time	thursday 4:30-6:30
place	205 south hall
professor	warren sack
email	new-media-prof@sims.berkeley.edu
office hours	thursday 2:00-3:30
tutor	dilan mahendran
email	dilan@sims.berkeley.edu
office hours	tba
course email list	new-media@sims.berkeley.edu
course web site	www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is290-1/s02/
student pages	www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is290-1/s02/assignments.html
resources	www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is290-1/s02/resources.html
description	This is a graduate seminar/studio course in which we will explore the role of new media technologies (especially software-based technologies) in the production, distribution, and reception of the news.  The focus this term will be on international news.  We will consider macro and micro phenomenon which influence the form and content of the news and we will consider how new media technologies can or do amplify, transform or counter the powers of these phenomena.  Phenomena to be covered include the influences of ownership of the media, law and the media, geography, race, religion, language, ideology, story format, news sources, editing, and history.  Each week will be devoted to a different macro or micro influence on the form, content, distribution, or reception of the news.  Students will be assigned a series of design and analysis exercises in which they will be asked to examine or propose how new media technologies can be designed to improve the quality, quantity and presentation of news and information.  We will be especially concerned with existing and proposed software technologies to search, sort, cluster, archive, present, edit, and author the news.  Readings will be drawn from humanities and social science works of media studies and also from the technical literatures of information retrieval, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and multimedia.
requirements	Every week there will be a reading assignment and a design or analysis exercise.  The readings are intended to give you ideas on how to conceptualize and approach the design and analysis exercises.  This course is a studio course which means that every week we will spend an appreciable amount of time looking at and discussing student work.  After completing the week's assignment we will ask you to upload your work to the course website before the next week's meeting time.  During the following week's meeting time we will discuss the work that you have uploaded to the website.  Final project reviews will take a similar form.  As a student you will be asked to show your work, be given the chance to describe what you have done, and then will receive feedback from fellow students, the professor and tutor, and possibly several invited guests.
grading criteria	weekly exercises 80% final project 20%
readings	books (These books are recommended, but not required.  Individual chapters from these books and other materials will be available in the course reader and on reserve at the library.) Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (editors) Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001) Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York: Vintage, 1979) Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000) Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (New YorK; Pantheon, 1981) course reader A collection of xeroxed articles will be  available as a reader that can be purchased from Copy Central on Bancroft.  (The reader is not yet at Copy Central.) online articles The online articles are available for download at the URLs hyperlinked in the readings listed below.
resources	Throughout the term we will be collecting pointers to code archives, websites, books, and articles. These will be resources for better understanding the assigned readings and for finding related work for the final projects.  The resource list can be accessed through this link: resources.

 
 
 

schedule

date	topic	technology	readings	assignment due
24 jan	introduction	old-new media technologies
31 jan	ownership guest speaker: kim norlen	social networks	required ben bagdikian, the media monopoly edward herman and noam chomsky, "a propaganda model" xeroxed copies of the readings for this week can be found in the hall outside of room 314 south hall.   recommended columbia journalism review, "who owns what?" "the big ten," the nation, jan. 7-14, 2002 mediachannel.org, "the media ownership chart" gabe lucas, kim norlen, valerie lanard, media map	who owns whom? your assignment for this week is to explore the media ownership of our immediate area (berkeley).  you may work in a group if you would like to. (1) pick a media type from the list of local media that you you find here (e.g., local newspapers, or local television, or local radio). (2) use lucas, norlen and lanard's media map, and/or www.hoovers.com, and/or the urls listed to the left to discover the owning companies, the owner's owner's, etc. of each of the local media companies. (3) try to discover interrelationships between the local companies and their owning companies.  do the same people sit on the boards of different companies? does a company own a significant stake of it competitor? (4) code these relationships up in a form that could be machine readable.  you might chose to do this as an xml document, or you might simply chhose to do this in a simple way -- an indented list with some notation for pointers will probably work just fine. (5) invent a graphical means of expressing this information.  you might borrow ideas from one of the readings, you might find some software available online for charting out trees or graphs, or you might just sketch it out with pencil and paper. (6) post both (a) your coded relationships and (b) your graphical representation of these ownership relationships to your course webpage.  if your graphical representation is not in digital form, please scan it in so that we can look at it in class.
