New Media 2013 Summer Research Fellowships Awarded to BCNM Designated Emphasis Students
Berkeley Center for New Media is pleased to award fellowships for research on new media scholarship in Summer 2013 to five Designated Emphasis students. Congratulations to the following students. We hope that this award will help you bring your research and writing to fruition.
Kiera Chase
Ph.D. Graduate School of Education, DE New Media
Kiera's work on transparency and technological solutions for special-education mathematical literacy was accepted proceedings papers in the ACM-SIGCHI annual conference “Interaction Design and Children” (IDC 2013), to be held this June in New York City. "The IDC venue is particularly exciting for me", Kiera says, "because they have just introduced a new workshop on technological design for students with disabilities." This fellowship will cover Kiera's costs of attendance at IDC, and additionally support her summer project to digitize the special-ed algebra learning environment.
R. Stuart Geiger
Ph.D. School of Information, DE New Media
Stuart's dissertation project is investigating the social roles of automated software agents in Wikipedia and reddit. Situating his work in the field of media studies, he will be focusing on how these "bots" reconfigure relations in mediated environments, particularly the production of alternative relations of power and agency between developers, users, platforms, and code. During the summer he will be reviewing relevant literatures, identifying relevant case studies to analyze, developing an interview protocol for bot developers, submitting a proposal to the CPHS/IRB for review, and if approved, conducting pilot interviews.
Christopher Goetz
Ph.D. Film Studies, DE New Media
Christopher's summer research includes finishing a chapter on the history of discourse concerning the banning of pinball machines in America. To do so he will travel in state to nearby museums to spend time with the actual machines, as well as archived promotional materials for the entertainment industry. This chapter will contribute to the academic community's knowledge of how early leisure devices (such as home pinball, early video games and home computers) were allowed into the home, and how their entry altered notions of both home and leisure.
Margaret Rhee
Ph.D. Ethnic Studies, DE New Media
This summer, Margaret is finalizing her dissertation chapter “Racial Recalibration: Humanizing Technology and Machine Intelligence through Nam June Paik’s ‘K-456.’” The chapter attempts to build on theorization of Paik’s work by focusing on race and/as technology through his robot-artist K-456. The New Media summer fellowship will support a research trip to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which holds the foremost collection on Paik including the artists' complete estate archive.
Bonnie Ruberg
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, DE New Media
This summer Bonnie will be researching and writing an article on homophobic Twitter hashtags that bridges the gap between her dissertation interest in the intersection of sexuality and embodied technological experiences. She has been collaborating with fellow DE Andrew Godbehere, who is creating tools for statistical Twitter language analysis. Over the summer she will be working more closely with the data sets generated, and writing an article on her findings for publication in a digital humanities journal.