Center for Transformative Media at Northeastern University

One month from today! Join Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg on Zoom for "Audience, AI & Events: A free skill-building webinar for local news publishers."

This all-day event includes several interactive workshops facilitated by leaders in their fields, including:

• Audience development and engagement with Emily Turner, deputy editor of community at Boston.com.
• AI skills for local news organizations with Dr. John Wihbey, associate professor of journalism and media innovation at Northeastern
• Keynote from Dan Lothian, editor-in-chief and general manager of local news at GBH. Lothian will be in conversation with Lee H., executive editor of GBH News.
• Event planning for building community with Iris Adler, veteran broadcast news executive and a board member at Brookline.News
• Wrapping things up with Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, co-leaders of What Works and co-authors of “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate.”

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/audience-ai-and-events-tickets-1987362369345
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This event is organized by What Works, supported by the Northeastern University School of Journalism and co-sponsored by the Center for Transformative Media at CAMD.

Today at 2pm ET! Join us for a discussion on how synthetic content creators are redefining authenticity, labor, and identity online.

Register here: https://northeastern.zoom.us/meeting/register/WxAVyRMiROWiqmXB0uPOVQ #/registration

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Panelists: Christine Tran, John Wihbey, Seo Eun “Sunny” Yang

Moderator: Nora Suren

Description: Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the creator economy and influencer culture at lightning speed. From hyper-real virtual influencers to AI-generated video content that’s populating TikTok and Instagram, AI influencers erase the distinction between human imagination, machine automation, and promotion.

This webinar explores how synthetic content creators are redefining authenticity, labor, and identity online. With critical and creative lenses, we’ll explore how these trends unveil deeper questions regarding gender, race, and power in the generative media era—who gets represented, who gets erased, and how algorithmic aesthetics are globalizing new forms of digital labor and desire.

Generative AI is disrupting education, and it’s time we contend with that. In our new video series, 11 professors across CAMD share how they’re engaging with AI in teaching, research, and creative practice — from active integration to principled resistance.

Each video gives a brief snippet of a professor’s philosophy on generative AI use and how they use it in the classroom (or don’t use it at all).

This series was originally envisioned by Jason Donati and Adriana de Souza e Silva as part of their AI Faculty Fellowship. We’d also like to give a special shout-out to Jahangir Babar, our video editor, who put these all together so beautifully!

Watch the full series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VErucE0Ius&list=PLQtLraqLFNbvYq68iy3ictZULobF0x1A8

For this month's scholar spotlight, CTM communications assistant Vivica Dsouza interviewed Caleb Okereke.

Caleb is a Ph.D. student at CAMD. Before entering academia, Okereke worked as a journalist and founded Minority Africa, a publication focused on underreported communities across the continent. His work spans reporting, editing and research, with a consistent focus on how media systems shape the visibility, and invisibility, of marginalized groups.

Read the full interview here: https://camd.northeastern.edu/news/ctm-scholar-spotlight-caleb-okereke/

This Monday at 1pm in 350A Snell! Join us for a book talk with Art + Design Prof. Sylke Meyer.

Her recent book, "Soviet Narratology and Spatial Story Design," provides a fascinating take on what Russian formalism can teach us about spatial storytelling.

Since the tradition emphasizes structure over content, what a narrative is “about” matters less than its form, structure and the location in which it takes place.

That shift also downplays the author as the primary source of meaning and moves toward space as a carrier of narrative meaning.⁠
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Spatial story design is about shaping the probabilities of how a user behaves inside that space. You don’t control everything, but you can guide experience through design.⁠
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Register at the 🔗 in bio! ⁠
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🗓️ Monday, Apr. 6 ⁠
⏱️ 1-3pm ⁠
📍350A Snell Library

Many thanks to our communications assistant Vivica Dsouza for representing the CTM at the Centers for Digital Scholarship student showcase last week!

Vivica presented on her research with Meg Heckman and John Wihbey on AI adoption in local newsrooms.

We're thrilled to see that seven of our center's core faculty were awarded CAMD's Creative Catalyst Phase 2 seed grants!

Congratulations to all the selected teams. These projects truly exemplify the program's mission to bridge disciplines and push the boundaries of traditional research paradigms.

Our community's projects include:

• From Data Tracking to Data Crafting 🧵 — Using data crafting to engage Type 1 Diabetes patients with their personal data, transforming the relationships between diabetics and their datasets to improve self-awareness, individual autonomy, and long-term health outcomes, while emphasizing "alert fatigue" as a key challenge. Featuring core faculty Laura Forlano, Ph.D.

• When Speaking Is Dangerous 📢 — This project examines when and how algorithmic literacy enables misinformation response, particularly among marginalized communities, by synthesizing communication, human-computer interaction, algorithmic visibility, folk theories, and social justice design. Featuring core faculty Michael Ann DeVito

• Challenging Inequality by Mapping Grassroots Creative Technological Practices 🗺️ — This project will develop and deploy an online tool to map creative technological practices in low-income communities, taking a strengths-based approach to document bottom-up tech innovation and promote cross-fertilization between communities. Featuring director Adriana de Souza e Silva & core faculty Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga

• CAMD Data Ark 🎨 — Developing a humanities-driven provenance framework for AI training datasets to ultimately create an infrastructure that makes the origins of training data legible — serving art historians, cultural organizations, and archival researchers across art history, digital humanities, AI ethics, and network science. Featuring core faculty Derek Curry, Jennifer Gradecki, and Sylke Rene Meyer

Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday's "Scrapyard Challenge Arcade Controller ReDesign" workshop with Jonah Brucker-Cohen!

We so enjoyed hearing about Brucker-Cohen's artistic vision, then making our own controller devices to put a fun and silly twist on classic arcade games.

We have a very cool person coming to campus this month! On Mar. 25, Jonah Brucker-Cohen will be giving a lecture and leading a workshop in a one-day residency of sorts—all at the Center for Design.

At 12:30pm, Jonah will give a lecture called "Critical Digital Experience." He'll discuss his artistic projects, which challenge and subvert accepted notions of network interaction and interface socialization.

From 2-5pm, we'll move into the Scrapyard Challenge Arcade Controller ReDesign Workshop, an interactive experience that allows anyone to create a novel controller for classic arcade games using a custom-built interface board and Raspberry Pi computers running Retropie Software.

These events are generously cosponsored by the Center for Design, the department of Art + Design, the EXCITE Institute and Games@Northeastern.

🗣️Register for the lecture: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/critical-digital-experience-a-talk-by-jonah-brucker-cohen-tickets-1981910638070?aff=oddtdtcreator

🔧Register for the workshop: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/scrapyard-challenge-arcade-controller-redesign-workshop-tickets-1981911170663?aff=oddtdtcreator

Next Wednesday at 12pm! For Design Research Week, join us on a deep dive into the Retro Mobile Gaming Project, a physical archive and online database that catalogues mobile gaming history. ⁠
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The event includes an interactive workshop and a guided tour of the Retro Mobile Gaming collection. With help from the speakers, participants will learn how to go from a single, unrefined idea into a comprehensive and publicly-engaging resource. ⁠
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Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/playing-with-mobile-gamings-history-tickets-1981063583507?aff=oddtdtcreator
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🗓️ Mar. 18⁠
⏱️ 12:00pm ⁠ET⁠
📍Center for Design, Ryder Hall