Upcoming Events: Cyberscholars (4/28); Living with Data (4/29); Smartphones, digital news & the world’s biggest election (5/6)

Cyberscholar Working Group at MIT

Monday, April 28, 6:00pm ET, MIT Center for Civic Media

The Cyberscholar Working Group is a forum for fellows and affiliates of MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, Columbia University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research.. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, Yale, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work. This month's presentations include: "IANA Transfer: To fear or not to fear", Pranesh Prakash, Postdoctoral Associate in Law and Access to Knowledge Fellow for the Information Society Project. More TBA.

more information on our website>

Living with Data: Stories that Make Data More Personal

Tuesday, April 29, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

We are becoming data. Between our mobile phones, browser history, wearable sensors, and connected devices in our homes, there's more data about us than ever before. So how are we learning to live with all this data? Inspired by her ethnographic interview work with members of the quantified self community, Sara hopes to make these larger systemic shifts more relateable and concrete with personal narratives. This talk will share some examples of how we find clues, investigate, and reverse engineer what's going on with our data, and call for more stories to help personalize our evolving relationship to data and the algorithms that govern it.

Sara M. Watson is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her work addresses how individuals are learning to live with their personal data, in particular as more technologies like wearable sensors and the Internet of Things tie our bodies and our physical environment to data. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Cheap smartphones, digital news and the world’s biggest election

Tuesday, May 6, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

On June 1, 2014 the world’s biggest democracy, India, will have a new government, after an enormous, complex election taking place over several weeks. This is probably the country’s first proper ‘digital’ election, with Internet-based campaigning and journalism coming to the fore. Those who are connected will see a very different election to those that have gone before

However, we have to remember that even at the most optimistic estimates, no more than a sixth of Indians have access to the Internet. That’s a billion people who are being left behind. But smartphones are getting cheaper and mobile internet connections are becoming more easily available. The new Internet users will demand content that won’t be in English, that doesn’t necessarily demand high levels of literacy and works well on basic devices with erratic connections.

Hasit, a Nieman-Berkman Fellow at Harvard and Senior Producer for BBC News in London, is researching models for digital news designed for this type of user and will speak about his findings.

Hasit Shah is a senior producer at BBC News in London. He is a 2014 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation at Harvard and he will study the rapid growth and development of digital media in India and its impact on journalism, society, popular culture, political discourse, the economy and public policy. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Social Machine

Tuesday, May 20, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School. Free and Open to the Public.

Online, interface designs fashion people's appearance, shape their communication and influence their behavior. Can we see another’s face or do we know each other only by name? Do our words disappear forever once they leave the screen or are they permanently archived, amassing a history of our views and reactions? Are we aware of how public or private our surroundings are?

In “The Social Machine”, Judith Donath addresses topics such visualizing conversations and networks; portraying identity with data and history; delineating public and private space, and bringing the online world's open sociability into the face to face world. “The Social Machine” is a manifesto for balancing legibility, social responsibility and innovation -- and a manual for designing radically new environments for social interaction.

Judith Donath synthesizes knowledge from urban design, evolutionary biology and cognitive science to design innovative interfaces for on-line communities and virtual identities. A Harvard Berkman Faculty Fellow and formerly director of the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group, she is known internationally for her writing on identity, interface design, and social communication. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Intelligence Gathering and the Unowned Internet

The long-term viability of an unowned, open Internet remains in question. Any analysis of where the Internet is headed as a protocol and a platform must take into account the activities of both public and private entities that see the Internet as a source of intelligence -- and a field of contention. Yochai Benkler, Bruce Schneier, and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center are joined by John DeLong and Anne Neuberger of the National Security Agency in a conversation moderated by Berkman Faculty Director Terry Fisher on the future of an open internet in the face of challenges to privacy in an unsecure world. This talk was co-sponsored by: the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Law School American Civil Liberties Union, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, National Security Journal, and National Security and Law Association. video/audio on our website>