MediaBerkman

“Walled gardens” is a common term for systems that limit the entrance and exit of certain kinds of data. It is a deceptively simple metaphor that relies on the existence of a shared set of assumptions about what gardens are, what walls are, and what it means to build and maintain them. In this talk, Goodman extends the walled garden metaphor for digital spaces by comparing it to everyday experiences of more literal ones: urban community gardens.

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Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through a dynamic visualization of stories, data, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. Two of the project’s founders, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, explain the origins of the project and invite feedback.

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Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through a dynamic visualization of stories, data, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States.

Click Above for Video

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Jim Bessen, Lecturer of Law at Boston University Law School, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Bessen’s presentation is titled “Patent Failure”. Bessen analyzes a broad range of evidence on the economic performance of the patent system. He finds that patents provide strong incentives for firms in a few industries, but for most firms today, patents actually discourage innovation because they fail to perform as well-defined property rights. This analysis provides a guide to policy reform.

Runtime: 56:14, size: 320×240, 165.4MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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Lewis Hyde, Berkman Fellow and Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Hyde’s presentation was entitled “Reclaiming Fair Use for Scholars and Teachers.”

Runtime: 1:05:54, size: 320×240, 180.6MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Dr. Miaoulis discussed curriculum content for elementary, middle school and high school level and present how engineering makes all disciplines engaging, as well as his initiative at Tufts University to increase the number of female students studying engineering.

Dr. Miaoulis is an innovative educator with a passion for both science and engineering, Miaoulis championed the introduction of engineering into the Massachusetts science and technology public school curriculum. His dream is to make everyone, both men and women, scientifically and technologically literate.

Runtime: 1:15:56, size: 320×240, 209MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

2008-02-12_miaoulis

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Judith Donath, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and director of its Sociable Media research group, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Donath’s presentation was titled “Designing Society”. In it, she presents several design projects from the Sociable Media Group. Some are visualizations of online interactions, which reveal important but hard to perceive social patterns. Others are experimental mediated social spaces, where the goal is to balance legibility with innovative computational capabilities.

The focus will be to show how design affects identity, reputation and trust – the foundations of society.

Runtime: 1:15:56, size: 320×240, 209MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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Beth Kolko, Berkman Fellow and Associate Professor of Technical Communication at the University of Washington, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Kolko’s presentation was entitled “User, Hacker, Builder, Thief: Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age.”

The not very slow but definitely steady flow of computer technology into far corners of everyday life has changed fundamental cultural processes and affected how people work, learn, and play. It’s also provided lots of cool stuff to buy. But by some measures there has also been a somewhat fundamental failure of imagination in envisioning what hardware, software and services can look like which has resulted in users from outside targeted demographics adapting technology in unexpected and creative ways. This talk is about diversity of design, the cult of expertise, why hackers are the good guys and lays out the argument that theories of subjectivity and axe grinders can be part of the same conversation. Encouraging users to become hackers, builders, and thieves may be the best way to ensure creative and diverse design.

Runtime: 53:24, size: 320×240, 144.5MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

QuickTime Video

Fernando Rodrigues, Brazillian journalist and Harvard Nieman Fellow was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Rodrigues spoke about journalism and access to public information in Brazil.

Journalist Fernando Rodrigues assembled a database with some 25,000 records of Brazilian politicians showing electoral information and personal data –including the list of personal assets of each politician who run for office in the three past general elections in Brazil (1998, 2002 and 2006). In 2006, the day the website was last updated, it drew 1,000,000 viewers. It is a free access website and voters can check whether a particular politician has increased his or her patrimony in a compatible way with the declared income. The database has also been an endless source of news stories for media outlets all over Brazil.

Collecting all that information was not an easy task, since Brazil does not have a Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Rodrigues also works with the National Forum of Right of Access to Public Information, a new advocacy group in favor of a FoIA for Brazil. The Forum teaches people how to require public information from government agencies despite that there is no clear legislation about it.

Runtime: 01:12:43, size: 320×240, 214.3MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

Judith Donath on“Designing Society” – Podcast

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