Publications
Books, articles, papers, theses, and other publications produced by the faculty, students, and staff of MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing.
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The Commoditable Block Party: Electric Signs in Manhattan, 1881-1917
The form and content of the electric bulb sign in Manhattan from 1892 to 1917 — and how this unique medium engaged with its environment and audience.
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A Digital Assemblage: Diagramming the Social Realities of the Stikine River Watershed
The landscape of the Stikine River Watershed through varied perspectives and heterogeneous data sets, using landscape as a condition for relating factors of knowledge, discourse, and power.
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In Medias Res, Spring 2002
A Latin term that literally means “in the middle of things” or “in the thick of things,” in media res is often used to refer to the act of joining the story already in progress in theater or literature.
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Collaborative News Networks: Distributed Editing, Collective Action, and the Construction of Online News on Slashdot.org
An examination of the social practices and processes surrounding the production, consumption and distribution of news on Slashdot.
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Anthropology of Nostalgia: Primitivism and the Antimodern Vision in the American Southwest, 1880-1930
“Indigenous populations and rural areas become as central to the activities and investments of modernism as urban Western ones.”
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“Stepping Up to the Mic”: Le Tigre Strategizes Third Wave Feminist Activism Through Music and Performance
An analysis of the political music band Le Tigre, this thesis explores the strategies for Third Wave feministic activism that Le Tigre creates and pursues through music and performance.
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Contested Codes: The Social Construction of Napster
Napster as an object whose meanings were contested and ultimately resolved, or at least stabilized, within, across, and through a broader systems of power.
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Ceremony of Innocence: A Case Study in the Emergent Poetics of Interactive Narrative
Is there a necessary inconsistency between the narrative and interactive domains? How does Ceremony of Innocence bridge any such inconsistency?
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High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (1996)
“Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square.”
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The Serpent’s Gift (1995)
“Helen Elaine Lee’s supremely assured The Serpent’s Gift, a first novel that gives to us — with the fullest emotional resonance, humor, and exultation in the novelist’s art — the intertwined stories of two families from early in this century to our own times. “
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Einstein’s Dreams (1993)
Alan Lightman’s “modern classic”, a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905.
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Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (1983)
“This biography illuminates the racial attitudes of an elite group of American scientists and foundation officers. It is the story of a complex and unhappy man.”