7 feb	sources guest speaker:  jeff ubois	web clients	required herbert gans, deciding what's news (chapters 1 and 4) teun van dijk, racism and the press (chapter 6) recommended steve rendall, "fox's slanted sources: conservatives, republicans far outnumber others"	revealing sources (1) go to the new york times online, "international" news section.  select twenty stories from the stories listed there: www.nytimes.com/pages/world/ (2) for each news story note (a) who wrote the story (this could be a journalist, a group of journalists, or even an organization; e.g., the associated press); (b) the affiliation of the writer (e.g., john smith, associated press); (c) all of the people or entities who were directly cited;  note, again, that the cited entity could just as well be a group or institution as an individual (e.g., "today, in response to bush's state of the union addres, iran said..."); (d) all of the affiliations of the directed cited people or entites; (e) all of the indirectly cited sources (e.g., "both sides"  are the source in the following indirect citation: "both sides insisted that they were supporting the government of mr. karzai, and both sides offered a chorus of vituperation..."); and, (f) all of the affiliations of the indirectly cited sources (which, in the case of "both sides" above would also require on to resolve who the "sides" refer to.  (3) see if you can sort these authors, directly cited sources, and indirectly cited sources into two or more categories.  use the van dijk, gans, and rendall articles to get some ideas about how you might sort these sources out.  (4) while you are doing the work for (2) -- i.e., while you are finding sources -- also write done the words, phrases, or punctuation that indicated to you that a source is cited in the text.  here is my list written in the programming language lisp: sources.  you don't need to write this out in lisp; a list of words, phrases, etc. will be perfect.  (5) put your work up on the web so that we can have a look at it in class.
14 feb	narrative form	information extraction	teun van dijk, "news schemata" ralph grishman, "information extraction" christopher riesbeck, "micro sam" roger schank and robert abelson, "scripts"	inverting the pyramid   This week's exercise can be found here: link to exercise.
21 feb	personalization and point of view	information extraction	sara elo, "plum: contextualizing news for communities through augmentation richard terdiman, discourse/counter-discourse	extra! extra!  This week's exercise:  The point of this week's exercise is to consider how a news article might been automatically annotated with extra background and context material that is useful for a particular group or community of people.  (1) Read Elo's thesis (2) For each news script you defined for last week's assignmen, identify at least two stories in that the script applies to. (3) Now, for each news script, identify at least three online sources of background and/or contextual material that would be pertinent for the community or culture that posseses the script.  Try to find background sources that are different from the one's Elo uses (e.g., the CIA factbook). (4) For each news story identified in step (2), annotate the news story in a Plum-like fashion with the background materials you have found.  You might do a simple layout in HTML like is done with Plum, or you might device something more graphically ambitious. (5) Post your work to the web so that we can look at it in class.
28 feb	ideology, myth, and metaphor	information extraction	george lakoff, "metaphors of the gulf war" george lakoff "metaphors of terror (9/11)" warren sack, actor-role analysis: ideology, point of view and the news	all the news that fits (1) pick an international news topic that is being written about from two or more political points of view.  examples: afghanistan, palestine, american military advisors in the phillipines, etc. (2) find both (a) the recurrent actors in news stories about your chosen topic (e.g., "george bush" might be one such actor; and, (b) the roles assigned to the actors (e.g., a role might be a specific position, like "preseident", or it might indicate a general sort of agency (e.g., "terrorist"). (3) find the roles that are politically "loaded."  for example, the roles like "terrorist" and "criminal" and "aggressor" are politically loaded because they are pejorative terms.  no one calls themself a "terrorist."  rather, peoples tend to call their adversaries "terrorists."  see my thesis for more details. (4) pick three of the "loaded" roles and compile a list of lexical and/or grammatical clues that one can use to identify the role in a news text.  This part of the assignment is exatly like what we did in identifying the role of "source" for february 7th.  see the end of my thesis for example definitions of several such roles. (5) now try to name the larger scenarios, the larger stories or myths into which the identified actors and roles fit.  if you have two different political viewpoints, then you are likely to have two different stories (and thus two different sets of roles).  you can begin this process identifying actor-role pairings that are consistent for each political point of view that you have identified as pertinent to the news topic.  if you have a little more time and you want a better understanding of this, have a look at george lakoff's book "moral politics: what conservatives know that liberals don't.  lakoff identifies two stories about family life: one for conservatives and one for liberals.  he claims these differing attitudes, the differences in the stories about families, are central to any understanding of the differences (and internal consistencies) of american conversative versus american liberal politics.  write out your two or more stories as single paragraphs. (6) post your (a) list of actors; (b) list of roles; (c) three role definitions; and, (d) two or more paragraph long stories to the web so that we can have a look during class.
