Interested in data visualization? Journalism? In cooperation with the Allbritton Center, the Digital and Computational Knowledge Initiative (DACKI) is pleased to bring Matt Daniels to Wesleyan to give a talk on Wednesday 11/4 and to meet with students in classes and small groups on Thursday 11/5.
Matt Daniels is a media artist and designer, fascinated with the possibilities of data-driven narrative. For Daniels, this has often meant analyzing and illustrating the content and popularity of music,its lyrics, and its locations. He has produced infographics keyed to such things as the size of rappers’ vocabularies and the timelessness of some music based on Spotify data. He publishes an online magazine called Polygraph.
WesStuffed is back as hot as ever, and we’re kind of a big dill (pun intended). What is WesStuffed, you ask? Basically your go-to food blog for everything in and around Wesleyan. We are looking for bloggers/columnists/ writers/photographers and food lovers in general so come to our interest meeting to hear and share your food ideas. Here is a link to the blogfor more info.
P.S. there will be food at this meeting, and yes it’s a bribe.
This post is the first in a small series of reflections on the recent events on campus, to be published over the next few days. If you have anything that you would like to contribute, please feel free to reach out to us.
I am writing this in response to the traumatic and overwhelming events that have happened over the past few days – the hospitalization of a dozen students and the arrest of four others, as well as the media and institutional reactions. I hope that this can be a space of positive dialogue and solidarity, where we share our thoughts and reflections with compassion and humanity. I hope to counter the intense and destructive negativity and inappropriateness of some of the language being used to address these events in our own community, in person and online, in the media portrayals and in the administration’s emails. These events remind of us of the importance of fostering a supportive community, one that we must build on our own, as the student body. These thoughts hope to help support that process of reconciliation, healing, and empowerment.
It’s the VOSS VISITING SCHOLAR LECTURE *bom bom bom bom*:
Join Tom Rogers ’76, P’14 and Henry Schleiff P’14 for a panel discussion on the business of television. Smart boxes, streaming, and social TV have changed how we watch, while traditional television advertising and cable subscription models are in flux. How will producers fund content in the future, and how will consumers watch it? These top executives will discuss the changing landscape of television. Moderated by Andrea McCarty, Charles W. Fries curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives.
Date: Today, April 15th Time: 8pm Place: Center for Film Studies Cost: Free
Watch out, Wesleyan, because according to lots and lots (and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots) of different media outlets, we’re at it again. “What’s wrong with Wesleyan?” ask Business Insider’s Ashley Lutz and Abby Rogers. I’ll do my best to explain that here in this rundown of media coverage regarding the weekend’s debauchery.
Of course, this question could be answered fairly quickly by any number of blogosphere navigators, but perhaps best by Daily Caller commenter “WHATTHEBLANK,” who characterized us as “leftists [who will] just get older and go to occupy protests and still drink smoke weed and act stupid.”
So, as one of those overprivileged WASPs that everyone is talking about, who better to give you your cheat sheet to the media coverage that Wesleyan is getting for our little tryst with the T-Rex?
Reported quote from the incident report: “Wesleyan student removed from the 6th floor for riding the dinosaur.”
If you’ve recently braved the chilly wintry air to get a snack from Weshop before commencing your diligent studies, you may have noticed a conspicuous white News 8 van perched on the corner of Church and Pine. It’s not every day that our little campus generates localnewsattention, so the media presence may cause some people to worry. But the answer shouldn’t be much of a surprise:
Was just approached by an abc news woman wanting to know what happened at senior cocktails. #FuckOff
On Friday, the third Senior Cocks event came to an abrupt halt when the senior class was kicked out of the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford. (Haven’t heard the story? Catch up here and here.) Apparently the scandal has generated so much attention that News 8, based in New Haven, has stopped by to talk to seniors and grab some video shots of our frigid lovely campus. The news van’s been busy, having already visited the museum to talk to employees and gather their side of the story before coming to Wes. The reporter whom I spoke to wasn’t entirely forthcoming with her goals, but I gathered that even she was uncertain whether or not the science center would be pressing charges against Wesleyan.
What’s the Twittersphere saying about the Times piece? Click past the jump.
A weekend New York Timesarticle covers Wesleyan’s change in admissions policy, giving a national and international platform to some of the activism surrounding need blind here on campus. With little communication to the alumni and larger Wesleyan community about the recent change in admissions policy, for many alums this could be the first they hear of the policy shift, a topic we’ve been abuzz with for months. Not only did my mom text me this morning to check the article out, but other people are wildly sharing it, too: it is listed in the top-emailed articles on the NYT website, and the tweeting world is hot on the topic.
The article cites financial instability as threatening diversity at small elite colleges, specifically Wesleyan and Grinnell. Small schools like our own have been steadily raising tuition, while families are increasingly unable to meet rising costs in a weak economy. Richard Perez-Pena writes,
As a result, more students need financial aid than did a few years ago, they need much more of it on average, and colleges have fewer resources with which to provide it, though a major expansion of the federal Pell Grant program has made up some of the difference.
Wesleyan is described as having “had the most heated recent debate.” Disappointingly, then, no students are quoted in the piece, but President Rothgives a shout out to student activism, saying “I applaud the students’ commitment to our values,” and adds, “I did not think that the economic model we were using would be sustainable in even the midterm, over the next decade.” This is out of character given his recent confrontations with chalking Wesleyan students and Nemo Allen ’12 from Democracy Now!. Links in the NYT article direct readers to two Argus articles about student activism surrounding the barge-in at the Trustee meeting and protest at the Homecoming football game. Additional coverage here and here. Added to this semester’s memorably heated moments—but unmentioned in the Times—are the artistic chalk bomb, Alumni letter asking to withhold alumni donations, and parent assembly infiltrations.
Do you like numbers hidden in social research the way some people like veggies hidden in meatloaf? The numbers are coming to you tomorrow. From Rosa Hayes ’13:
By The Numbers is a twice-monthly seminar series sponsored by the Quantitative Analysis Center showcasing student research in the social sciences. This is a forum for students to present ongoing research and receive feedback from students and faculty. If you have done research, are currently doing research, or are just interested in learning more about contemporary topics in the social sciences, we hope to see you there!
Let’s get this right off the bat: this post is about one particular aspect of the aftermath of the Usdan flyer controversy.
You might have heard of it by now, or maybe even seen it. Yesterday, NBC Connecticut vans were spotted on campus grounds, and we later got word that reporters were trying to squeeze soundbites out of Wes students. Later that night, they ran a news story about the Usdan flyer incident. It was short, it was a little strange, and most disturbingly, it was considerably misleading. Then came the newest update: Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, is denouncing Wesleyan from across the country and calling on the university to apologize for the incident.
There has been much heated debate behind the scenes here in the cyberspace office of Wesleying ever since last Friday’s incident. We as a self-accountable collective of bloggers had to confront very difficult questions: what is our role in the student body? What are our duties? How far can we go with moderation and censorship? How do we balance between protection and preservation of the discussion? Most of these questions went unanswered, simply because they are so grey and difficult.
But when the NBC Connecticut story ran last night, it was pretty clear what needed to be done. Bad reporting on what happened here at Wes needs to be covered, and the viewing lens of the story has to re-calibrated for the benefit of the community. This is precisely what this post will try to do. Now, I just want to make clear that this is an insanely difficult and sensitive thing to write about. And I know I’m probably going to get slammed in the face one way or another for doing something or for not doing another thing or whatever, but fuck it—I’m doing it. This is something of a long piece, so hit me up after the jump.
Oh, and one more thing: if you’re on the NBC Connecticut staff, hello! This is for you. Really.
You have to hand it to Andrew Breitbart: at least he’s consistent. The conservative publisher and occasional Drudge Report editor, who in 2009 referred to Ted Kennedy as “a special pile of human excrement,” seriously has it in for ye olde Wes.
In February 2010 we reported on Breitbart’s keynote address to the First National Tea Party Convention, where the commentator offered this piece of warning:
“Bad, racist, homophobic—all those buzzwords that they learned in their freshman orientation class at Wesleyan—are used as weapons to try to destroy you and intimidate you to not speak up.”
No one quite knows the root of Breitbart’s grudge, but apparently that wasn’t the last of it. At CPAC this weekend, Breitbart namedropped Wes again, aligning us with the “totalitarian freaks” in Obama’s White House. The shout-out comes about eight minutes into the video above, but here’s the text.
It’s the VOSS VISITING SCHOLAR LECTURE *bom bom bom bom*:
