly you those you mentioned earlier the ways in which there are opportunities for people to get involved with the community here in Cambridge in Boston and I'm just wondering yeah I've got the the rest of MIT the non-seministic side right so Jeffrey asks you know we collaborate a lot within it within uh CMS but what are the opportunities to collaborate across MIT and outside of MIT and you know beyond yeah um I think people do that in different ways it is it's one of those things where you it helps to have a sense of the people with whom you might want to collaborate beforehand it's a large institution people are doing especially at the graduate level like very different work um people don't like the institution-wide people may not necessarily always be familiar with what's happening in each program um I know from my own experience I am one of my so we have when we do our thesis work we choose a committee and one of my thesis one of my committee members one of my advisors is actually somebody who runs a group in the media lab which is kind of a neighboring program to us but it's actually not the same program and is more engineering driven um so that's an example of how and that that evolved really naturally from mutual interests he was looking at issues and topics related to news and we became familiar with each other's work and so that that happened really like that was a really good partnership um I know other people have also taken that avenue asked professors from other departments to serve on their advising committees um in other ways as well trying to think if they really have anything to add to that um and it's definitely a very um individual um decision um most of the people that I've interacted with outside of the department I've met at um lectures or um conferences in town and you know just having similar conversations in the same spot and then making a connection that way um as far as like working on a collaborative project it's mostly been CMS driven for me but that's not like a a choice I've made it's just kind of how it's organically happened yeah I'm glad you mentioned all the talks because you know you get a mailing list and go to talks at Harvard like every day talks here every day Microsoft research is an amazing resource nearby where they have talks almost once a week the Berkman Center for Internet Society the Berkman Center for Internet Society but Harvard um and so you might spend you know one day go to talk on algorithms at Microsoft research then I go to Berkman to learn about surveillance then back to Microsoft to learn about comics then over here to learn about uh Japanese music we had a colloquium on that you know so there's so many opportunities in a way you you come in so like stay ambitious it's good to come in ambitious but then you realize like there's only so much I can do in in two years and so you sort out like okay I'm just gonna collaborate this small way as opposed to you know and I think also as part of the all research groups of course have collaborations with the outside yeah with with different groups and you know international collaborations so so that's where it comes in as well you know these these connections yeah you might be doing a conference internationally through a research group or you might be building a product from Mitsubishi in the mobile experience lab or you know there's all kinds of different ways that you're reaching outside of the institute yeah or just just the project I was just talking about is with someone who's sort of outside of CMS proper um but yeah okay he's on the W side he's on the other side yeah um and then also I mean I haven't really experienced this yet but I have to imagine electives as a big way that you can sort of um like get get outside of the CMS bubble but also get outside of the MIT bubble and take classes at Harvard yeah yeah absolutely when it comes to the game lab I think most people here don't think of it as a CMS thing it's most of our undergraduate researchers are from course six for instance so which is course six is computer science and electrical engineering electrical engineering yeah so we do have that sort of mix of different kinds of skill sets that is needed for the types of projects we do and we we collaborate a lot with with outside interests so if you're an RA for us you will be expected to probably travel both in North America and Europe with to follow our different projects and get sent to different conferences other questions yeah um imagine you were working at the creative community yes if you yeah definitely I think the question was about the creative communities initiative and you can fill us in but Ian is supposed to he has immediate he had a classic rental three and then a meeting at 330 so any second now he may rush in and give a quick presentation of himself okay but meanwhile you can I will I will preempt his his explanation the creative community initiative is one of the newer research groups um and the two primary professors are Ian Connery who is an anthropologist and TL Taylor who was mentioned before she is a sociologist and Ian's work has been mostly with uh he wrote a book on Japanese hip hop and the soul of Anime hi Kirie um this is Kirie Caldwell she's also a graduate student yeah um she was mentioned before yeah um so um CCI is this uh we we basically focus on ethnographic work um and I will take a moment um so it was mentioned that placement for research groups is we do they do that very carefully and that is mostly that so usually you end up in a place where you have experience but um I for one didn't have much ethnographic experience before um but it did turn out to be a great fit but um I just wanted to put in a plug that um most people end up in a place that they expect sometimes you don't but it'll be great um so CCI is focusing on ethnographic work um this weekend um I'm going with the group to San Jose to a conference to do some ethnographic work um last year we did a collaboration with baby center which was this online um platform for mothers mostly mothers but for parents um and so it's kind of a little all over the board but we also do really great things like we have guest lectures we have a guest lecture coming today which I'll have to duck out for soon um and we do we do readings together which has been very helpful for me especially since I didn't have that ethnographic kind of background okay thank you um Kirie Caldwell one of our grad students just came in and so did Ethan Zuckerman um are you uh on a tight schedule that you need to rush out okay so let's maybe Kirie can just introduce herself as a grad student quickly and then Ethan do you have your computer because you want to hook up sure well I have my computer because I'm lost with that and I can't remember what I'm doing because but if you'd like me to project some slides I can no no no actually I'd like prefer you didn't excellent okay okay great so Kirie and then Ethan will talk to us and then we'll have some more questions uh hi I'm Kirie Caldwell um so see you guys grad student uh on second year uh with Lacey and Niki here um and uh I work for the MIT Game Lab and the Education Arcade for my RA ship so uh I run around talking talking about playing promoting uh in like kind of a cultural like let's have fun playing games uh kind of way so um yeah I actually just got out of uh doing a lecture for one of our courses or one of the courses that uh at least is takeable here um on uh uh gender and um gender in Japanese games so so I was just talking about so sorry if I seem a little frazzled I've been hopping from teaching to teaching to which that class is also taught by Eid contract by the way yeah I think all of this gives you a sense of the pacing of things around okay Ethan oh yes well while Ethan is walking over um can I get you a question off the web one more internet question yes all right hello out there can you talk more about the program's balance between theory and practice for those of us who are especially interested in the creative side of new medium is it possible for a thesis proposal to be centered around a creative project in the game lab for an example right talk about the relationship between theory and practice for example could a thesis be sent around a game lab project could you speak to that as a game lab person yes I can uh so uh we we definitely have those kinds of uh thesis projects not just in the game but also in the ice lab nicks lab and so on so we often do some kind of combination of uh what you're doing is an artistic expression but it also always has to have uh some kind of research question that you're exploring through that work so uh it it can't just be a fine arts project but it's very often some kind of balance between the two right do you want to add something no I think I think that that's very helpful and we you know it it sort of happens on a case by case basis you know what is the balance between the creative output you want to do and the research questions that you're pursuing I'd like to add that um we actually have two um second year master students working on their theses right now that are doing creative projects um and I want to kind of put the plug in that if you do a creative project you still have to create the thesis that has some sort of theoretical framework so it's it's a delicate balance but um I think they both are very happy to be doing creative work as well yeah and as if I were advising someone one of those theses I would be like be careful not to bite off more than you can chew because you can't actually design a whole new thing you know and write a hundred-page thesis and you know you so often the thesis meaning is like limit yourself limit yourself pull it in a little bit yeah Ethan could you come over we're we're live here and no one can see you if you're sitting over there absolutely um I could just be a disembodied voice you're just trying to force me to put my laptop down after my secrets um uh howdy I'm Ethan Zuckerman um I direct a research group uh that's part of cns uh called center for civic media it's a group that's um got participants both from the media lab uh as well as from the cms program uh so right now I actually have four graduate students from the media lab I have two graduate students uh from cms that's a pretty typical ratio for us um I should probably start with this weird term civic media for us civic media is this idea that you can make social change by making and disseminating media and putting it out in the world for us that often means digital media and particularly participatory media so making social media making blogs putting out videos but we see civic media really much more broadly it's the whole art of making media and looking at the ways in which that might make change in the world so some of the work that we do is around building platforms so you can see some of the work that we do online if you'd like one of the things that we released recently is called fold it's at fold dot cm and this is basically a novel form of publishing and content management system it's basically a way of going after a problem that we're seeing a lot of in online publishing which is that despite the fact that there's so many things you can do a text online mostly people treat web pages as newspaper columns uh they run text they break it up with an image they run text then they have a diagram and then they run some more text and it's not actually a particularly good way to read or write it doesn't take very much advantage of the power of the medium and the use of the hyperlink so we designed sort of a new platform based around the idea that you have eyes that move not just up and down but left and right uh and you're writing in an environment where there's an enormous amount of rich information that you can link to and embed and otherwise create so fold is a nice example of where someone might go with master's thesis this was a student over at the media lab she did this as a master's thesis in design we were able to pair her with a programmer to make sure that this actually launched during her time at the program the two of them have now formed a company and are now taking venture capital and are trying to figure out is this a competitor to something like medium or is this something that might be useful um you know for instance in a newsroom or in scientific publishing something along those lines one of my current students from CMS is now in his second year in his thesis year his project is called deep stream and this is basically a way of trying to add some context to live video streams so it's sort of a similar model so one branch of what we do is platforms a second branch of what we do might be thought of as um crowdsourcing community data so we do a lot of work in the field right now our major field site is Sao Paulo Brazil and we're doing a lot of work helping small community organizations make maps of urban infrastructures and the idea behind this is we're really interested in the question of how do you let citizens feel powerful and actually have change over their local environments and so this often means working at a city level rather than a federal level and it often means it almost always means letting the community that you're working with tell you what issues are most important so we're going and working with sort of established community groups they're identifying issues of urban infrastructure in their communities we've been building a software platform that allows large teams of people to collect photos and videos to geolocate them put them on a map and produce data sets that they can use for advocacy and that work is now getting combined with work with sensors we've just been building a low-cost audio sensor we're starting to do a noise map of Cambridge what does Cambridge sound like at different times of day what are the quiet and the noisy spots and that's really a framework that's going to let us use a much richer set of sensors around air pollution and water pollution going forward the third thing we work on is do you mind if I push the pause button on you for just a second you're great without your computer by the way but Ian it's on a really tight schedule let me back up the third point and then I will get out of the way for Ian but third thing for me I do a lot of work on media impact so a lot of people in the social change field want to know if they make media and put it out in the world what sort of effect is it having when occupy introduced the idea of the 99% and the 1% what influence did it have when black lives matter went out and essentially said racism isn't over in fact it's something we have to be actively working on what impacts has that had we have a project that's been going on for eight years it's called media cloud you might think of it as lexus nexus only open source and focused on digital media and it's optimized so that we can map online conversations when people are talking about a controversial issue what's the language that they're using and when activists are getting involved with that issue and trying to introduce new language how successful are they with it and I'd love to tell you more about it but for now I want to hand over to Dr. Ian country and the wonderful projects that he just thank you Ethan and thank you Heather so I'm Ian country I'm a cultural anthropologist here at MIT I've been here 12 years camera there's a camera there can you scoot over over here the computer hello everyone hello streaming audience yeah so I'm an anthropologist and we have a lab called the creative communities initiative it's TL Taylor and I she's sociologist I'm an anthropologist we're both interested in ethnography doing fieldwork participant observation as a way of understanding connections between online and offline worlds and their potential their potential to bring new solutions to old problems that's our tagline but basically the notion is that it grows out of my own research and TL's research as well I look at Japanese popular culture how cultural movements spread globally my first project was on hip hop in Japan how does rap music take root in Japan my second book was about Japanese animation how did Japanese animation become a global phenomenon and part of my conclusion was that at the beginning of sort of both of these cultural forms elites didn't get it they didn't think this is going to be important it wasn't going to go anywhere even in the US hip hop at first was seen as not music they're not even singing they don't play instruments this is not going to go anywhere and yet communities of passionate committed people gradually grew audiences worked on the forum spread them around found ways to connect to other communities and that change often comes from the margins into the center so the idea is how do you find those communities that are going to bring about change I think fieldwork and being among those groups is a way to do it in fact if you spend time with people if you spend time in these spaces you can see what has a kind of positive energy a forward momentum a potential to reach across the boundaries that are out there already so that's the idea behind the creative communities initiative I'm currently working on music and the way music is recovering and really a vibrant space despite the impossibility of making money on recordings that the prediction was music would disappear it hasn't it's actually gotten more vibrant in the years since the recording industry has plummeted and yet new ways new kinds of business and social connectivity has really made it a very interesting space so that's my future project TL is working on e-sports and various kinds of online gaming communities we have students working on a variety of things Lacey is one of our students working on interactive comics and how that's shaking up the comics world we've had people studying video games in Peru and how that got going diversity in the tech sector ghost workers in Africa is actually a kind of interesting intersection of politics and economics and cultural settings that one of our students is working on as well so there's a lot of possibilities and basically our focus is finding ways to use field work and ethnography to understand media studies issues in more detail and really open up the discussion of how change happens by looking at communities and being part of them in some way thank you that's the pitch if you have one or two questions I'd be happy to take any questions no problem thank you Heather I really appreciate it I'm sorry we have to run to our lab meeting now I have thank you very much I just wanted to say though if anybody would have more questions for me please email me our emails are up on the site yeah so yeah you can go to a page of all the students phew they say that MIT is like a fire hose of knowledge right so we're giving you the fire like oh my god it's so much maybe if anyone has any questions for Ethan we could back up a little bit even maybe just say one last thing which is just sort of the work that people have ended up doing in our lab some of that work ends up focusing on building so my current CMS second year student Gordon Mangum is doing the design work on a lot of the engineering on deep stream which is a pretty serious software engineering project a lot of the work that people do with me is more traditional sort of cultural studies or communication studies so two of the sort of highlight standout theses the last two years last year Chelsea Barabbas wrote a thesis with me about the technology pipeline and the ways in which gender and race were playing into underrepresentation within Silicon Valley hiring culture and that's actually work that's been quite influential in the sort of foundation and social change community the Ford Foundation ended up using it as part of their jumping off for some of the work that they're using in the space she is now working for the MIT Media Lab leading research on questions of equity and equality within digital currency because we have a big lava where they're focused on Bitcoin and I'll just interject that she's at the colloquium at five o'clock so yeah ask her all about that two years before that the standout thesis was from Molly Souter who did work on denial of service attacks as a form of protected political speech this was really fun I have done a lot of the work on how denial of service attacks serve to censor and silence dissident in human rights organizations in the developing world so you would think that I would be the least likely person to be supportive on a thesis about the ways in which these might be viewed as political speech but she was real persuasive and real persistent and wrote an amazing book out of her thesis called the coming swarm which she got published within six months of graduation she's now in a doctoral program in Canada so people go in all sorts of really interesting directions from this but they they go very very impressive and very cool places thank you back to you I have a question from the interwebs do you have projects at the intersection between international development and media and is that something that will be a good fit for CMS projects at the intersection of international development and media oh yeah you bet so I've been running a website for 11 years called global voices I'm one of the co-founders of it which is basically an international newswire of stories coming from the developing world a lot of our work right now is sort of analyzing and understanding how media coverage in the developing world does and doesn't penetrate into mainstream media coverage we did a little bit of work on attention to the Charlie Hebdo attacks versus attacks in Baga Nigeria at the same period of time that the New York Times actually cited their public editors cited in talking about deciding to change their coverage and pay more attention to terrorism on a global scale so we have actually a lot of folks in our lab come in from a development background Gordon who's working on deep stream actually has been doing media training in the developing world for the last four or five years Chelsea who is now doing this work on bitcoin actually came from an international development background and some of the side projects that people end up working on not even their thesis projects end up being very strongly connected to this a project that Chelsea and a student named Jude Mwenda worked on last year was in using unmanned aerial vehicles drones armed with infrared cameras to detect charcoal being made in forests in Kenya so charcoal is like people think charcoal is funny like charcoal is a super huge problem in Sub-Saharan Africa and the way that you make it is you clear cut trees you dig a big hole you put the trees in you light them on fire you bury your earth on top of them and what you really want to do is find people making this and arrest them and one of the best ways to do it is to find active fires and it turns out that you can do it by heat signature and while it sounds crazy to be using drones in Kenya it turns out that drones are the cutting edge for what people do to spot wildlife to take rich Americans out on game drives so what you do is you take the same drones that people are flying during the day to figure out what the lions are you put a different camera and different software on top of it and you start identifying where the charcoal is and you go after the poachers so yeah we work on fun stuff that's so impressive um sarah are you sarah wozen is out in the hallway are you ready for us or we've got a couple of questions directly for you sarah so awesome she she uh great she's from the open documentary lab or open doc um with two students who work with her too so um if you want to sit here and if the students could could you guys we're on we're live streaming so we can see each other they can see as best if you stand behind us any yeah no you're out yeah you want to you want to stand in front of the screen oh he knows we're here all right so the open documentary lab um we look at new forms of storytelling and look at the intersection of technology storytelling how they change each other um we're also looking at institutions we just came out with a report yesterday about how legacy institutions are making the transition and digital work using um experimental and collaborative works um that interactive documentaries help them do um we also we build resources when we started the lab it was 2012 um there was really no infrastructure for this very new type of storytelling and so we brought together curators and funders and technologists and storytellers um all to really think about what does this field need and where do we fit in um one of the things we've started to do is build resources so the first thing we did was a project called moments of innovation which looked at the whole history of nonfiction storytelling and showed that all these new processes we talk about interactive participatory data immersive um have long histories and that when you think about a documentary you really were um unattaching it to an actual medium so it's not film it's not photography it's many different um media put together and it can come from anywhere and so when for instance we look at data storytelling we go back to cave paintings and what they did there um so our participatory has a long process of of you know we start with the codec camera and how that changed the ability for people