Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of “big data” in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of “big data”.

Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of “big data”. She argues for attending to different dimensions rather than scales of data, more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the “snapshot” of quantitative work to the “time-lapse photography” of ethnography, she suggests that researchers must imagine “big data” as an on-going process of modeling, triangulation, and critique.

Gray’s current research includes work on ethnographically-informed social media research, compliance cyberinfrastructures in universities and their impact on emerging media research, online labour, and the importance of location and place in the context of mobile technologies. Her book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America examined how youth in rural parts of the United States fashioned “queer” senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media—particularly internet access—played in their lives and political work.

In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed “fact-checking” divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future?

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson.

Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, despite remaining deeply underground. How did the submergent circulations of Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization, intercultural exchange and participatory media at the turn of the millennium? In this talk, I trace the “cultural feedback” of Noise through the productive distortions of its mediated networks: its recorded forms, technologies of live performance, and into the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners.

David Novak teaches in the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work deals with the globalization of popular music, media technologies, experimental culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of recent essays in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and Popular Music, as well as the book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press).

Cosponsored by the MIT Cool Japan Project.

We often talk of video games as being “fun,” but this is a mistake. When we play video games, our facial expressions are only occasionally those of of happiness, instead we frown and grimace when fail to achieve our goals. This is the paradox of failure: why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy?

In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Yet failure in a game is unique in that when we fail in a game, it means that we (not a character) are in some way inadequate, and games then motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy.

In this talk, based on his new book The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul will argue that the paradox of failure pervades games on many levels: in game design, in sports coaching, in strategy guides, in taunting, in the prejudices against sore losers. The issue of failure is also central to recurring controversies of what games can, or should be about: what does it mean to cause terrible events to happen in a fictional game world? Games, then are the Art of Failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.

Jesper Juul is an assistant professor at the New York University Game Center and a visiting assistant professor at Comparative Media Studies. He has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990′s. His publications include Half-Real on video game theory, and A Casual Revolution on how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii brought video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”.

D.T. Max, staff writer at the New Yorker, looks at David Foster Wallace and irony, with an eye especially on his 1990′s attacks on David Letterman and the novelist Mark Leyner, both in publications and in private correspondence. When did David Foster Wallace become obsessed with irony and why? What made him so sure it was corrosive to civil culture or initiative? Or was the unease he felt in its presence really more the product of his own personal history?

The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver will discuss his career — from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps the most influential political blog in the world — and the ways in which statistics are changing the face of journalism in a conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Millions of documents produced around the world over more than four thousand years are now available in digital form — Google Books alone had scanned, by March 2012, more than 20 million books in more than 400 languages. Images of manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and other non-print sources are also appearing in increasing numbers. But if we have addressed physical access to images of textual sources, we are a long way from providing the intellectual access necessary to understand the written sources that we see. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities as we refashion our study of the past from ethnocentric monolingual conversations into a hyperlingual dialogue among civilizations, where humans work with machines and with each other to communicate and where books do, as Marvin Minksy opined decades ago, talk to each other.

Gregory Crane is Chair of the Department of Classics at Tufts University, as well as an Adjunct Professor in Tufts’ Department of Computer Science. Since 1988, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project, a long-running digital humanities effort focused on Greek, Latin, and Arabic Classics.

Organized by Literature. Co-sponsored with CMS, the MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, and Ancient and Medieval Studies.

Hybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are a notable feature of today’s on-line journalism. How is this access to the power of the visual changing our journalism? What current projects are particularly significant? What will this convergence mean in the future?

Jason Spingarn-Koff is the series producer and curator of Op-Docs, a new initiative at the New York Times for short opinionated documentaries by independent filmmakers and artists. He directed the feature documentary “Life 2.0″, which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network’s Documentary Club, and his work has appeared on PBS, BBC, MSNBC, Time.com and Wired News. In 2010-2011, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Alexandra Garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education. Awarded an Edward R. Murrow award, eight regional Emmy awards and named 2011 Video Editor of the Year by the White House News Photographers Association, Garcia is currently a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Moderator: Sarah Wolozin, director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, has produced documentaries and educational media for a variety of media outlets including PBS, History Channel, Learning Channel and NPR.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Young people born in 1980′s and 1990′s China are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention as they are the country’s first generation of only children. They are also the first generation to come of age with the Internet, and, for many, playing Internet games forms an integral part of the youth experience. This presentation will explore the affective dimensions of digital games from the perspective of urban Chinese youth. What is the significance of an e-sports event that attracts tens of thousands of twenty-somethings, many of whom experience it as a teary-eyed “farewell to their youth”? Or a viral video created by World of Warcraft gamers that urges millions of viewers to “raise their fists in solidarity” to show support for their “spiritual homeland”? What should we make of these phenomena that demonstrate, ever more clearly, the ways in which games are intertwined with people’s spiritual and emotional lives? Are games the imagined utopia they are made out to be in these nostalgic accounts or might these affective attachments prove to be a form of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called “cruel optimism,” a relationship in which the very thing that is desired becomes an obstacle to flourishing?

Marcella Szablewicz is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Duke University. Her research focuses on youth and digital media in urban China. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation, provisionally entitled From Addicts to Athletes: Youth Mobilities and the Politics of Digital Gaming in Urban China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork supported by the Fulbright and National Science Foundations, the book will examine the precarious socio-economic futures of urban Chinese youth through the lens of digital gaming culture, while also considering how dominant discourse about digital leisure practice is shaped by larger cultural debates about patriotism and productivity, class and the crafting of the “ideal citizen”. Her work can also be found in the Routledge volume Online Society in China and in the Chinese Journal of Communication.

Co-sponsored by the Cool Japan Project.

In mid-November, I visited with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic, author of a memoir—The Beautiful Struggle—about his father’s influence during his childhood in Baltimore, and, this year, an MLK Scholar at MIT. We talked about his impressions of MIT students and his growth as a writer, and we touched upon his research of the Civil War, the setting for an upcoming book. You can read Coates’ blog at theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates.

Andrew Whitacre: What brought you to MIT and your MLK fellowship?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Tom Levenson brought me. He was reading my blog, reading some of my writing. He asked me if I was interested in coming to MIT. I said, who wouldn’t be?

Are you teaching?

I’m teaching this semester—one class, “Writing and Reading the Essay”, which I’m greatly enjoying.

In one of your Atlantic posts, you talked about the “sucker punch”. What was that?

It was about the Romney campaign, how they never saw defeat in the election coming, that they felt sucker-punched. I was and have been sort of amazed. There was this thing going on in the election where these guys who were into stats and mathematics, not just Nate Silver, who did a good job telling what was going to happen. And no one believed it—I shouldn’t say no one believed it, but there was this theory that somehow these guys were simply reflecting some kind of liberal bias. It’s one of these things where if you believe something, you tell yourself something enough times, you really come to believe it.

Do you have any sense of how those bubbles get formed? Liberals tend to think of themselves more self-critical than conservatives.

Well, we did it in ’04, with John Kerry, where people for some reason remember it as an upset for Bush. It was not an upset at all. If you go back and look at the polls, the polls said Bush was probably going to win, and that’s what happened. I think there’s some kind of righteousness that comes out of that, that sort of pose, this feeling that you were cheated. We have certain prejudices against information that challenges our world-view. I think that’s just true of human beings, period. I think one of the things that has happened with liberals in the last twenty years—at least in media, where I’ve had a chance to study liberal and conservative media—is liberalism has come to be about the fight. The fights within. So you can have straight-down-the-line-liberal publication like The Nation, but you also have publications like The New Republic, Slate. These are places where they cut their teeth on being counterintuitive: tell me what they other guy won’t say. Those are very different things than what’s happening in conservative media, where the media pretty much exists to fall in with the Republican Party. That’s really where they are. And to the extent that you differ from orthodoxy, you find yourself pushed out. Take someone like David Frum, who’s writing for the Daily Beast, which is not, in any respect, a conservative publication—that’s not what they’re doing. Why is he there rather than a conservative outlet?

What was your reaction, on election night, when Fox News had Karl Rove on and he refused to let the election be called?

I was watching Fox News when that happened. I thought it was the exact phenomenon we’re talking about. I thought Rove, though—he had something very different: he had money at stake. He had taken all this money from billionaires, telling them “This is what’s going to happen.” He didn’t just have an interest like “I am a conservative, so I have an interest” but interests like “I have millions”.

What do you think about growing up in Baltimore compared to where you are now?

It’s very different. I didn’t know what MIT was growing up in Baltimore. It’s incredibly different. I knew a lot about black schools around the country. That was about it. It wasn’t all that developed. I knew my parents wanted me to go to college. But I never had any particular sense I could go to a Harvard or MIT or Columbia or Yale.

What do you think you’ll be able to get from the resources here?

I get the most from the students. Watching them, how hard they work. It’s inspirational.

You feel that same way about their humanities work?

Oh yeah! My class, they work extremely hard, even though it’s not science at all. One of the things people say, not just here but in general, is the humanities tend to be easier than the sciences. Which I always thought was a shame. Practicing the humanities is not easy at all. If you want to be a world-class literary scholar or literary scholar of any repute, a world-class historian, a James MacPherson, it’s really hard. The humanities, I strongly feel, should demonstrate that. They should reflect that. It should not be the case that your experience in school is all that different from what you have out in the world when you try to practice that art form. So I work really, really hard to make the class count as much as I can coming in the first time.

