[Gregory T. Donovan]

The New Media and Digital Design Program’s Inaugural Lecture Series
Fordham College at Lincoln Center
Spring, 2015

Further details on each lecture below, information on how to RSVP without a Fordham ID to follow.

Thursday, February 12, 2015 (4:00-6:00 P.M.)
Government With the People: Digital Media and Re/Designing Government
Beth Noveck, Former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative

Monday, February 23, 2015 (4:00-6:00 P.M.)
Connecting to Rural America from All Over the World: Hollow: An Interactive Documentary
Guided Screening with Elaine McMillion, Documentary Filmmaker; and Jeff Soyk, Art Director for Design and User Experience

Thursday, March 12, 2015 (3:00-5:00 P.M.)
Humanist Games
Mary Flanagan, Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Dartmouth College; Founder, Titlfactor Game Research Lab

Monday, April 27, 2015 (4:00-6:00 P.M.)
Digital Media with a Mission
Amy O’Leary, Editorial Director of Upworthy.com

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Government With the People: Digital Media and Re/Designing Government
Beth Noveck, Former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative

Thursday, February 12, 2015
4:00-6:00 P.M.
Lowenstein Hall, South Lounge

This lecture is given in memory of Joseph Dembo.

Beth Noveck’s work proposes government with the people, a new vision of governance in the digital age. She argues that new media technology and policy can foster more open and collaborative government, allowing people and institutions to work together to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern more effectively.

Noveck is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful, she is also co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds.  Currently, she is Director of The Governance Lab (www.thegovlab.org) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance, organizations that strive to improve people’s lives by changing how we govern.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, Noveck has been named one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy; one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company; and one of the “Top Women in Technology” by the Huffington Post.

Connecting to Rural America from All Over the World: Hollow: An Interactive Documentary
Guided Screening with Elaine McMillion, Documentary Filmmaker; and
Jeff Soyk, Art Director for Design and User Experience

Monday, February 23, 2015
4:00-6:00 P.M.
Lowenstein Hall, South Lounge

The term “documentary” was coined by John Grierson, father of the documentary film, as the “creative treatment of actuality.” Digital and social media open up enormous potential for completely new kinds of documentaries: films that constantly update themselves with breaking information, are shaped by users, engage communities through social media collaboration, and are made more persuasive through personalization. 

Hollow: An Interactive Documentary an award-winning example of those emergent capabilities. This new media film project invites viewers into the story of McDowell County, West Virginia – and the story of small town America today: of rural communities facing changes beyond their control, of boom and bust economies, and challenges and triumphs of every size. 

By design, this documentary is a participatory project that examines rural America through the eyes and ears of its subjects. Using interactive technology, it allows viewers to experience McDowell Country through guided access to 35 important stories from the project, combining video portraits, data visualizations, photography, community-generated content and grassroots mapping to bring the stories to life. 

The project won a prestigious Peabody Award in 2013, and has been presented at the New York Film Festival, MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, Harvard’s Berkman Center, and the Museum of Moving Image, among others.

Humanist Games
Mary Flanagan, Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Dartmouth College; Founder, Titlfactor Game Research Lab

Thursday, March 12, 2015
3:00-5:00 P.M.
Lowenstein Hall, South Lounge

Flanagan is an artist, educator and designer whose works have included everything from game-inspired art, to commercial games that shift people’s thinking about biases and stereotypes. In 2003, Flanagan established the game research laboratory Tiltfactor to invent “humanist” games and take on social issues through gaming.

Her interest in play and culture led to her widely-praised book, Critical Play. Her fifth academic title, Values at Play in Digital Games, with philosophy Helen Nissenbaum, was recently released from MIT.

Flanagan has been a Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies the Brown Foundation, and has served on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Academic Consortium on Games for Impact. She has been supported by commissions and grants from The British Arts Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institute of Justice.

Digital Media with a Mission
Amy O’Leary, Editorial Director of Upworthy.com

Monday, April 27, 2015
4:00-6:00 P.M.
Lowenstein Hall, South Lounge

In early 2015, FCLC’s own Amy O’Leary announced she would be leaving The New York Times to become Editorial Director of Upworthy.com.

O’Leary is a noted multimedia storyteller who learned the trade as a producer for This American Life and quickly showed herself to be a journalist and editor able to think as fluently in text and audio as she can in data and wireframes. An adept and perceptive reporter, O’Leary covered sexism in the videogame industry a year before #gamergate. A creative adoptor of new technologies, she once live-tweeted one of her own keynote addresses. At the Times, O’Leary also proved herself an astute digital strategist, co-authoring last year’s widely discussed Innovation Report.

As she moves to Upworthy, O’Leary takes her digital savvy to social issues. “The world needs as much attention as possible on the stories that matter most,” she says. “Whether that’s climate change, income inequality, health or immigration,” she explains, “today we have to be willing to get out there, into the street fight for human attention that is the Internet, and be willing to deploy our strengths as storytellers to make sure the most impactful ideas reach real people, where they’re at.”

O’Leary will close the Lecture Series by coming back home to Fordham, Lincoln Center, to talk about where she’s at and what matters most in digital media with a mission.

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