Roughly 60 percent of teens produce and share original content online, although they typically can't use these skills at school. Meanwhile, the other 40 percent are being left behind by the new media culture. To bridge this education gap, the School's CMS researchers have developed the Learning Library.
Writing the history of any conflict presents the challenge of bias. So what would happen if both sides could agree on what happened? HyperStudio is helping bring policymakers together—with access to a wealth of original documents—to reexamine the U.S.-Iran relationship. History may never be the same.
Data show that between 4 million and 6 million votes were lost in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Ever since, the School’s political scientists have been working to create a better electoral system.
Electronic tolls ease congestion on roadways but distance voters from the act of paying taxes. Economist Amy Finkelstein has found that drivers who use E-ZPass and similar technologies rarely even know how much they are paying in tolls. The result? Higher tolls without the political consequences usually associated with a rise in taxes.
Text searches have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet no similar tools exist for examining music. Now an advanced computer framework being developed in the School's Music Section promises to revolutionize the field, providing researchers with the tools they need to address previously intractable problems in musicology.
Iran wants to stand tall in the world—providing its own nuclear power. The United States opposes any uranium enrichment in Iran—to forestall nuclear armament. Jim Walsh, a research associate in the Center for International Studies, proposes a solution to this standoff—and policymakers are listening.
China has the largest standing army in the world—2.3 million strong—and has been pouring money into its military budget for years. But that doesn’t mean it’s planning to flex those muscles abroad, says M. Taylor Fravel of the Security Studies Program.
Based in the School's Literature section, the MIT Shakespeare Project harnesses web technology to give scholars unprecedented access to Shakespeare's many forms—from the First Folio of 1623 to Richard Burton's Hamlet of 1964 to a modern King Lear performed in Mandarin.
Ruth Perry, Professor in the School's Women and Gender Studies program, is discovering that folk ballads played a key role in the Scottish Enlightenment. A significant repertoire of these ballads—the earliest known poetry in the English language—came to light thanks to one woman: Anna Gordon Brown.
Questions of morality have challenged humanity from time immemorial. Within the Philosophy Department, Professor Judy Thomson's "trolley problem," first posed 30 years ago, continues to stir debate about moral decision-making. Today, her work forms the basis for a wealth of research in the rapidly growing field of moral psychology.
Undoubtedly, and the millions of visual artifacts lying unseen in museum storage vaults amount to lost knowledge. "Visualizing Cultures," an initiative of the School's Foreign Languages and Literatures section, remedies this situation—bringing powerful historical images to light online, along with scholarly commentary to help researchers understand what they are seeing.
The history of natural philosophy, experimentalism, theater, politics, and religion all converge in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes,” a play that emerged from a class in the School’s Theater Arts section. The play, which opened in London, explores the link between the rise of experimental science and the closing of England’s theaters.
The roots of modern environmental consciousness go back to 19th century England, when opponents of a Lake District dam were among the first to argue that everyone has a stake in the landscape. In a new book, History Professor Harriet Ritvo explores why nature's advocates did not prevail then—and often still don't.
Globalization isn’t just about wider markets. It’s also a grassroots cultural movement, evident in the flow of trends and fan cultures from east to west and back again. Through a MISTI Global Seed Fund, MIT students are exploring these forces in a “live action animé" performance—giant robots and all—in Japan.
When the engineer describes her first Legos, the chef his rolling pin—neither is just talking about objects. Individually evocative, objects carry different meanings for each of us. Professor Sherry Turkle of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, researches the relationships we build with the things in our lives, with a focus on why and how things matter.
The U.S. government forbids the sale of raw milk cheeses aged under 60 days. Artisan cheesemakers say this rule is arbitrary and may compromise the integrity of their products. Anthropologist Heather Paxson explores the issues of safety and quality in our food.
Victorian novels, released as weekly or monthly serials, could take more than a year to read. They were savored, shared and discussed publicly. HyperStudio and the Literature Section have teamed up to offer a glimpse into this engaged, social world of reading through the Serial Experience Project.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology