Mapping Media Ecosystems

This session looks beyond platforms to explore the concept of media ecosystems. How do we understand, map, visualize, and ultimately shape the flow of texts across an increasingly diverse and complex media ecosystem? What are the relationships between professional and citizen, participatory and broadcast media? How do we understand what people are encountering, both in terms of supply (tools like Media Cloud that examine what’s published) and demand (tracking/logging efforts that look at individual or group consumption?

Hal Roberts is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He studies various issues around the flow and control of content online, including Internet filtering and circumvention, online surveillance, distributed denial of service attacks, and new media. Hal has worked on the technical side of many Berkman projects over the years, including H2O, Weblogs at Harvard Law, and Global Voices Online.

Erhardt Graeff is a founding member of the Web Ecology Project and a research assistant on the Good Participation and GoodPlay projects at Harvard Project Zero. His research focuses on questions of internet and society with a heavy emphasis on civic engagement, digital inequality, education, journalism/media, and social capital. Additionally, Erhardt is the co-founder of BetterGrads, an online college mentoring organization, and a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation, which gives monthly grants to awesome projects. He has an M.Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformations (i.e. sociology) from the University of Cambridge and bachelor’s degrees in information technology and international studies from Rochester Institute of Technology. Erhardt’s personal website is erhardtgraeff.com. On Twitter he’s @erhardt.

Gilad Lotan is the VP of Research and Development for SocialFlow, where he utilizes data driven approaches to draw insight and understanding from social streams. Previously, Gilad served as a program manager at Microsoft’s FUSE labs. Past work includes ‘Retweet Revolution’, visualizing the flow of information during the 2009 #IranElection riots, and a 2011 IJOC study investigating the relationship between mainstream media and social media channels during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Gilad’s work has been presented at TED, IXDA, Summit Series, Berkeley BCNM, Boston Book Festival, and published at HICCS, CHI and Ubicomp.