The Big Bang Theory

By Rogier Brussee on 17 May 2012

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), remnant of the big bang.

tagged with: dwdd, dijkgraaf, einstein, science communication, science

American’s are top taggers

By Erik Hekman on 14 May 2012

I’m currently in the process of wrapping up my paper about Flickr the Commons. Retrieving a large dataset really has been beneficial in regards to my research. I’m not going to blog any spoilers but it is fun to look at the data especially in regard to the location of the Flickr Community members. To get a better understanding who contributes to the Commons we analyzed 167,871 accounts. This was the total amount of accounts who actively did something with the content of the institutions. One of the more interesting things was to see if we could determine the users locations and see which countries participate more.

tagged with: location, flickr the commons, data, social media

I control my data therefor I am

By Kees Winkel on 11 May 2012

Uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existing symbolic order, norms and values and which way out to choose. In ‘Life as a construction box’, Swierstra^[1] et al. begin their publication with the conception of ‘way out’ which, in my ayes is a bit heavy (my connotation of ‘way out’ has to do with escape). But then, the publication is a bout the most relevant, current and rather important issues of our days. Issues like privacy, man and machine, ambient and pervasive technology, health and being unhealthy and, as would like to put it, the makebility of reality, an as fundamental as rather intangible confusion trying to surface through solid ethical questions and controversies. Dutch philosopher Peter Paul Verbeek^{[see Swiestra]} questions whether people have the possibility to withdraw themselves from ambient and pervasive technology. And what about our log-time disputed basic right of privacy?

tagged with: moorian, boyd, verbeek, swiestra, privacy, facebook

Archetypes in magazines

By Frank Meeuwsen on 7 May 2012

Even though we are researching in the digital space, and my main passion lies at the internet and digital media, I will always have a soft spot for magazines, Especially independent magazines. Next to my iPad, I always have a big pile of magazines waiting to be read. I read magazines offline as well as on my iPad. I must say, reading magazines on a digital device leaves something to be desired. For instance, you don’t have the tactile feeling of knowing how far you are in a magazine. It doesn’t have a nice way to flip the pages fast, just to get a feel of the magazine. That’s why I will keep reading magazines in print. This led me to the Facing Pages festival in Arnhem this weekend. An intimate festival to celebrate independent magazines worldwide. Where else would you find magazines on Meatculture right next to a stencilled personal ‘zine dedicated to DWDD’s presenter Matthijs van Nieuwkerk? The festival revolves around three rooms: The lecture room, the exhibition and the lobby with magazine store. To start with the last. Amsterdam based Atheneum Bookstore runs the popup store with a great selection of magazines. I have found some great titles with outrageous designs. Some of the magazines have their digital counterpart, but to tell you the truth, they don’t hold up to the real thing in your hands.

tagged with: archetype, magazine, festivals

Would Plato’s Cyborg be male?

By Kees Winkel on 30 April 2012

I do this philosophy course at the university of Utrecht. Fascinating (and not in Spock’s connotation). The professors make us compare texts and write no more than approximately three hundred words about it. That is a challenge. Have a look of what I cooked up from the texts of
1. Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Phaedrus (1)
2. Jos de Mul’s chapter 1, part four of Filosofie in Cyberspace (2)  (in Dutch) and
3. Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (3) .
Is there any coomunality in the texts and if so, what is it. If not what is the common difference? Etc. So, after a couple of work-through-the-nights, I came up with my common denominator: would Plato’s Cyborg be male? Make up your own mind!

tagged with: social construtivism, rhetoric, plato, donnan haraway, de mul, cyborg manifesto, benjamin jowett, technological determinism, philosophy

Tough Nut to Crack

By Thijs Waardenburg on 27 April 2012

Monitoring activities on the web is not new or unique. You have probably heard of Google Analytics (GA), a service that allows to monitor the traffic on a website. Nice graphics and tables show how many people have visited a particular page, where they come from, how long they stay on a page, and so on. This gives a certain impression of the success of a website.

tagged with: social media, metrics

The Great Media Strategy Game

By Rogier Brussee on 20 April 2012

tagged with: communication strategy, game, media strategy

Event12: been there, done that...

By Harry van Vliet on 5 April 2012

Since we are finalizing our current research on festivals and working towards a publication in September, we are coming out of our research closet! Last week a ‘snippet’ of our research was presented at the international ASCA meeting in Amsterdam by Jelke de Boer en Michiel Rovers. This concerned the somewhat surprising result of social media users having lower scores on motivation question, before as well as during the festival. Could it be that social media users are less intrinsically motivated and more ‘instrumental’, scanning what leisure opportunities are available and choosing which one fits most conveniently? And are social media users during a festival more pre-occupied with showing they are ‘there’ at the festival (‘look at me!’) instead of being in the moment of experiencing the festival? Putting a mobile phone between you and the performing artist is a physical act of distancing yourself from what is happening around you by literally putting media between you and your surroundings. Adformatie also picked up these surprising results, and although being wrongly quoted on it, was further evidence for us that people are interested in our research.

tagged with: media strategy game, festivals, experience

Frictionless Sharing: a critical view on automated sharing of media texts in social media

By Kees Winkel on 1 April 2012

On Februari 16 of this year, Volkskrant published an article called The future of social media is automated sharing; handy but sometimes a bit embarrassing in which the author Heleen van Lier notes that the future of sharing media texts lies in automated sharing. Central theme in her article stands Frictionless Sharing; a phrase introduced by social medium Facebook a couple of months ago. Representatives of Facebook, Reuters, Nokia and Microsoft debated Frictionless Sharing (FS) during the Social Media Week in London. The debate panel came to the conclusion that FS is here to stay. Use of the technology is simple; after agreeing once, the user starts sharing his data with other in linked media.

tagged with: social constructivism, technological determinism, utopia, frictionless sharing, facebook

Paper accepted!

By Erik Hekman on 30 March 2012

This abstract I wrote, together with Harry van Vliet, about the usage of Flickr the Commons was accepted for the Heritage Impact 2012 in Brighton. I’m quite excited because this will be the first in a serie of papers focussing on social media data harvesting and analyses. Read the abstract here:

tagged with: flickr, social media, cultural heritage, conference