MIT Comparative Media Studies student theses (2001-2008)

AMANDA FINKELBERG
Space, Place, and Database: Digital Cartography in the Network Age (2007)
This paper addresses the changes in cartography since digitization and widespread popular dissemination. Cybercartography, an emergent system of maps, mapmaking tools, and mapmakers, forces a rethinking of spatial representations. The implicit distinction in digital media enables a new type of map user or neo-geographer that creates layers of expressions based on subjective experience. This paper argues that the neogeographer signifies a new cartographic behavior that affords a complex subjectivity. This behavior is further exhibited in the practice of navigable maps and virtual globes which lead the way to a paradigmatic change in the way we represent and interact with space. It is divided into three parts: Part I addresses the role of digitization in maps and lays out framework and vocabulary. Part II examines layers of spatial representations in historical context. Part III opens room for future study in the quickly developing inhabitable cartographic spaces of virtual globes and virtual worlds.
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KAREN VERSCHOOREN
.art: situating internet art in the modern museum (2007)
This thesis provides a critical analysis of the relation between Internet art and the traditional institution for contemporary art in the North American and West-European regions. Thirteen years after its inception as an art form, the Internet art world finds itself in a developmental stage and its relation to the traditional institution for contemporary art is accordingly. Through an elaborate discussion of the key players, institutions and discourses on aesthetics, economics and exhibition methodologies, this sociological analysis of the past and current situation hopes to offer a solid ground for extrapolation and predictions for Internet art’s future as an art world in its relation to the traditional art institutions.
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STEPHANIE DAVENPORT
Experiments in Corporate Collaboration: The Case of the Ars Electronica FutureLab (2003)
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SOPHIE ORMEROD
The Medium Still Isn’t the Message: Revisiting the Link Between Communication Technologies and Political Liberalization (2002)
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Roger B. Lazarus: Computing at LASL in the 1940s and 1950s (1978)

The Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have been important sponsors of, and customers for, supercomputers-high-performance scientific computers. The laboratories played an important part in establishing speed of floating-point arithmetic (rather than, say, at logical operations) as the performance criterion defining supercomputing. But their more specific influence on the evolution of computer architecture has been limited by the diversity and classified nature of their central computational tasks, together with the expansion of supercomputer use elsewhere.

The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection:

In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology as well as other historical and policy-related publications that had formerly been available on the Lab’s web site as part of its Library Without Walls initiative.

Fortunately, almost all of the withdrawn reports were acquired and preserved in the public domain by researchers Gregory Walker and Carey Sublette. The document titles are indexed in four parts

Publisher: Washington: Dept. of Energy ; Springfield, Va. : For sale by the National Technical Information Service, 1978.

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Arthur Kroker: Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis, McLuhan, Grant (1984)

Technology and the Canadian Mind explores the relationship between technology and culture in a comprehensive discourse on Canadian culture. McLuhan, Grant and Innis are viewed as key figures in understanding contemporary society from a uniquely Canadian point of view.

©1984, New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series
Montreal: New World Perspectives, ISBN 0-920393-00-4
Published simultaneously in the USA by St. Martin’s Press, ISBN 0-31278-832-0

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