‘Love, Rock and Revolution’ features legendary music photographer Jim Marshall’s work

Never-before-seen 1960s photographic work by legendary San Francisco rock and roll

photographer Jim Marshall (1936-2010) will be featured in “The Haight: Love, Rock and Revolution,” an exhibit opening Friday, Feb. 6, in the halls of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

JimMarshallExhibit-410aThe show will run through May at the school’s Reva and David Logan Gallery of Documentary Photography at North Gate Hall, located on campus near the intersection of Hearst and Euclid avenues. It is free and open to the public.

The Center for Photography at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has joined with Marshall’s estate to launch the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography, with a goal of raising $500,000 to $1 million to  support the visual arts at the journalism school.

Marshall was widely known for his documentary photos of big-name musicians from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana and the Rolling Stones, as well as Johnny Cash’s groundbreaking live concerts at Folsom and San Quentin prisons. His work appeared on more than 500 album covers and in magazines such as Rolling Stone.

Marshall’s photos also captured street life in San Francisco and New York, a Kentucky coal mining town’s despair and Mississippi civil rights demonstrations. He received an honorary Grammy lifetime achievement award posthumously in 2014, the only photographer to ever receive such an honor.

At the opening reception on Feb. 6, longtime San Francisco music critic and Marshall friend Joel Selvin and Amelia Davis, a photographer and Marshall assistant, will be on hand to discuss Marshall’s work.

The 6:30-8:30 p.m. event also will feature a psychedelic light show, in keeping with the popular rock programming of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, free psychedelic posters resembling those made famous during that era by the Fillmore music hall in San Francisco will be given away at the reception, while they last.

The exhibit was curated by Ken Light, the Reva and David Logan Chair in Photojournalism.

The Center for Photography at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, founded in 1996, offers courses in hands-on photojournalism and social documentary photography. The center routinely exhibits world-class photographers and hosts programs with distinguished photojournalists.

For more information about the event, contact Julie Hirano at juliehirano@berkeley.edu.

For more details about the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography, contact Marlena Telvick at marlenatelvick@berkeley.edu.

Source: UC Berkeley

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Victims of violence given voice in upcoming play

Members of the cast and production crew talk over a scene during a rehearsal for the Queen’s Drama Department’s upcoming staging of If We Were Birds at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. (Photo by Allie Gottlieb)

For its winter major production the Queen’s Department of Drama is staging one of the most powerful contemporary Canadian plays.

If We Were Birds is a Governor-General Award winning play by Erin Shields based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the poem that also inspired Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and is a poetic re-telling of the myth of sisters Philomela and Procne. In Shields’ work the ancient tale is transformed into a modern parable about violence against women in times of war as revealed through a chorus of testimonials of loss and suffering.

The play was selected as it has a large female cast explains drama professor and director Kim Renders, who points out that the department is comprised primarily of women. She also says the subject matter is particularly timely because of the ongoing conversation on campuses across the country, including Queen’s, surrounding sexual assault.

It’s a powerful play, Renders says, and a great script,

As a result, one of the main challenges in the production has been how to handle the powerful testimonials. There are times when the material is so heavy that a lighter touch may be required, Renders says.

“Dealing with this script at various times, that’s the balancing act,” she says. “When do we really punch it in and drive it home to the audience with hair pulling and chest beating and when do you need to hold back and just let the words do the work by themselves.”

Months of preparations are down to the final weeks and days but there is an eagerness to take to the stage. Renders, a co-founder of Nightwood Theatre and former artistic director of Theatre Kingston, says she is impressed by how the students are approaching the play from acting and production perspectives as well as the three student assistant directors.

“I’m feeling people are taking a very responsible approach to the material, very mature, professional,” Renders says. “People are quite dedicated to the work, and there is a ton of work because one of the students, Adrienne Miller , is choreographing the chorus and another student, Deanna Choi, is creating a soundscape that goes all the way through the entire production. And she is also playing music live.”

For the assistant directors it’s a further learning experience as they step off the stage and take on wider responsibilities.

“I think that being an assistant director is a very interesting learning experience because we are observers on one part, where we are watching and learning from Kim and her decisions as well as the actors,” says Holly Molaski (Artsci’15). “With such a big cast they have so many ideas too. So I’m really trying to observe and get ideas from everyone else.”

For Colleen Rush (Artsci’15) seeing the wider scope of the production has been valuable.

“What I’ve found interesting is seeing how quickly the images take form,” she says. “I also find interesting that Holly and I have a lot of input and it matches up. There’s a lot of agreeing.”

If We Were Birds will be staged at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Performances will take place in the Studio Theatre Feb. 4-7 and 12 at 8 pm, with a matinee on Feb. 8 at 2 pm. The play will be staged in the Grand Lobby on Feb. 10 and 11 at 8 pm as well as a special “Sunrise Performance” scheduled for the morning of Feb. 7. The time has yet to be finalized.

Tickets are $22 for general admission, $15 for students and seniors and can be purchased online at theisabel.ca/tickets, at the Isabel box office (12:30-4:30 pm), or at the door prior to performances.

Source: Queens Unviersity

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Use Social Media in Study of E-Cigarettes

Five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will support project that is as much about data-gathering methods as it is about public health. Credit: UA

When Facebook announced in September that it would use all that personal data it collects to roll out a new ad platform to rival Google, privacy advocates groaned and marketers grinned.

But what if all that intelligence could be used to crack open one of today’s most pressing — yet least understood — public health issues?

That’s precisely the vision of the University of Arizona’s Daniel Zeng, MIS professor at the Eller College of Management, and Scott Leischow, adjunct faculty in the UA College of Medicine and professor of health services research at Arizona’s Mayo Clinic.

Fusing cutting-edge informatics and public health, their plan to scrape social media to create the world’s best data on e-cigarette usage and marketing recently won a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The project will tackle four distinct goals. It will:

Create a massive, real-time and continuously growing data set of what consumers and marketers say about e-cigarettes on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as social media forums focused on e-cigarettes and "vaping."

Mine that content for insights into why people use e-cigarettes, how they believe they affect their health and whether they help them quit smoking.

Document the marketing landscape — all the ways brands and vendors use these channels to promote their products and how consumers respond.

Integrate all of that information in the world’s first one-stop resource for wide-ranging data on e-cigarettes as revealed through social media as a tool for other researchers, health care professionals and more.

While e-cigarettes are relatively new in the U.S. — they were introduced in 2007 — sales are doubling annually and were expected to reach $1 billion last year. Even so, any time public dollars fund research, two questions naturally arise: Why study this? And why study it this way?

"There’s so much we don’t know about e-cigarettes," Leischow says. "The scientific community has found mixed data on whether they’re helpful for smoking cessation. We have questions about how different flavorings impact use, particularly among minors. And many health professionals worry that e-cigarettes may ultimately lead to more young people taking up smoking. All of these blind spots around a product that is still totally unregulated make this a top-priority area for the FDA."

As for why it makes sense to study e-cigarettes in this way, Zeng’s MIS expertise holds the key.  By mining social media in real time, as Zeng and Leischow have proposed, there are a number of strategic advantages:

Data comes from people interacting naturally in their day-to-day lives, thus removing “presentation bias” problems intrinsic in surveys.

The data collection is automated, which means sample size is not constrained by how much money or how many eyeball hours researchers can muster.

The lack of constraint also makes anecdotal information scientifically relevant: One personal story is just that, but 10,000 or 100,000 personal stories over time equal robust statistical data.

Because content is processed by algorithms, not people, data is available in near real time, not months or even years after countless hours of labor-intensive review.

The world of e-cigarettes, like that of any niche product or interest, has its own specialized vocabulary of acronyms and slang, so the research team will first need to construct a base lexical dataset for “training” the computers that will collect and process content.

