Kurt Fendt, Executive Director

Jamie Folsom, Web Applications Developer

Jamie Folsom is lead web applications developer at MIT Hyperstudio, where he builds tools to support teaching and research in the humanities.

He participates in all aspects of the lab’s work, from consulting with faculty and collaborating with partners, to creating and deploying web apps and services. He has extensive experience teaching with and about technology, managing technology projects, and building web sites and applications.

He holds an AB in French from Vassar College and a Master’s Degree in Technology in Education from Harvard University, and has been a teacher, a technology trainer and manager, and a web applications developer for 20 years. He is from Boston, Massachusetts.

Dave Della Costa, Applications Programmer

Dave Della Costa is one of the developers building the next generation of HyperStudio's modular Repertoire library, using technologies such as Ruby and JavaScript. He has over 10 years experience building web applications, almost three of those at MIT. His development philosophy is based in trying to find the best balance between fast, functional development and well-structured, modular architectures—made possible using an test-driven-development approach. His interests outside of programming include music, traveling and language learning.

Gabriella Horvath, Administrator

Belinda Yung, Technology Support Specialist

Belinda Yung has been centrally involved in all aspects of digital Shakespeare at MIT since 1994, working with the Shakespeare Project and the Literature Section. Currently, she is the manager and technical director of the Shakespeare Project and webmaster of LIT@MIT. Prior to working for Literature, Belinda worked as a programmer on the Paradoja Project (Paradox of Women in Developing Countries) for Foreign Languages and Literatures. She also coordinates various educational media projects developed in the HyperStudio. Her work focuses on helping faculty to integrate digital media and technology in the classroom, supporting researchers and scholars at partner institutions, and exploring new ways for active learning.

Katie Edgerton, Research Assistant

Katie Edgerton studies the future of the film and television industry, and emerging forms of digital storytelling. Her forthcoming thesis focuses on television writing and new technology. Katie is a founding member of Social TV, an interest group in Comparative Media Studies. Prior to MIT, Katie was an Assistant Curator for Exhibitions at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center. She helped develop the Museum’s exhibit narrative, and scripted the 9/11 Timeline, a Webby Award honoree. Katie is a graduate of Williams College. A freelance writer and narrative developer, she blogs about film, new media, and storytelling at opendoclab.mit.edu.

Ayse Gursoy, Research Assistant

Ayse Gursoy joins HS after having completed her A.B. at Princeton in the English department. She is interested in looking at games critically and developing a working vocabulary for game criticism that takes into account the emergent properties of games, as well as the historical context. For her spring independent work in junior year, she wrote about Oblivion (TES IV), taking into account its debts to hypertext and tabletop RPGs, as well as the affordances made available by the programming and by the means of interacting with the game. For instance, the game actively encourages modding and gives players easy access to the console; what does this imply for the act of playing? She is also interested in the possibilities of gaming for representing and embodying new identities, and hopes that in developing a critical language for games, will be able to investigate the unique nuances of this question.

Jason Lipshin, Research Assistant

Jason Lipshin is a graduate student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, where he is focusing primarily on material histories of computation. Working at the intersections of software studies, science and technology studies, and media archeology, he generally tries to place technical understanding in dialogue with political and cultural theory, opening up “black boxes” while at the same time placing materiality in historical and cultural context.

Jia Zhang, Research Assistant

Jia Zhang is a native of Beijing China. She received her BFA in Industrial Design from RISD and MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons where she was a data visualization fellow for the International Budget Project. Most recently she has served as design director for the artist Xu Bing’s studio and project manager for artist Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic at NYU. Her research interests are qualitative visualizations of systems, their historic role in the experimental sciences, and their unique narrative qualities. She would like to experiment with building visualizations that contribute to media and platform awareness and literacy in the daily consumption of information.

Whitney Anne Trettien, Research Affiliate

Whitney Anne Trettien is a second-year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies, currently writing her thesis on the relationship between early modern rotary text generators and digital poetry. Before coming to HyperStudio, she translated Latin and Old English source texts on a project led by Professor Martin Foys to develop a digital edition of the Cotton Map, an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon mappamundi. At HyperStudio, she has pursued her interest in the digital humanities as project lead on a collaboration with Old North Church, and in her work on the Serial Experience Project, the Comédie-Française Registers Project, and US-Iran Relations. Outside of MIT, Whitney can be found blogging about baroque oddities, collecting dictionaries, and promoting her book Cost of Freedom, an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement.

Whitney’s own website is at http://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/

Brett Barros, HyperStudio Alum

Brett Barros designs and develops the front-end of HyperStudio applications, examining use-case scenarios and applying carefully selected design patterns. He is also a web stats analyst, perhaps best known for his SEM News site which aggregates web marketing news. Brett graduated Magna Cum Laude from Boston University’s Advertising program and accordingly applies a customer-driven focus to all of his work.

Madeleine Elish, HyperStudio Alum

Madeleine Clare Elish worked in the fields of contemporary art practices, anthropology of technology and critical theory as an undergraduate at Columbia University (BA 2006). Beyond her coursework, she directed and acted in theater productions, curated art shows and taught in an after-school arts program. An internship during college turned into a job at the Whitney Museum of American Art where she wrote essays and curriculum guides based on the museum's art collection for publication on the Whitney's website. Since graduating, Elish has also worked for the contemporary art gallery Gavin Brown's enterprise, NPR's On the Media. Most recently, she worked as an editor for various websites published by Rodale. At CMS, her research revolves around the intersection of vision, perception, aesthetics and ethics, centering around the ways that new media alter the way we see the world.

Suzana Lisanti, HyperStudio Alum

With extensive experience in web communications, Suzana provides web communications strategy for MIT projects such as the Global Shakespeare Performance Video Archive, the Edgerton Digital Collections, the upcoming MIT Museum's Holography and Spatial Imaging collection, and the Arts at MIT portal.

Nicholas Seaver, HyperStudio Alum

Nick Seaver graduated with a BA in interdisciplinary literature from Yale (2007). As an undergraduate, his interest in sonic media led him to research the relationship between the technology of sound reproduction and social conceptions of "noise." At CMS, he is studying indeterminacy and control in sound transmission, the role of "skill" in aesthetic judgments, and the history of automatic musical instruments. His academic work is supplemented by experiments in computer-aided composition that combine experimental music processes with pop music materials. In addition to his work in sonic media, Nick has a longstanding interest in the history of the book, which led him to spend a year training full-time as a hand bookbinder at Boston's North Bennet Street School. Nick blogs about sound at noiseforairports.com.

Anna van Someren, HyperStudio Alum

As HyperStudio’s project manager, Anna van Someren combines a background in curriculum design and education with her experiences researching new media and participatory culture. Prior to working at the HyperStudio, Anna worked at the Center for Future Civic Media to conduct research on the ways in which participatory culture environments support the kinds of social deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse. She formerly worked as Creative Manager for project New Media Literacies (NML) at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS, leading the production and development of innovative educational materials informed by a deep understanding of the ways youth interact with and produce media. She is a current board member of the Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium (RYMAEC) at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston.

 

Prior to working at MIT, Anna developed new media curriculum and taught multimedia production at after school programs and at the college level. An independent video artist, Anna has shown her experimental shorts in festivals internationally. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Art & Art History from Colgate University, and her MFA in Film & Video from Massachusetts College of Art.