As that first-timer, have you had to learn a lot on the fly about being a teacher?

Not really. I actually think it’s an advantage. The only thing I know how to teach is how it’s practiced. To the best of my ability I try to emulate what my relationship would be with my editor. The rigor with which you write actual essays. I try to practice the craft. I try to push them the same way. We talk about craft all the time. We talk about sentences, why some sentences are strong, why some sentences are not. They want the push. I grew to appreciate that. I gobbled it all up.

So you started at Howard University?

I did. I started there, went college there on and off for about five years and left without graduating.

Is there a story behind that?

Yeah, I started writing! And I liked it so much. I had never been a particularly good student, and writing was the first thing I’d ever done that looked like a career path that I was ever good at.

What would you consider your first success? Submitting a first piece?

Actually, probably writing for my college newspaper. I started in with a little poetry. I had people around me that told me I should keep going. You know, writing is done on your own time. You don’t have to sit in a meeting for hours, as you do in a classroom. It’s very much a practice thing. I gravitate to the idea of doing something. It’s not very theoretical. Most of it is pretty simple; you just have to keep doing it over and over again.

What’s the structure of your class?

It’s workshop. We spend most of the first month reading other people’s essays. And in the second we still did quite a bit of that but then started workshopping our own essays. Sometimes we’ll do sentence essays in class, try to write as strong a sentence as possible. Certain home projects. Today we had the workshop for the second essay, which was good. It was very good.

You once described President Obama as a “conservative revolutionary”. Is there anyone else you’d cite as an example of the same thing?

Plenty of people throughout African-American history. Malcolm X was a conservative revolutionary. Maybe not in that sense, but Lincoln…Lincoln’s a conservative revolutionary. People who preside over momentous change but do so in a really small-bore way, almost reluctantly and try to do it without upsetting society.

If the pace of change is the same in Obama’s second term, how do you think people will look back over what he did?

I think he’s been relatively effective. Quietly, but relatively effective. We’ll see. I don’t want to call that. We’ll see.

What do you expect for your son?

I don’t expect him to think about the world the way I think about the world. I don’t expect him to think about race or ethnicity the way I think about it. We’re raised in different times. He lives in a much more integrated world now.

Tell me a bit about your November event here with [journalist, MSNBC politics talk show host] Chris Hayes (video).

That was a lot of fun. I was shocked by how many people came out. We had to turn people away. I thought his message was all about the responsibility of people with access to elite institutions, education, power, etc. I thought bringing that here to MIT was incredible.

What were some of the arguments?

We talked about what is an institution, what are MIT’s responsibilities? Are we producing an elite that actually reflects this power/responsibility thing that is of the quality it needs to be. Do we even need an elite, is something I pushed him on. The best thing was, the next day he came to my class and talked to the kids.

The election of President Obama in ’08 was a very symbolic moment. What’s next? What would be meaningful to me would be if there was an African-American president that came from southeast DC. That would be pretty badass to me. After Obama’s election, what’s next, how do you top that?

I’d make the case that this is pretty badass, and once it happens, you find reasons to make it an exception. I think the test is, do we say we think this is an exception to the rule now—if someone had told us this in 2002, we would have been amazed that something like this would have happened—so…probably a woman. That’s very much is the next test.

Is there anything else you want to accomplish in your time at MIT? Is it just going around, meeting a lot of people? Is it just teaching class? Do they set any expectations for an MLK Scholar?

They just want me to be a good citizen in the community. That’s what I’m trying to do. Even in my daily interactions, I get so much. Having dropped out of college and being back on campus, it’s pretty amazing how I actually feel.

Is there any way you’d describe your writing style or particular interests—or contrast yourself with some of your peers?

I’m always interested in history. In this history of this country, in particular the history of race in this country that I try to work out in my work. That’ll continue. If there’s any difference, that’s a big one.

Do you feel like there’s something in U.S. history that’s been overly forgotten?

Ha, the Civil War. What actually happened. For a long time we thought about it as this whole brother-against-brother thing, two honorable sides, that that shouldn’t be forgotten. And when you look at the history, something that becomes immediately clear is that it’s not two honorable sides. In fact it’s something much, much darker, but at the same time something much more beautiful too when you find out what we were really fighting for, in the Civil War but also what came out of that.

What are the analogies you draw now from the Civil War?

It’s not direct stuff. More just an awareness of history. I try to draw lines. Long, long lines. Does everybody understand the relationship between race and citizenship? Which was what the Civil War was ultimately about, it’s what Lincoln ultimately died for. I try to trace a long arc of history to make it clear that things don’t just grow up out of nowhere.

What kind of projects are you looking to do in the future?

I want to be able to write here’s-what-I-think pieces for a long time. I enjoy it very much.