Fellowship Life

Events and activities sponsored by Knight Science Journalism at MIT have popped up in three recent newspaper articles this month.

—On October 17, Bo Peterson of the Post and Courier in Charleston, SC, published a writeup about KSJ Project Fellow Scott Huler and his mission to recreate the 600-mile wilderness voyage of explorer John Lawson in the year 1700. “It’s almost sinful how much fun I’m having,” Huler told Peterson from a stop at Awendaw, a fishing village on the South Carolina coast. It was a strenous sort of fun, though: Peterson says Huler spent much of the first few days of his trip battling…

In his first big assignment since retiring as director of Knight Science Journalism at MIT, veteran science journalist Phil Hilts recently accompanied teams from the Greek Government and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to one of the world’s most famous marine archaeological sites: the wreck of the Roman treasure ship Antikythera.

The site has been visited before, notably by sponge divers in 1900 and by Jaques Cousteau’s team in 1976. It has yielded amazing treasures like a life-size bronze of Herakles (or perhaps Paris) and the intriguing Antikythera Mechanism, an analog computer designed to predict solar eclipses and other astronomical events. But because of the wreck’s depth – 135 to 185 feet – divers have never been able to spend much time on the bottom. It’s estimated that as much as 80 percent of the ship remains unexplored, Hilts says.

With a suite of new technologies in hand, including robotic 3D mapping gear, computerized rebreathing devices, and a pressured “Exosuit” for human divers, WHOI and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports arrived at the wreck site off the remote island of…

At a ceremony in New York City last night, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences handed out the 35th batch of News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Among the winners: A Short History of the Highrise, an interactive documentary on “vertical living” directed by Katerina Cizek, a member of MIT’s Visiting Artists Program, and co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Op-Docs section of The New York Times.

The executive producers of the project are Silva Basmajian at the National Film Board of Canada and Jason Spingarn-Koff at The New York Times. Spingarn-Koff is the newspaper’s commissioning editor for opinion video, and producer and curator for Op-Docs, the Times’ series of short opinion documentairies by independent filmmakers. He was a Knight Fellow at MIT in 2010-2011.

A Short History of the Highrise, which documents life in residential skyscrapers in cities and suburbs around the world, won the News & Documentary Emmy in the category New Approaches: Arts, Lifestyle, Culture. (The New York Times had a pretty good shot at winning the …

Deborah Blum and I were thrilled when Kathryn O’Neill, a communications officer with MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, contacted us a few weeks ago to propose putting together formal Q&A about the role of science and technology journalism in modern society and the future of Knight Science Journalism at MIT. Naturally, we said yes. We had a great time working with Kathryn to say—in 900 words or less—how sci/tech journalism fits into important policy debates, why it’s important for MIT to engage with the journalistic community, and where we plan to take the program in the near future.

Today the MIT News Office published Kathryn’s article. See Q&A: Science journalism and public engagement….