to take their own photos and change even what um the notion of what a photo is um so we do a lot of projects like that the other one we have is docubase which um is a database that's tracking the people technologies and projects that are transforming documentary in the digital age we put out a we collect documentaries put them out there we have case studies the students work on um we have playlists to help you guide you through it we have a lab section that does all these um behind the scenes to open up the process of what this new kind of filmmaking is um not filmmaking documentary making um and what we're finding too is it's requiring entirely new teams um entirely new relationships with audiences and subjects which we no longer call audiences and subjects um and it's just really rethinking what storytelling is what the role of the author is you know that you're creating a place for conversation that you're creating a process as opposed to a product that you're having different kinds of impacts than you would with just putting a film out there so those are the kind of things we're looking at um we have a lot going on we we partner with a lot of film institutes with Tribeca Institute we're doing a media impact project with Sundance um we have several projects but one we send students to Sundance every year to write about this new type of storytelling try to get it out in the public um with idfo and a documentary festival in Amsterdam we do other projects so a lot of collaborating too with different institutions so thank you and so we have two students who are participating in this lab first year in the second year yeah sure so i can talk a little bit about my motivations for joining this lab actually um my background is in producing uh and you are suding oh yes and my name is suding uh so my background is in producing public affairs documentaries mostly for pbs um you know linear broadcast very traditional and so i was really interested in open doc lab as a way to explore other forms of storytelling other platforms other creative approaches and to really meet people who are working in this field i'm Dennis Thorthum i'm a second year cms student also with open doc lab and my background is in film uh in both like nonfiction and fiction film or like hybrid art house uh and i don't know i think it's a pretty great lab what you get to do is you go to sundance right or indy wire or like what's doing case studies last year especially on pieces like i did one on like a vrp school ascent and like a bad documentary called do not track so it consists of basically doing in-depth study like interviews and research and writing and it is very rewarding and right now i'm researching visual reality and nonfiction and it's kind of like looking at the convergence of games and documentary and also looking at new uh 3d capture technologies and how it changes how you make media or like looking at 360 video and its relation to nonfiction so yeah if you have any background in like media making or film or like documentary in any form i think it would be a great fit thank you can we open up wait just hang on i want to make sure everyone in the room has their um yeah i'm wondering how projects are kind of inherited by new students because it sounds like for example the one in cell follow is going on for many years so how does that pass down happen how are students introduced to the project what is their long-term engagement um for those long-term projects so i would say that we've got um you know two or three long-term projects and lots of shorter term projects so first of all every student ends up with her own project um either for the thesis or often something that that cheer you will end up sort of doing on on one's own um the longer projects tend to have staff members attached to them um so we're mostly grant funded and so for instance on the media cloud work where um you know we've been doing that for eight years there's now a staff team of like five or six people on that and when students are coming in we're helping you find a manageable bite-sized chunk of it that's sort of playing to your skill set and interests and you're sort of getting ramped up by the rest of that team um for projects that are more speculative like promise tracker where i haven't gotten anyone to really figure out how to pay for it in part because we started working in brazil and then the brazilian economy collapsed it was not my best move um we are often sort of scratching for funding and sort of finding it in interesting places and then um students in many cases uh may be sort of building it at the same time as we are so there were two cms students involved with sort of our first trip to salpalo doing uh the interviewing were considered designing the protocols and and sort of uh doing our first sort of uh community projects there um so sometimes it's in the startup phase sometimes it's in the inheritance phase but it is the inheritance phase it's almost always in a case where we have a certain amount of institutional knowledge from a staff team that's on board and able to help out is that helpful um maybe another one from the room and then we can do an internet yeah so um i know definitely each lab and research group have plenty of opportunity doing different type of research and often already funded by certain founders but how about those uh like us when applying already carrying some projects with us it's not like we have multiple choices but we have been working for a while and there will be our independent scholars all certain organizations we have been working with will we be able to bring in this project while while we are luckily joining the program wow that's an interesting question um did you have a were you about to say something yeah i yeah i'd love to okay great could you repeat the question yeah sure so the question was uh for people who are already interested in applying to cms and have projects that they want to do um how does that sort of interact with what they do in the lab and um i think one thing that's interesting and and worth mentioning because i had the same question when i was applying is that um many students don't do their thesis work in partnership with the lab some do where there's a really like strong overlap or you know it makes sense from an agenda perspective but it's also very doable to do your thesis um alongside your lab work it is i mean it's both our significant commitments but that's what i'm doing for a fact like my thesis um which looks at news organizations and um like comment spaces is quite it's quite different from my lab work in the design lab and that's fine and and in your case you came in with a very clear knowledge of what you wanted to do you were in my office a week and you got here saying this is what i want to work on and uh and that doesn't always happen uh but it does sometimes so so i would say um maybe there's three things that that could end up happening it's possible to come here with a project and have it aligned very closely with a group and have the group say that's great let's do this and and let's give you resources and work together on it it's possible to come up come in with a project and have it be you know ideologically aligned with a group um you know that's why we would put you in a group um but it's your project and you might end up working on it for the thesis and the group might end up working on it the third which in some ways i think might actually be the most likely is that you come here with a project and you may discover that there's other things you want to work on too uh and and that is one of the interesting things here i mean generally speaking people don't get into programs like this one unless you are already doing some very very interesting work but a whole lot of people come here with very very interesting work and then find a whole other set of things to get interested in um so i don't think it should be a barrier unless you're sort of insistent that you want to be in group one in which case you'd really want to be very certain that you were working with a group that that was excited about picking up your project and running with it and and that's hard to guarantee um you know folks like heather and me are pretty opinionated and we have the projects that we want to work on that we're excited about and uh yeah we're swayable sometimes sometimes thank you um Shannon you were going to do an online question would you mind standing over here just so i don't have to repeat it sure uh this is uh mostly bouncing off of sarah although i think other people might have some as well the first question was what if you're coming in and you're purely documentary is this the right program and if if so why and the other one was sort of the opposite end of that is if what if you want to work with open doc lab do you have to have made a documentary in order to do so he'll answer the second question first no you don't at all you just have to have an interest and usually though you have some skills something that's aligned um with documentary making um so that the first question if you're a documentary purist um so i i mean i would have to um find out what they mean by that yeah um but for us we're rethinking the documentary and we you know support linear documentary we think it's great but it's not what we're working on and studying and and incubating at the doc lab there are masters programs that are strictly in documentary filmmaking and if you're certain that you really don't want to study the history of x y or z or take a class called major media text or take a class called theories and methods one and two because you have certain documentaries that you want to be you know then maybe uh a documentary filmmaking program is a better match for you yeah um so i i'm not saying no to this person don't apply i'm just saying you need to be open and flexible and interested in all kinds of things that are happening around here even if you happen to be more directed and in a certain area yeah yeah back to you anyone out there did you want to come in and take a seat you're in the door there's a seat up here if you'd like yeah the question was if you have something for your portfolio you want to include online like a link to a web page or something and it's not in english is it disqualified no it's not disqualified but if we don't speak your language we're not going to get much out of it so you know bear that in mind yes yes the g re scores i mean the last year still in the system um yeah gres are their scores are valid for five years and i guess it's part of the question if one is applied before yes if you've already submitted your scores to mit and they are still valid i still have them and you don't have to send them again nice very good thank you um you've been there um i was just wondering it seems that the research assistantship or ta uh ship is pretty integral to getting those out of the program so i was wondering are people are there students who for example maintain a full-time job um or are able to sort of juggle sort of maintaining institutional ties in other places while being part of this program is that just generally possible or if you are cyborg as long as you have no sleep needs but really people don't come in who are also working full-time job somewhere else it's very very intense kind of experience um you know theoretically 20 hours a week in the lab but it can bleed over it can be more uh sometimes at certain moments um you've got your classwork um you've got a very very full plate here i i think that for us when we were thinking about it for first semester our commitments with lab and coursework and everything came to usually and reading and all that in the first semester came to between like 50 and 70 hours a week it was a lot so doing yeah doing a full-time job on top of that like you'd have to yeah but as far as other affiliations we did have a student who graduated last year who was very involved with uh running an annual film festival uh and so that was something that he was able to do a few hours a week and then sort of stop and and take a few days to sort of go work on that and yeah um he needed a little extra time to graduate he went over into the summer um but it was not impossible uh but that was definitely not a full-time job uh but that question of sort of if you have another affiliation a volunteer project that's very important to you something like that that's feasible um but another job while you do this is not yeah so there's a sorry um there's a section um on the application for test scores and there are a series of open boxes to place information about your resume about um relevant travel experience what are those fields for