Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-64). / This text explores three developments pertaining to children and reading in seventeenth-century England. The author aims to show how profoundly death was implicated in the development of thought about children's reading as well as in the emergence of a literature for children in the early modem period. The first chapter discusses the negative reaction to the growing phenomenon of children reading romances and adventures in chapbook form. Escapist literature was believed to make one forget one's mortal lot, which in turn decreased one's motivation for piety. Through a discussion of the threat chapbook romances posed to pious reading, the chapter establishes the historical context for a related development, the creation of a religious or moralizing literature that children would find compelling. In their quest for gripping settings, authors latched on to the deathbed scene for its felicitous blend of inherent theatricality and religious resonance. By early seventeenth century, a few women writers even used the pretext of deathbed advice to pen their own conduct-of-life manuals in an otherwise male-dominated marketplace. The second chapter discusses the prefatory rhetoric used by the two most successful female writers in this genre. The remarkable success of maternal deathbed advice literature suggests that books in Protestant culture absorbed the near-superstitious value of Catholic icons and relics. The genre also implies a Protestant adaptation of the Catholic veneration of the mother. Comfort for the motherless child no longer came from prayer to Mary, but through the reading (and perhaps holding of) a book of advice by a model (and dead) Protestant mother. An analysis of the prefaces enables a close reading of the self-fashioning / of model mother-authors. The third and final chapter discusses the starring role of death in the first English-language children's book, A Token for Children, by James Janeway. The chapter explores the literary interest in the early deaths of ordinary children of extraordinary piety. By reference to the doctrine of predestination, the author speculates that these books had a comforting as well as a preparatory function, allowing parents and children to rehearse (through reading) a model death of a child undoubtedly bound for Heaven. By no means a comprehensive treatment of the connections between death culture and children's reading in the early modern period, the thesis is intended to indicate how pious reading functioned as a reminder of one's mortality and a spur to self-scrutiny. The "looking glass" of the text displayed idealized and heaven-bound children and parents compared to whom the reader may have felt sorely in need of increased vigilance. / by Heather Miller. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 73-77). / Studies have shown that children's early literacy skills can impact their ability to achieve academic success, attain higher education and secure employment later in life. However, lack of resources and limited access to educational content causes a "knowledge gap" between children that come from different socio-economic backgrounds. To solve this problem, there has been a recent surge in the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to provide learning benefits to children. However, before providing new content, an ITS must assess a child's existing knowledge. Several studies have shown that children learn new words by forming semantic relationships with words they already know. Human tutors often implicitly use semantics to assess a tutee's word knowledge from partial and noisy data. In this thesis, I present a cognitively inspired model that uses word semantics (semantics-based model) to make inferences about a child's vocabulary from partial information about their existing vocabulary. Using data from a one-to-one learning intervention between a robotic tutor and 59 children, I show that the proposed semantics-based model outperforms (on average) models that do not use word semantics (semantics-free models). A subject level analysis of results reveals that different models perform well for different children, thus motivating the need to combine predictions. To this end, I present two methods to combine predictions from semantics-based and semantics-free models and show that these methods yield better predictions of a child's vocabulary knowledge. Finally, I present an application of the semantics-based model to evaluate if a learning intervention was successful in teaching children new words while enhancing their semantic understanding. More concretely, I show that a personalized word learning intervention with a robotic tutor is better suited to enhance children's vocabulary when compared to a non-personalized intervention. These results motivate the use of semantics-based models to assess children's knowledge and build ITS that maximize children's semantic understanding of words. / "This research was supported by NSF IIP-1717362 and NSF IIS-1523118"--Page 10. / by Ishaan Grover. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 36-38). / Communication within natural systems of eukaryotes and prokaryotes typically entails message transmission between and among cells via small-molecule messengers being funneled from the sender to the receiver cell. Nucleic acids are rarely used as extracellular messengers due to their labile nature and proclivity for enzymatic digestion. Eliminating these obstacles will allow for a larger array of messages to be sent with minimal cellular machinery. Exploiting the bacterial twin-arginine translocation (TAT) pathway and a nucleic-acid binding protein sourced from bacteriophage MS2, we have engineered a message-sending system in Escherichia coli capable of specifically exporting a "pre-written" circularized RNA message to the extracellular environment. This RNA message maintains its integrity over the course of at least four hours in extracellular growth medium, and this system serves as the first demonstration of versatile, stable messaging with nucleic acids, specifically with RNA, in the extracellular environment. / by Lisa Nip. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [169]-174). / Television is in a period of dramatic change. As the mass audience continues to fragment into ever-smaller niche audiences and communities of interest, and new technologies shift control over the television viewing experience from network programmers into the hands of media consumers, television's traditional business models prove themselves increasingly untenable. In an attempt to preserve these models, television executives are attempting to shed television's long-standing reputation as a passive medium, which emphasized the viewer's role as a consumer of television content, and which critics often decried as vacuous and mindless. The current discourse suggests that television's future now relies on the industry's success recasting it as an active medium, capable of capturing and holding the audience's attention, and effective at generating emotional investment. The single most important concept in this new industrial discourse is that of audience "engagement", a term that has generated a tremendous amount of debate and disagreement, with television and advertising executives alike struggling to understand what engagement is, how it works, and what its practical consequences will be. This thesis argues that television's future as an engagement medium relies not on inventing new methodologies that define engagement in terms of quantifiable audience behaviors and attitudes, but instead in a new conceptual model of television, better suited to a multi platform media environment and the emerging attention and experience economies, which focuses on the development of television programs that extend beyond the television set. / (cont.) Such a model must understand television not as a method for aggregrating audiences that can be sold to advertisers, but as a medium that draws upon media platforms, content, products, activities and social spaces to provide audiences with a range of opportunities to engage with television content. Accordingly, this thesis offers a framework for thinking about viewer engagement as the range of opportunities and activities that become possible when drawing upon an expanded, multi-platform conception of the modern television text. Applying this framework to the innovative and experimental textual extensions developed around ABC's Lost, the thesis indicates both the challenges and opportunities that emerge as television becomes an engagement medium. / by Ivan D. Askwith. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 43-46). / Efforts to model computation in biological neural networks require knowledge of the structure of the network, the dynamics that play across it, and a network simple enough to be tractable to our incipient analyses. The simplicity of the 302-node nervous system of the nematode C. elegans and its transparency have made it an attractive model organism in neuroscience for several decades. Indeed, Caenorhabditis elegans has long been touted as the only species for which the connectome is known, reconstructed by hand from electron micrographs. However, while the number and identity of neurons in C. elegans appears fixed across animals, the variability in the connections between them has not been sufficiently characterized by the above efforts, which examined only a handful of animals and required many years of human labor. Such a characterization, and, moreover, an ability to accurately assess shifts in these neural graphs on timescales compatible with the pace and statistical rigor of scientific research would significantly accelerate efforts to understand neural computation. This thesis lays the groundwork for the development of such a framework. The expansion microscopy tissue preparation platform provided the basis for the set of experiments described within, in which strategies for molecular annotation of C. elegans and the subsequent protocols for readout are examined. / by Nicholas C Barry. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 90-96). / This thesis presents a collaborative human-machine crowdmapping approach to creating socio-spatial maps that represent both spatial and social aspects of communities. Our implemented system combines satellite image analytics, a mobile mapping app, and social survey data. The system is designed to provide an end user experience that aligns institutional interests with grassroots interests, resulting in a self-sustaining system. In collaboration with the global health organization Partners in Health, we tested our approach with local health workers in Rwanda. Better maps can improve local visibility and empower communities to share knowledge, trade goods, and access medical services. Assisted by automatically annotated satellite maps, the community-driven mapping resulted in detailed spatial and social maps for four rural villages. With the collected data, we designed a novel socio-spatial map for this community that combines knowledge about household locations, paths, inhabitants of those homes, and social relations between residents. Generalizing from this map, we propose a framework to organize people, places, paths, and relationships to reason about the intersection of social and spatial mapping. Furthermore, we derive design characteristics of our human-machine mapping system that can guide the development of new systems in related contexts. Socio-spatial maps have the potential to be used as critical decision-making tools for individuals and organizations alike. / by Raphael Schaad. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-136). / The recent increase in digital gaming players and platforms does not imply that digital gaming is as inclusive as it could be. There are still gaps in participation that, if left unaddressed, will exclude groups who have been historically marginalized. Women are among those individuals most vulnerable to exclusion from gaming. In order to better understand the motivations and practices of female players, this study focuses on a group of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who have created a community that plays digital and non-digital games together and includes women. The research was conducted over eight months using interviews and participant observations. The study concludes that there are interrelated factors at the group, game play, and individual levels that influence this particular community's inclusiveness. These factors include how the community values the play process over who wins or loses a game, uses games as facilitators of playful socializing, and negotiates their identities in relation to the "gamer" stereotype. / by Hillary Kolos. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 75-78). / In recent years, there has been a growing interest in tools and strategies to support computational thinking, emphasizing a systematic application of computational ideas to problem solving. In this thesis, I focus instead on computational tinkering, exploring tools and strategies to support playful and iterative experimentation with physical and computational materials. I propose two different ways to look at computational tinkering: bringing the playful attitude of tinkering to building with code, and integrating computation into physical tinkering activities. Through four case studies, I describe the design and facilitation of activities for children in different contexts, using a particular tool LEGO Programmable Art Machines. For each case, I share my observations and reflections about children engaging with the activity, to iteratively improve the design of the experience. I conclude by identifying some key characteristics of learning through computational tinkering and proposing directions for further work in the design and outreach of computational tinkering activities and ideas. / by Carmelo Presicce. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [67]-[74]). / This paper suggests advertisers should experiment with in-game advertising to gain skills that could become vital in the near future. It compiles, arranges and analyzes the existing body of academic and industry knowledge on advertising and product placement in computer game environments. The medium's characteristics are compared to other channels' in terms of their attractiveness to marketers, and the business environment is analyzed to offer recommendations on the relative advantages of in-game advertising. The paper also contains a brief historical review of in-game advertising, and descriptions of currently available and emerging advertising formats. Keywords: Advertising, marketing, branding, product placement, branded entertainment, networks, computer games, video games, virtual worlds. / by Ilya Vedrashko. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 89-99). / [Color illustrations] Figure 0-1. Key elements within a Molecular Design Interactions interaction loop. Be it information embodied within rain, the oceans, a dinner plate, or human tears; the flow of information through fluids provides insights into the biological and chemical states of systems. Yet a large portion of our everyday experience with these systems remain inaccessible to users, designers and engineers whom operate outside the context of chemical disciplines. This thesis introduces a design framework coined Molecular Design Interactions, along with a toolbox of material based input-output devices termed Organic Primitives to facilitate the design of interactions with organic, fluid-based systems. The design methodology utilizes organic compounds from food for the development of color, odor and shape changing information displays. Activated by units of fluid information called droplets, this thesis focuses on pH signals in fluid as a model to demonstrate how molecular scale phenomena can be brought from materials into applications for interaction with a range of organic systems. A design language and vocabulary, drawing from signaling theory and molecular associations, offer designers a method with which to translate sensor-display output into meaningful experience designs for human perception. The design space showcases techniques for how the Organic Primitives can transcend beyond mere input-output devices to achieve higher order complexity. Passive and computational methods are presented to enable designers to control material interface output behaviors. An evaluation of the individual output properties of the sensors-actuators is presented to assess the rate, range, and reversibility of the changes as a function of pH 2-10. Strategies for how the materiality of objects can be augmented using Organic Primitives are investigated through several applications under four contexts: environmental, on-body, food, and interspecies. Molecular Design Interactions offers a process and toolbox to create interfaces between humans and molecules in fluids, across scales, from the nano to the macro systems. / by Viirj Kan. / S.M.