Vicky Zeamer (vzeamer@mit.edu)
My passions fall more in the realm of human-centered design. I have spent my previous education and work experience in the tech industry, specifically focusing on how user experience (UX) can help guide the development of technology to be better for people and society. At MIT, I earned my M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies where I wrote my thesis on how the dining out food industry shifted in response to the proliferation of digital food culture on Web 1.0 & 2.0. I earned my B.A. at Wellesley College where I studied both how people and societies function and create culture (American Studies) and how computer science and design could be leveraged for innovation (Media Arts and Sciences). I am currently a UX Research role at HubSpot in Cambridge, a software company dedicated to helping small and medium-sized businesses grow through an online marketing and sales platform. I sit as a user-centered researcher within the Machine Learning (ML) engineering team where my main focus is to gather insights about our users and strategize how to create ML-enabled solutions for our customers. Being at the intersection of technology and people is really my sweet spot.
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Internet Killed the Michelin Star: The Motives of Narrative and Style in Food Text Creation on Social Media
While the underlying purpose of the construction and consumption of food texts remain the same from analog to digital form, the authority of food culture and its complimentary narrative control has shifted as a result of the convergence of food texts and digital media affordances.
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Podcast: Anne-Katrin Weber, “Between Participation and Control: A Long History of CCTV”
Anne-Katrin Weber explores the politics of CCTV, highlighting the adaptability of closed-circuit technologies, which accommodate to, and underpin variable contexts of media participation as well as of surveillance and control.
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Podcast, Emily Rueb: “The City Talks: Storytelling at the New York Times’s Metro Desk”
Emily Rueb, a reporter for The New York Times, shares insights gained in bursting boundaries of traditional storytelling for The New York Times’s Metro desk — weaving video, audio, illustrations and text across multiple platforms.
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Podcast, Nancy Baym: “Music Fandom and the Shaping of Online Culture”
Nancy Baym: “By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power.”
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Podcast: Deen Freelon, “The (Non)Americans: Tracking and Analyzing Russian Influence Operations on Twitter”
Addressing the challenges to analyzing Russian political influence operations.
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Podcast: Carleen Maitland, “ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons”
Carleen Maitland introduces the terms “digital refugee” and “digital humanitarian brokerage” as she previews her new edited volume “Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons”.
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Podcast: Eric Klopfer, “From Augmented to Virtual Learning: Affordances of Different Mixes of Reality for Learning”
What theories and evidence can we generate and build upon to provide a foundation for using mixed reality technologies productively for learning?
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Podcast: Nicole Hemmer, “From Taft to Trump: How Conservative Media Activists Won — and Lost — the GOP”
Nicole Hemmer explains how conservative media activists won the GOP for the right — and how in the era of Trump, they lost it.
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Podcast: Brian Larkin and Stefan Andriopoulos, “The Contingencies of Comparison: Rethinking Comparative Media”
Brian Larkin and Stefan Andriopoulos: “It is clear that future media centers will emerge in places far outside their traditional Western centers.”
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Podcast: Michael Lee, “The Conservative Canon Before and After Trump”
Michael J. Lee charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States.
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Podcast: Barbie and Mortal Kombat 20 Years Later
Yasmin Kafai and Gabriela Richard expand the discussions on gender, race, and sexuality in gaming.
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Podcast: Glorianna Davenport, “The Networked Sensory Landscape Meets the Future of Documentary”
Glorianna Davenport presents DoppelMarsh, data from a dense network of diverse environmental sensors mapped to deliver “a sense of being there” in a re-synthesized, ever-changing landscape.
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Podcast: Paul Roquet, “Desktop Reveries: Hand, Software, and the Space of Japanese Artist Animation”
Paul Roquet unravels the analytical split between the “drawn” and the “digital” in animation and media studies more broadly.
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Podcast: Nathan Matias, “Authoritarian and Democratic Data Science in an Experimenting Society”
How will the role of data science in democracy be transformed as software expands the public’s ability to conduct our own experiments at scale?
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Podcast, Kishonna L . Gray: “#Misogynoir, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and other forms of Black Digital Feminisms”
Operating under the oppressive structures of masculinity, heterosexuality, and Whiteness that are sustained in digital spaces, marginalized women persevere and resist such hegemonic realities.
