Initially, we’d planned to build an aggregator of blogs from around the developing world, based on my interest in Africa and her focus on China. Rebecca MacKinnon and I founded Global Voices in 2005 when we were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. A recent paper by Benkler, Roberts and Faris (I had a small assisting role) does a good job of displaying what the tool can do – this CJR article is a compact overview of its conclusions. This work builds on work I did almost a decade ago, Global Attention Profiles, and now is built on top of the Media Cloud platform, which we are co-developing with Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts and other friends at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. Much of my research at MIT centered on quantitative analysis of media: computational techniques to determine who, what and where feature in traditional and participatory media. Joy Buolamwini and Alexis Hope will graduate in 2021, and I am working with Chelsea Barabas and Pedro Reynolds Cuellar on their PhDs as well. I worked with extraordinary people at Center for Civic Media and have an increasingly long list of alumni who have moved on to wonderful things – Nathan Matias was my first PhD graduate, and he’s been joined by Jia Zhang and Erhardt Graeff. Center for Civic Media, supported by the John and James Knight Foundation, researches the relationship between media and social change, and builds tools to study how ideas spread in the media, and how citizens can better participate in their civic lives. I came to MIT in 2011 to take over the Center for Civic Media when co-founder Chris Csikszentmihalyi moved on. I’m founding the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure to explore these ideas, and you can find much of my writing about the topic on the iDPI website. My work at UMass focuses on designing and advocating for versions of social media that are designed to have positive social and civic impacts, which means moving beyond existing models of funding and governance. My home department is the School for Public Policy, but I’ll be teaching and advising students in Communication and CICS as well. I’ve got appointments in three departments at UMass. I joined UMass in the fall of 2020 and will teach my first class in February 2021.
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