07 mar	translation and culture	machine translation	edward said, covering islam, introduction, and chapter 1 (pp. ix - 73) edward said, orientalism, introduction (pp. 1 - 28)	lost in the translation (1) read said to get a feel for what he means by "orientalism" and see his analysis of western media's coverage of "islam" as a subject. (2) go to the webpage www.ajeeb.com.  use internet explorer.  netscape does not work with this site.  this site is an arabic-to-english (and vice versa) translation site.  site up for a user account. (3) on three separate days this week, use the ajeeb software to translate the arab-language newspaper www.aljazeera.net. (4) compare the three days of front page articles on al-jazeera to the front page articles for the same three days at the new york times site.  some issues to consider in your comparison: (a) are the articles on the two sites covering the same events or different events?  when they cover the same events, is the coverage the same or different?  when the coverage is the same, what sorts of mistakes do you note that the arab-to-english translation software seems to be making?  (i am assuming you do not read arabic.  if you do though, that's great.  we will have even more to talk about in class.) (5) according to traditional western scholarship the term "orient" is suppose cover a part of the world that excludes and, in some ways, parallels the "occident."  however, these terms are far from symmetrical.  universities in the west have departments called "oriental studies," but none called "occidental studies."  are there asymmetries between the small collection of front page articles you collected for step (4) that illustrate this orient/occident asymmetry?  does this pair of terms help you explain what you see in the al-jazeera paper versus what you see in the new york times?  what implications might this have for translating the new york times into arabic and/or translating al-jazeera into english?  (6) cut and paste articles -- or entire front pages -- from al-jazeera and the new york times.  juxapose them in such a manner as to illustrate the findings you arrived at for steps (5) and (6).  anotate these resulting collages with your own text if you think that will clarify your findings. (7) put everything up on the web so that we can discuss it during class.
14 mar	language and nationalism	machine translation	robert e. park, the immigrant press and its control benedict anderson, "nationalism and imperialism" from imagined communities	find two or more non-english language or "foreign" "local" news products and bring them into class.  for example, you might bring a videotape of a short segment from a spanish-language tv channel broadcast from northern california and a url to a news site written for indian nationals living in northern california.
21 mar	objectivity	computational linguistics	hodges and kress, news and ideology bruno latour, science in action warren sack, "questioning the news"	just the facts mam! (0) Pick a date (e.g., today) and a statement that is discussed as a fact in the news (e.g., "The U.S. is at war with Afghanistan.") (1) Go to Lexis-nexis (http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/) and find a date prior to which the fact was not discussed as a fact (e.g., September 10th).  Let's call that date the "start date." (2) Pick a newspaper listed in Lexis-Nexis and do the following: Beginning at the start date, collect a series of articles that address a topic related to the fact (e.g., the WTC, the highjackings, etc.)  Chart the transformations in statements between the start date and the first mention of the fact as a statement.  Use the transformations named in either the hodges and kress aticle, my one-page summary, and/or the latour article.  (3) Diagram these transformations of statements from "pre-fact" to fact and plot them chronologically so that we can see how fast (or how slow) this transformation from pre-fact -- or opinion -- to fact occurred. (4) Read my paper on "questioning news" and speculate on how you might write a computer program to do steps 1, 2, and 3. (5) Put your diagrams and speculations up online so that we can see them in class.