how much space is appropriate to use i mean i could write volumes about those things but they're also present in other elements of the application so what what do you hope to see in those open form sections of the application Shannon is that something you can answer just because you've got the form memorized better than i do yeah i just kind of read the end product if it's something that shows up in another part of the application don't bother repeating it because the the committee has already seen it they really do read these applications very thoroughly the open spaces are primarily for something that doesn't fall into the other boxes so something extra something or something that you want to really highlight that you did something exceptional about you that's pretty much what therefore does that help okay thanks um and so these are just assistantship or the financial being all equally applied to national students too yes yes yeah uh i have a question about mentorship um you mentioned that the thesis you might be working on could be separate from your lab work you also mentioned a thesis committee i'm just wondering like when you're working on your thesis and you're looking for people to help advise or guide you or just collaborate with is that usually on the student to find those people and the program kind of help you see we we do help you um as director of graduate studies i am meeting with students to gauge their progress um hey i need to meet with you guys engage with you but uh so someone comes in to meet with me and i say hey what's your thesis going to be on and they said x y or z and i said well who are you thinking of working with and typically people have a pretty good idea like you know like ethan would be perfect how many students does he already have you don't work at the logistics is it viable have you talked to him yet if you go into his office hours whatever um but and then we want to get your committee together which is typically just one second person um uh with a cms affiliation right stanon we don't they have we we ask for one person to be one of our regular cms um cohort but you can also have a tour from outside right sometimes the second person is outside so you might have someone from history or urban studies who didn't have a direct affiliation but you're the director of the of your project would be a primary yeah and sometimes another university but that's less common less encouraged but yeah it can happen yeah and this is something that um faculty here take very seriously and yeah you know one of the things we've actually been working out is sort of ensuring that faculty have a manageable number of people that they're working with because it really is a commitment i mean i'm meeting with my thesis students weekly uh when they're in the thesis here yeah and um you know working on writing week by week as it's going forward so it is a very close relationship yeah that's a good question um also i just to add to that um sometimes it can very much come out of your lab work uh so i ended up coming in and having like strong kind of eulogical ties as you were mentioning uh with the game lab so i'm actually working with me kale here on my thesis and that kind of happened serendipitously through doing lab work so um you know you could even have like strong ideas coming in like oh i want to work with so-and-so and then you know that might shift around as you start kind of developing your ideas and your your work outside and how that ends up influencing all parts of your life right things evolve organically uh-huh yeah there was a question in the back yes hi i'm jessie uh i was wondering when you think about your approach to your application how important is it to take the mentality that you're applying to and identify your research interests and how they align with cms as a program versus the research groups that you're specifically interested in okay so jessie asks about the you know when you're applying and you're thinking about your application do you want to be thinking about your alignment with cms as a whole or versus a research group um i i would say cms as you're you know thinking about organically what we do as as a whole that said in some cases you know if you are clearly you know documentary is very strongly your focus the way you sort of pitch yourself might be strongly influenced by the fact that you've studied what open doc lab is and you know you know about it um but given i'm a little stuck here um given that as you take classes your interest your interest might shift a little bit we want to bring in someone who's open to all the possibilities of cms all the different things that are going on you know to just pitch yourself as like i'm a hyper studio person i think would be too limiting um so i think it's better to think about cms kind of more holistically as a as a kind of rule of thumb yeah sure jake one more out here does the stipend cover summer i think i did not visit their opportunities to apply for summer does does the stipend cover summer funding and if not are there opportunities there are shannon you can probably answer that a little better than i can as a as a practical kind of thing um as a rule of note the the stipend does not cover cover summer funding some research groups have funding and they will work if your thesis and research group are very closely aligned and they have funding they can offer you a summer r.a. but there are also funds at the institute that you can apply for for summer research funding right which is so that funding to say travel somewhere to do your work as opposed to just a monthly living stipend kind of application yeah so in short there are opportunities but we don't have anything guaranteed for your summer yeah anyone else in the room because we can go to the internet shannon wants us to go to the internet you're so good to take care of them shannon thank you the question is will proposing a project that is bigger than the scope of the program be detrimental will proposing a project that is bigger than the scope of the program be detrimental sure like uh well okay look there are big questions like i'm interested in how technological interventions can you know improve health care um well that's huge right and then something specific like how can data sensors test air quality to see what you know people are people with as with asthma are you know what they're getting into their system you know that's a very narrow question so um obviously if your research question is too broad then we'll you know you don't you haven't thought about enough you don't have enough focus you haven't done a deep dive yet um i don't know if there's anyone else who could answer that better have like specific examples of students and how they narrow their interests or i just agree yeah don't say i want to investigate how we can use games for learning or something like that yeah yeah games for learning that's pretty broad enough about it yeah talk about your specific game that you've been developing or thinking about or the game that you've been playing that you're really invested in or you know keep it very specific or give specific examples to show your interests i do have one more question from the internet that i know you guys are going to want the answer to hang on a sec were you going to add something you said no i was just going to say i i think it might be sort of a one two it's helpful for me to know what your big interests are it helps me to know what your motivations are but one of the things i'm looking for in master's students is the ability to frame an answerable question right so giving me a question that isn't answerable not just in a master's but in a phd or in a 20 year career is generally just it's sort of a sign of poor judgment um so part of what i'm looking for is your ability to sort of be realistic about your time uh and everything else that you're being asked to do in this and to pick off the the right chunk of work to to work on um at this at this moment in your academic career thank you that's a very helpful reason to response that time goes really fast yeah um one more from the room and then we have a practical question for jan in here yes documentary films but right an open doc lab question what if you come from more theoretical background rather than a practical maker kind of background well i mean we balance theory and practice in all of our in our education and in our labs in particular sort of the practical side of the education um so but i think theory is good and to have the overall picture and you know a theoretical understanding of what you're doing and where it fits into um you know sort of the bigger cultural understanding of documentaries but and then the p.i. is a theorist on William Marie Kio so there there is theory but the it's very practical work the 20 hours a week it's very hands-on practical work my practice is more in the media productions yeah yeah yeah i mean it's all kinds of research skills writing skills um you know have to have a no not at all no you just have to have a good reason why you want to be in the lab and what you want to learn from it shannon the the question that i know you all under the answer to was does this type and cover health insurance does this type and cover health insurance and the answer is yes yes good thank you that's very practical um we are almost out of time so i'm wondering if there's any last uh we can end on that practical note but uh if anyone has a real zinger to end with we could also now the pressure's on sure how's the program changed since it started how do i see it changing the future that's a that's a good tough one um i've only been here since 2012 so um i don't think that i have the deep institutional history it's it's been a program that has evolved over time in interesting ways that um only since we merged with the the with writing have we sort of had standalone institutional status we were more closely aligned with literature in the past so there have been really interesting changes over time uh we are hopeful that we'll make a new hire in the future so we're trying to you know keep growing and growing um anyone else have a better question i can answer i've been here 10 years oh yes it has changed and it really changes based on the faculty that come in and what their research areas and then labs develop out of those research areas and then also what they teach and how they teach the courses so yeah it's overall comparative media studies and across borders and institutions and platforms some time periods but then within that it's hugely um dependent on the people that are here yeah so if we make another hire and it's someone in you know with a comics focus that's a whole you know big area that we haven't had a really hardcore kind of specialist in or you know we might go into an area you know so so as the program grows and we make new hires and so on um makes a difference we're gonna add something yeah on a smaller scale i mean each group of students that comes in everyone's got yeah these kinds of different backgrounds and interests and so each class kind of like forms its own kind of identity and that ripples through um you know later generations of students i mean we still feel a couple years ago definitely last year and you know i guess we've been rubbing in some ways on the next the next series so um yeah it's kind of big and yeah and it might if you can all come to the um colloquium at five o'clock with the alumni panel that's a range of people from the class of i think 2010 up to like last year so you'll get a little more bit of a what oh yeah mark 2002 nice all right so you get a nice kind of range a kind of nice picture of uh alums past and present and you know give you a sense of what might happen in the future going to take up place only this week or this this this panel is today at five o'clock there are maps in the hallway on that table also fabulous keychains with little lights on them cmsw keychains uh immediate i don't yeah you could open a lock with it that's kind of it um but the it's in uh is it building two rooms 231 building four room 231 thank you building four room 231 um which you can find on the map where you can plug it into your phone and mit is a bit of a labyrinth right with the numbers and the hyphens and everything but if you can't find your way to the building you probably shouldn't be coming here anyway so yeah i know 10 year faculty who can't no i i don't because i have the same yeah we know that there's a building 14 e in a building e 14 and you know the gaps are endless or endless but i do hope to see many of you there um and thank you so much for coming today we answer a lot of your questions thanks