If you follow news about prisoner rights, court rulings and other news about prison issues, join us for this week's Civic Lunch...

Free Civic Lunch This Week

• RSVP for our [free] lunch this week with Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News

And more civic media news this week...

"Nutrition Labels for News"

• Matt Stempeck: “Do nutrition labels even work?” A key question before testing nutrition labels for news content

Solitude on the Web

• Nathan Matias asks, Can the Internet be a place for deep personal reflection?

SOPA/PIPA

Back in November, Associate Professor of Civic Media and Center principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock spoke with NPR's Brook Gladstone about what comes next for the Occupy movement (image and link courtesy of shass.mit.edu and NPR's On the Media:

Download!

Everything for me this week is relating to the late Vaclav Havel, and this "imbeciles" story makes me think of Havel's 1965 speech/article "On Evasive Thinking".

He opens with an episode from earlier that year when a girl was crushed by a stone window ledge that fell after the state failed to maintain it. Havel tells how the state acknowledged the issue and abstractly promised that things would get better. He tells how spineless writers wrote how wonderful it is that their society was now open enough for criticism.

As in…

A girl being crushed resulted in praise for the very gov't that allowed her to be crushed, because the writers were too chicken to ask the primary question, "Dear gov't, why do our window ledges fall?"

(For MIT undergraduates only.)

With the increasing proliferation of mobile digital media tools and online video distribution, there is a need for secure easy-to-use platforms for sharing and organizing media content among youth. While capturing and tagging digital media with time and location is possible, editing and organizing it for producing seamless narrativesthat can be easily shared online remains complicated. This project seeks to undertake development of mobile tools and online platforms that support young media makers and citizen journalists to create, organize and share digital narratives produced in their own neighborhoods over time, while allowing new forms ofinter-generational learning, location-based storytelling and civicadvocacy.

Enjoy the latest civic media news...

 

From the Center

Truth Goggles

• Dan Schultz: "Trust Me: Credibility is the Future of Journalism"

Bulk-Analyzing Front Pages

• Pablo Rey unveils amazing "Newspapers’ Front Page" analysis tool

Jobs

For a recent Civic Media Lunch, we welcomed the co-founder and radio coordinator from ZUMIX, Madeleine Steczynski and Elena Botkin-Levy. ZUMIX is a twenty-year-old East Boston-based nonprofit that builds community through music and the arts. Their core constituency is low-income youth -- picture a Boys and Girls Club filled with kids playing guitars and learning to use mixing boards...

As it happens, a week later, Sujata Singhal of the Harvard Graduate School of Education developed a logic model of ZUMIX for a GSE paper.

(click to expand)

It was our great pleasure last Friday to host GZA/The Genius of seminal hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan.

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Thanks to "The Crime Report" for their coverage of Charlie DeTar's Center project, Between the Bars:

Reentry and reform can take root when prisoners are able to maintain connections with their families and communities. One website is making great strides in building those bridges online.

BetweentheBars.org aims to humanize prisoners and open a dialogue between the millions of incarcerated Americans and the public. The site launched last year, growing out of work at the MIT Center for Civic Media by Charlie DeTar and others. It’s a refreshing initiative in a field that usually holds technology and communications at arm’s length.

DeTar’s site is a brilliant idea. Thanks to a recent redesign, it’s also a well-executed one. Between the Bars relies on the help of volunteers to scan posts from prisoners and post them directly to the web.

Download! (Embedded version below the fold.)

While you view our video below, read Ethan's rundown of our superb event, Mapping Media Ecosystems. It featured Hal Roberts, of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Erhardt Graeff, founding member of the Web Ecology Project; and Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development for SocialFlow:

I asked them to share some of the recent work they’ve been doing, understanding the structure of the US and Russian blogosphere, analyzing the influence networks in Twitter during the early Arab Spring events and understanding the social and political dynamics of hashtags. They didn’t disappoint, and I suspect our video of the session will be one of the more popular pieces of media we put together this fall.