28 mar	spring break
04 apr	international differences		klaus bruhn jensen, news of the world: world cultures look at television news teun van dijk, news analysis	news diary the point of this week's exercise is to begin to address the issue of how differing news content relates to its reception, i.e., its audience and their interactions with one another. (1) pick two days.  they do not need to be contiguous.  for these two days keep a news diary to record the news that you have read (e.g., in a newspaper or magazine); heard (e.g., on the radio); or watched (e.g., on television) and the conditions or contexts in which you have read, heard or watched the news.  during these two days record the following whenever you read, hear, or watch a news story: (a) the venue: e.g., the nytimes, the 6:00 news on a given tv channel, etc.;  (b) the headline or topic of the news story; (c) the time of day when you heard, read, watched the news story (d) the place or location (e.g., at home, in the library, etc.) (e) the number of people you read, watched, or heard this story with.  for example, watching a cnn story on tv at the airport will probably mean that you saw the story with about 50 people.  or, sharing the paper with your partner over breakfast would count as reading the story with one other person. (f) note whether or not you discussed this story with others.  note the time, place and number of people you discussed the story with.  it may be that you won't discuss the news story with anyone until days after you read, hear or watch it. (2) figure out a way to present your results chronologically and put your results up on the web. (3) in class we will focused on trying to understand how the news stories that you came across during these two days influenced or shaped various social interactions.
11 apr	lakoff		lecture by george lakoff on "metaphors and war"
18 apr	audience	weblogs and newsgroups	david morley, the nationwide audience ian ang, desperately seeking the audience warren sack, "future news: constructing the audience constructing the news"	new(s) roles through reflection and through empirical observation it is possible to understand the "audience" of the news as something more than a group of listeners, watchers, or readers.  with, for instance, the advent of newsgroups, weblogs, etc., the news reader becomes -- also -- the news writer or, at least, the news commentator or editorializer.  sometimes amateur news editorializers also become news editors.  witness, for example, phil agre's red rock eater (see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html). in our discussion last week we identified a set of audience roles including news reader, news writer, news editor, news browser.  we also found examples of uses of the news that went outside of an understanding of news as information.  for example, we saw how news was often grist for communication and conversation; we also heard about news -- e.g., npr morning news -- as audio "wallpaper"; i.e., that which functions a many people's background environment as they eat breakfast or drive to work. this week's exercise is more speculative in nature than the exercises of previous weeks.  the point is to sketch out either (a) a new role for a news audience member; or, (b) a new function or use for news.  your answer can take the form of a paragraph or two of text and/or drawings and visual illustrations.  you can approach this exercise any way that you want.  i will outline a possible way of approaching one version of the exercise -- the exercise to identify a new role -- in the following steps: (1) visit a news-oriented weblog, newsgroup, or listserv -- e.g., metafilter.com, weblab.org, etc. (2) find a message containing a news article published in an edited news forum.  e.g., many newsgroup participants copy newspaper articles into the newsgroup in order to spark discussion about a current event. (3) watch how the stated facts in the news artcile get rewritten, restated, challenged, etc. in responses to the post containing the original story. (4) think about the sorts of work involved in subsequent posts as the work of someone playing an identifiable role.  for example, there might be a chronic contrarian -- a troll looking to start a flamewar -- that inhabits the group and thus constantly challenges everyone and everything.  there might, on the other hand, be a person in the group -- or a set of people -- devoted to faciliating and smoothing over differences.  there might an amateur fact checker constantly vigilant for possible errors, etc. (5) put your role description(s) up on the web.  also, document your description with the messages, etc. that motivated your observations. next week we will discuss two things: (a) for each new news function proposed we will examine what sorts of new audience roles are implied by this new function; and, (b) for each new news audience role identified we will examine the news functions and/or new news technologies implied by such an audience role.
25 apr	projects
02 may	projects
09 may	final presentations