It’s also one thing to scrape words but a much more complex challenge to automate the process of extracting meaning, so that a computer can spot when someone cites a reason for using e-cigarettes or mentions how the products affect his or her health (both of which first require a computer to detect who is or isn’t a user) or correctly catalog the marketing strategy used in an advertisement.

"We basically will be creating a suite of novel technologies for this study using both established building blocks of informatics and methods that have yet to be developed," Zeng says, "including analysis and visualization tools that were developed here at the U of A. 
Beyond that, we’re relying on proven tools for pattern mining, group behavior prediction, social network analysis and a lot more, but in ways that have never been combined for this level of research and in this topic area."

For Leischow, the knowledge those tools will produce is invaluable.

"There are all kinds of messages out there, from how effective e-cigarettes can be to help smokers quit tobacco to how they’re totally harmless or taste like candy," he says. "It may be that e-cigarettes prove beneficial to public health, or they may be shown to do more harm than good. In either case, it often takes many years for experts to fully recognize how products are being used and how they impact well-being, and even longer for regulation to catch up.

"This time, it’s going to be different. This time, we’re getting out ahead."

Source: UA

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A mobile app for conducting opinion polls

Opiner is an open source tool for opinion polling. Credit: Image courtesy of KTH The Royal Institute of Technology

Soon anyone can conduct public opinion polls to drive issues that are important to them, using a new open source tool being developed at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Researcher Konrad Tollmar and his colleagues intend for the mobile app, Opiner, to be used as a tool for direct democracy. Tollmar says that once Opiner is publicly available, it will enable anyone to conduct surveys, drive public opinion and influence political decisions.

"This will be an alternative to services that can cost millions to use," says Tollmar. "It gives people an opportunity that historically only large organisations have had."

Public opinion polls are an important tool for interest groups, which regularly hire commercial firms to conduct polls for them. The ability to take stock of -- and present -- public opinion enables interest groups to control the narrative around their issues, establish their communications themes and influence how the media and policymakers grasp a given subject.

"Polling can be expensive," he says. "But Opiner enables anyone to drive public opinion or conduct surveys."

Opiner could also have the benefit of energising more people to become politically involved. And it's not just for activists. Media organisations big and small can use the tool for their own purposes.

"We're working on a form of direct democracy. That people can have a voice in society," he says.

"But Opiner can be used for just about anything, large or small," he says, noting that one of the strengths of Opiner is that it can be context-specific.

Targeting mobile devices means that Opiner pollsters can make use of both space and time 

to find out what people think, and ask relevant questions based on these two parameters. For example, what do people think about public transportation when they are riding on the subway? What do students think about the quality of lunch while they're sitting in the school cafeteria?

"There is evidence in behavioral science and what is called "Experience Sampling," that surveys get a more true result when people are asked what they think in the moment, instead of afterward," he says.

Opiner also offers transparency. In addition to implementing polls, users can analyse the performance and freely share it. The system includes a toolkit to easily visualise the results in an understandable way.

"There are a lot of great tools on the web for public polling, but they are closed and commercial. Opiner is fully open and works on all types of newer phones. The system is open source, so anyone can download the software and set up their own Opiner," he says.

But it's not just the political benefit that Tollmar hopes to spread. In beta tests with teachers and students, the research team found that the act of surveying itself serves an educational purpose: as a way of developing students understanding of politics and language.

"First, we talked with their teachers about which questions should be asked. That worked so-so," he says. "The students didn't think the questions were always relevant. It was much better when the students themselves had to formulate their questions."

Opiner is part of the European research project, FlashPoll. Flashpoll has a mature Android app available, but what makes Opiner stand-out, Tollmar says, is its truly open platform -- from the establishment of questions, running the polls and analysis, to the sharing of results. "You should rather see Opiner as a research prototype of the next generation of Flashpoll tools," he says.

Tollmar is among a group of researchers at KTH who have worked with various digital tools over the last several years to help people make their voices heard, including Måns Wrange, Patrik Hernwall, Igor Isaksson och Mats Gustavsson.

Source: KTH The Royal Institute of Technology

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