Video Player

Applied Humanities: Transforming Humanities Education

Moderator: William C. Uricchio
Scot Osterweil Kurt Fendt Peter Donaldson Rekha Murthy SM '05 Matthew Weise SM '08: April 23, 2010; Running Time: 1:26:57

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In the first of four panels celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program at MIT, panelists reflect on the wide range of projects and media studies offspring that have emerged from this innovative program.

Major CMS themes include the development of community, creation of a deeper understanding of collaboration, working across disciplines, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. Panelists discuss the MIT approach to applied humanities, and share insights on education, game design, public media and visual information. William Uricchio moderates.

Scot Osterweil brings his background as a theatre major to the effort of game design, citing the need to engage the user, not just create games that are based on reciting facts—just as an actor has to engage in audience in something deeper than lines of a script.

Kurt Fendt’s background teaching German language and literature, combined with work with many German artists has informed his current approach to working in digital media. He is concerned with how to engage students in the process of actively creating media, not just using it.

Peter Donaldson cites Shakespeare’s works as multi format productions whose performances can travel across cultures and time as well as across media.

Rekha Murthy finds that her real life experience coupled with her CMS education has enabled her to have a broader understanding of the world, and channel it into her work in public radio in new ways. As public broadcasting morphs into public media, significant identity questions emerge that require deeper thinking to sort out the huge challenges in her field. Today she values the contextualization and opportunities for reflection that CMS has afforded.

Matthew Weise who attended film school before CMS admits to always struggling with the notion of the humanities. He comes to terms with a definition that “humanities are things that make me feel more human” and provide inspiration to want to apply his full self to the task at hand. He finds himself happily enriched in ways he doesn’t fully understand.

Lecture Details

Location: E14-633

“I had worked for NPR for five years but I had to come to CMS to have a decent conversation about objectivity and balance.”

Rekha Murthy

About the Speakers

Moderator: William C. Uricchio

Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT Professor of Comparative Media History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

William Uricchio received his Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University in 1982 and comes to MIT from the Institute for Media and Re/Presentation at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he was department chair. He currently directs a five-year cultural identity project in the European Science Foundation Changing Media Changing Europe initiative.

A Fulbright and Humboldt fellow, Uricchio has published widely on early television, early cinema and their emergence as cultural forms, including Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films(1993); Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (1993); The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (1991); and "The Nickel Madness": The Struggle to Control New York City’s Nickelodeons in 1907–1913. His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (forthcoming).

Scot Osterweil

Creative Director, The Education Arcade

Scot Osterweil is the Creative Director of the Education Arcade, and a research director in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is an award-winning designer of educational games, working in both academic and commercial environments, and his work has focused on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects. He has designed games for computers, handheld devices, and multi-player on-line environments. He is the creator of the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games, and leads a number of projects in the Education Arcade, including Vanished (a science game developed in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medical science), iCue (history and civics) and the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Language Learning Initiative (ESL). He is a founding member of the Learning Games Network. He is a graduate of Yale College with a degree in Theater Studies.

Kurt Fendt

Director, HyperStudio
Research Director, Comparative Media Studies

Kurt Fendt is Director of HyperStudio, MIT’s Center for Digital Humanities, which explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of research and education. He is Research Director in the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program (CMS) and teaches a range of upper-level courses in the German Studies Program in Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Fendt has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen (both Germany), and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria; in 2001 he was Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany. He is co-Principal Investigator of the d'Arbeloff-funded Metamedia project, co-Director of Berliner sehen, a collaborative hypermedia learning environment for German Studies, the on-line collaboration space for educators "Berliner sehen Exchange", and co-author of the French interactive narrative "A la rencontre de Philippe" (CD-ROM version). Since 2005, he has been organizing the MIT Short Film Festival.

Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities and earned his Ph.D. in modern German literature with a thesis on hypertext and text theory in 1993 after having completed his MA at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.

Peter Donaldson

Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Head of the Literature Faculty, MIT Director, Shakespeare Electronic Archive

Peter Donaldson is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1964, a B.A. from Cambridge University (Clare College) in 1966, an M.A. from Cambridge University in 1970, and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1974.

Since the late 1980s he has focused on two major research areas: Shakespeare on Film (Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors and a series of articles now being revised for a book on Shakespeare and Media Allegory), and electronic projects involving Shakespeare across media, including the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, which uses computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production.

Donaldson has held research fellowships from the NEH and ACLS, and was the first Lloyd Davis Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Queensland (2006).

Rekha Murthy SM '05

Director of Projects and Partnerships, Public Radio Exchange(PRX)

Rekha Murthy works at the intersection of public radio and digital media, currently overseeing distribution and content strategy initiatives for PRX, an online distributor of audio programs to public radio networks, stations, and audio platforms including mobile, internet, and satellite radio

Matthew Weise SM '08

Lead Game Designer, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

Matthew Weise graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 2001 with a degree in Digital Arts, which included videogames (before Game Studies was a field). He continued his videogame research at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where he examined how videogame theory and criticism differs between communities. As a CMS grad student he also worked at The Education Arcade, most notably collaborating on Revolution, a small-scale simulation of colonial America. Matt worked in mobile game development for a few years, occasionally doing some consultancy work, before returning to CMS and MIT in 2007 to work at the newly created Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.