MAS 134 Syllabus
Story: Representation and Process
Tuesday/Thursday 10-11 AM
Recitation: TBD
Primary Lecturers: Glorianna Davenport (gid@media.mit.edu)
Ken Haase (haase@media.mit.edu)
TA: Stephen Gilbert (stepheng@media.mit.edu)
This is the first course in the proposed MAS undergraduate core
sequence. It's focus is *story*: the presentation of information or
experience so as to inform and transform. It's foundation is the
realization that storytelling is not just entertainment or `window
dressing' but is the foundation of how we understand and interpret.
Story is ubiquitous in communication: even if we attempt to present
some `raw fact,' it will be fit into a story when received.
We believe that the best way to understand something is by making it
and in this course, we teach how stories work by having you `make'
stories in a variety of different forms. We take as our model the
`studio' courses in the arts and architecture: learning happens by an
interleaved process of construction and criticism. Projects will be
judged by a jury drawn from laboratory faculty and staff, outside
visitors, and some of our sponsors whose daily work is making the
stories we see every day.
Course Objectives:
By the end of the course, students will:
1. have a portfolio of works --- in multiple media --- in which
they have some pride; i.e. would like to share with friends and family
2. understand basic principles of graphic design, video storytelling,
interaction design, and information representation
2. be able to make intelligent and helpful criticisms of the work
of others, based (at least) on these principles
3. be able to integrate the criticisms of others into a work you've
created
5. be able to construct and critique computer representations (both
internal and interface) of knowledge in particular domains
Course Structure:
The course is divided into four units, each with an associated
project. Projects will be done on UNIX-based machines in various
`gardens' around the Media Lab; projects should be completed by the
date of the project review listed.
Unit I: Story, Style, and Design
Project: Construct a world wide web page which tells a story,
on a topic of your choice, with a focus on design,
structure, and readability.
Intended to give an initial experience of making in a technologically
rich environment, this unit is an introduction to thinking
about content in the context of technology. Principles of
specification, criticism, and design will be introduced.
Unit 2: Representations for people and machines
Project: Take a short film (~30 minutes)
and make a 3 minute trailer for it.
Re-presentation is what we do to reduce a messy world to
manageable proportions. This unit introduces students to
representation as a distillation process where particular
aspects of a piece, experience, or domain are reduced to
essentials.
Unit 3: Moving between Media
Project: Pick a process, represent it, shoot it, and
render it as both a `salient still' and a `browsable video'.
How does content move across media? This unit begins with the
design of representations for a narrow content arena: a process
(of the student's choice) such as cooking some particular meal,
travelling to a particular destination, etc. The student then
shoots this process and produces two pieces from the process:
a salient still (or set of stills) and a multi-grained multi-threaded
browsable video based on the original segmentation.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Detailed Syllabus
Unit I: Story, Style, and Design
Project: Construct a world wide web page which tells a story,
on a topic of your choice, with a focus on design,
structure, and readability.
Intended to give an initial experience of making in a technologically
rich environment, this unit is an introduction to thinking
about content in the context of technology. Principles of
specification, criticism, and design will be introduced.
8 September: Introduction, Organization
(Davenport/Haase)
Story, Style, and Design
1. `Story' is not just entertainment but has to do with
the structure of knowledge
2. Just because there's no right or wrong doesn't mean there is
no `better'
3. The `criticism' (studio) model
13 September: Hypertext/Hypermedia history and core ideas
(Haase/Davenport)
From Vannevar Bush to you, a history of the evolution of
dynamic, interative, multi-modal media
(In particular: Memex, Nelson, Smalltalk, ARCMAC,
Hypercard, the Movie Map, Movie Manual,
Elastic Charles)
15 September: Primitives of Design I: Line, Letters, Layout, and Color
(Suguru Ishizaki/Yin-Yin Wong)
What works and what doesn't in layout and presentation;
(in this lecture, a focus on the modalities provided by the Web)
20 September: Society of Mind: A Case Study
(Ann Marion and Moe Shore)
How to put together a hypermedia publication by the editors
of Voyager's CD-ROM version of Minsky's "Society of Mind"
22 September: Video Storytelling
(Davenport)
Granularity: What is the smallest meaningful chunk?
Shots and sounds as story language
Representing temporal duration (different models)
Meaning embedded in framing and transition (continuity)
27 September: What's Wrong with the Web
(TBA)
A few highlights (?):
1. No granularity on anything but text
2. No control over color, typeface, geometry
3. Not a good navigation model (yet)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Unit 2: Representations for people and machines
Project: Take a short film (~30 minutes)
and make a 3 minute trailer for it.
Re-presentation is what we do to reduce a messy world to
manageable proportions. This unit introduces students to
representation as a distillation process where particular
aspects of a piece, experience, or domain are reduced to
essentials.
29 September: Representing Knowledge and Representing the World
(Haase)
What representations do (simplify)
The syntax of representations
(sentences, graphs, frames, etc)
The content of representations
(models of reference, categories, relations, etc)
The limits of representations
(simplification loses information, different operations
require different representations, etc)
4 October: Representing Video and Representing Story
(Haase)
Scripts and Story Grammars
Plan structures and Plot Units
Video concerns: continuity, character,
story purpose, scene purpose
6 October: Telling Stories
(Vernor Vinge)
6 October (evening): Project Review of completed Web documents,
(with dinner)
(Jury)
[Juries are composed of lab faculty and staff and some
outside participants from our friends and sponsors]
11 October No Class (Columbus Day Holiday)
13 October: Video Storytelling: Feature and Documentary
(Davenport)
Video Storytelling: Feature and Documentary
Story elements: Characters, set, action
Process: where and over what does the author apply control
Editing in the camera
Editing as a database retreival and sequencing problem
18 October: Perception as Story Understanding
(Matthew Brand)
20 October: Entertainment Symposium
(Students attend the symposium)
25 October: Project Review
(Jury)
[Juries are composed of lab faculty and staff and some
outside participants from our friends and sponsors]
----------------------------------------------------------------
Unit 3: Moving between Media
Project: Pick a process, represent it, shoot it, and
render it as both a `salient still' and a `browsable video'.
How does content move across media? This unit begins with the
design of representations for a narrow content arena: a process
(of the student's choice) such as cooking some particular meal,
travelling to a particular destination, etc. The student then
shoots this process and produces two pieces from the process:
a salient still (or set of stills) and a multi-grained multi-threaded
browsable video based on the original segmentation.
27 October: Representing Process
(Haase, mostly)
Standard AI models of space, time, and change
Picking your objects, events, and processes
1 November: Shooting Process
(Davenport, mostly)
Shooting process
Having a cognitive model of process
Function of Previsualization
Life as it happens: people and viewpoints
Discovering the story as the ongoing process
3 November: Primitives of Design II: Line, Letters, Layout, and Color
(TBA)
8 November: Salient Stills
(Bender)
10 November: Salient Stills
(Bender)
15 November: Project Review (Salient Stills from a process)
(Jury)
[Juries are composed of lab faculty and staff and some
outside participants from our friends and sponsors]
17 November: Truth and Image (tentative title)
(Bill Mitchell)
22 November: Project Review (Process Browser using Representation)
(Jury)
[Juries are composed of lab faculty and staff and some
outside participants from our friends and sponsors]
24 November: No class (Thanksgiving Holiday)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Unit 4: Analysis and Presentation (Provisional)
Project: Pick a text database and a set of questions and build
a system which tries to answer those questions automatically
based on the database.
In the three previous units, interaction and presentation
relied on structures (representations) provided by an
author in advance. However, in the real world, we can't
rely on being the author or even on the authors good
intentions. In such cases, it is neccessary to figure
out the `story' lurking in the data.
29 November: Understanding Language
(Haase)
The structure of text: words, phrases, sentences,
and paragraphs
Retrieving documents based on their words
1 December: Using Structure
(Haase/Warren Sack)
The subject/content distinction
Analyzing documents based on grammatical structure
6 December: Acoustic Presentation
(TBA)
8 December: Music and Story
(TBA)
13 December: Project Review (Last Day of Classes)