Is your data getting you down? Clunking up your reports? Stressing you and your colleagues out? If so and you’d like some help, we’d love to help cure your data presentation woes at our “Data Therapy” training. In Session 1: Creative Approaches and Techniques, Rahul will walk you through some of the common issues with presenting data.

Some of these issues include:
• choosing data techniques
• developing criteria for evaluating data presentations
• implementing compelling methods that will grab your audience

There will also be a Group “therapy” session where you’ll work with fellow participants to brainstorm solutions to your data presentation problems. If you are interested in applying the ideas from this workshop with your own data we are offering a Session 2.

This workshop is presented in partnership with the Regional Center for Healthy Communities.

RSVP required below.

Featuring guest Luca De Biase, most recently of Il Sole 24 Ore, who will discuss the state of civic media in Italy.

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The Civic Media Thursday lunch series welcomes those working in the civic media field, who share food and company with staff, researchers, and visitors at the Center's headquarters in the MIT Media Lab.

Jason Pramas, Steve Meacham, and Kyle de Beausset

Social movements have always been productive spaces for the creation and circulation of media texts, tools, and frames for understanding the world. In the past, movement narratives were often told by specialists: filmmakers, writers, radio producers.

These roles still exist, but more recently, the rapid spread of digital literacies allows increased participation in movement media making by everyday participants.

This session brings together social movement media makers and scholars in a conversation about what the transformation of the media ecology means for movements. Under what conditions does media making by a movement's base help strengthen the movement and advance its goals, and when does it produce confusion and a lack of narrative power? How can filmmakers rooted in movements open up their processes to increased participation? What movements today are engaged in innovative cross platform practices?

Jason Pramas is editor/publisher of Open Media Boston - an online metro news weekly with a progressive editorial stance covering the labor and community beats since 2008. A photojournalist by trade, he has been active in movements for democracy and social justice for over a quarter century. He is working on an MFA in Visual Arts at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, and teaches social media in various academic and professional settings.

Steve Meacham is organizing coordinator of City Life/Vida Urbana and has been an organizer for almost forty years, working in areas of housing, labor, community democracy, peace work, and economic conversion. He emphasizes a radical approach that links day-to-day issues to systemic change, that generates new leaders, and that can rapidly expand. His current position at City Life/Vida Urbana has allowed for the full development of this organizing model. It has combined an aggressive day-to-day response to housing displacement with a series of conferences and institutes called the Radical Organizing process.

Kyle de Beausset is the founder of Citizen Orange and a campaigner at Presente.org. He was born and raised in Guatemala of U.S. citizen parents and got connected to the pro-migrant movement after he retraced the route of a Guatemalan migrant into the U.S., almost lost his life to smugglers, and blogged about it. After being trained to organize by the undocumented youth movement, he learned to use his social media skills to help stop deportations, move the presidents of universities, and influence lawmakers. His writing and commentary have been featured in both local and national media outlets including the Associated Press, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Fox News, and MTV.

RSVP required below.

Zeega was founded in 2010 by journalist Kara Oehler, media artist Jesse Shapins, and creative technologist James Burns. The team first started working together while developing Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary co-created with radio producer Ann Heppermann and funded through the Association of Independents in Radio's MQ2 initiative with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. We built Mapping Main Street from scratch while also producing stories for NPR. But ultimately, to pull it off, Kara had to put her stuff in storage and live out of her car for the summer. Afterwards, we decided people shouldn't have to give up their homes to make collaborative documentaries.

Zeega will enable anyone to create participatory projects that combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps via APIs from across the web. But Zeega is not just an online documentary toolkit. Integral to the project is the ability to bridge physical and digital worlds through tangible media such as signs, stickers or even networked receipt printers. Zeega will be a community and framework for creative invention, making it possible for people to pioneer new forms of storytelling that have not yet been imagined. Our mission is not only to give voice to individuals, but to create a platform that empowers individuals to give voice to others.

Kara Oehler is a Peabody award-winning audio documentarian, Editor-in-Chief of the non-profit Media And Place (MAP) Productions and a Co-Founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, where she is Documentary Arts and Media Innovation Fellow. Her work has aired on shows such as RadioLab, Hearing Voices, Studio 360, and been exhibited at venues such as MoMA. She is also co-creator of the interactive documentary Capitol of Punk. More at: karaoehler.com.

James Burns is Chief Technology Officer of Media And Place (MAP) Productions and Co-Founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, where he is Creative Technologist and Relational Knowledge Fellow. He built the API-driven website Mapping Main Street, constructing a system that automatically interrelates media feeds from across the web into thematic and geographic pathways. He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. More at www.matroidblues.com.

Jesse Shapins is a documentary artist, media theorist and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, and Wired, and been exhibited at MoMA, among other venues. He is Chief Strategy Architect of Media And Place (MAP) Proudctions, Co-Founder/Associate Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, and is co-creator of Yellow Arrow, the groundbreaking platform for location-based storytelling, among other projects. More at: www.jesseshapins.net.

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The Civic Media Thursday lunch series welcomes those working in the civic media field, who share food and company with staff, researchers, and visitors at the Center's headquarters in the MIT Media Lab.