Expanding the Concept of Accessible Technology; Narcotweets: Reporting on the Mexican Drug War using Social Media

Expanding the Concept of Accessible Technology

Tuesday, June 26, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

This presentation expands the idea of accessible technology to show how the way we make our shared world of buildings, technologies, public spaces, practices, laws, and attitudes builds a total environment which welcomes some people and keeps other people out. The talk presents the evolution of how accessible technologies in the broadest sense make our citizenry more inclusive and diverse. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of Women's Studies and English at Emory University. Her fields of study are feminist theory, American literature, and disability studies. Her work develops the field of disability studies in the humanities and women's and gender studies. This year she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Narcotweets: Reporting on the Mexican Drug War using Social Media

Tuesday, July 10, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

In the last few years, the war among drug cartels and the Mexican authorities has intensified. It is a brutal war that has claimed the lives of many innocent people. Citizens, using Social Media have organized a communication network reporting daily on the dangerous zones of their cities. How did it start and how effective are they? In this presentation we analyze the information sharing practices of people living in cities central to the Mexican Drug War. We will describe the content, volume, and network structures of a microblogging corpus from several cities afflicted by this war. First, we will describe how citizens use social media to alert each other and comment on the violence that plagues their communities. Then we will examine how a handful of citizens aggregate and disseminate information from social media, many of whom are anonymous. We present our published and ongoing research (jointly with Eni Mustafaraj) on this phenomenon that we hope will expand our understanding of self-organized civic media efforts along with some of the challenges that these might face. Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Panagiotis "Takis" Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science and Founder of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Urs Gasser and John Palfrey on Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity. But interoperability is not also without its risks. In this presentation authors John Palfrey — Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School — and Urs Gasser — Executive Director of the Berkman Center — demonstrate how interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system, and now is mor e important than ever. Interoperability offers a number of solutions to global challenges, but in order to get the most out of interoperability while minimizing its risks, we will need to fundamentally revisit our understanding of how it works, and how it can allow for improvements in each of its constituent parts. video/audio on our website>

RB204: The Art and Science of Working Together

If you've ever experienced the problem of a dead cell phone battery and only incompatible chargers within reach, you've experienced one of the minor frustrations of a non-interoperable system. This frustration — not to mention the environmental waste of having dozens of different charger types for the same class of device — has led some countries to institute regulations for cell phone manufacturers to use a single common standard. Such a structure is an example of an Interoperable System. And interoperable systems can range anywhere from relatively minor markets like mobile phone chargers, to massive infrastructures like smart energy grids or air traffic systems. Friends of the show John Palfrey and Urs Gasser are the authors of the newly released "Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems." They spoke with David Weinberger about how Interoperability works, and how interoperable systems can lead to greater innovation, greater efficiency, and better functioning societies. audio on our website>