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

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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

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Bringing the past to the Present

By Erik Hekman on 11 February 2012

The growing impact of information technology and digitisation, ever since the beginning of the 1990s, has given cultural heritage institutions a fresh impulse to deal with the problem of accessibility of their collections (Van Vliet, 2009). Their efforts, however, are still mostly aimed at cultural preservation, and, for the time being, have done little to bring us closer to the dream of a Virtual Collection in the Netherlands. For instance, more than 30 million art objects were still not digitised in 2008 in the Netherlands (Veeger, 2008). Meanwhile, it has become urgent to further open the door. The Internet’s dominant role in recent years has caused a change in the relationship between media producers, suppliers and consumers in the traditional media landscape. The cultural sector must therefore decide what to do with today’s digital media in response to the general public’s changing role, and for the purpose of improving accessibility. The use of multiple media resources and particularly resources like the Internet and mobile telephony seems to be inevitable. The only question that remains is: how? This paper addresses this question by focussing on social tagging and storytelling, and reports the results of an empirical study on tagging behaviour using the social tagging platform www.ikweetwatditis.nl (see also Van Vliet et al., 2010).

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How to measure online success?

By Erik Hekman on 5 November 2011

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to download and read the research report from Culture24 focussing on museums and the Internet. Online strategy and how to measure online success were central in this four year during study. Developing effective ways to define, measure and evaluate the success of online activities is an issue faced by all parts of the cultural sector. Organizations regularly invest in cultural websites, social media activities and online services without a clear idea of what the services are trying to achieve, or their intended audience.

tagged with: metrics, museums, social media

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The role of social media in the entrepreneurial process

By Erik Hekman on 20 June 2011

There is an broad array of initiatives and experimentation with social media by entrepreneurs and businesses. ‘We have to do something with social media’ seems to be the credo and emphasize lies on ‘a race to the market’. There is a great deal of trail-and-error and knowledge on how social media works is often highly tacit. One can also think of this as a ‘probe and learn process’ of entrepreneurs and businesses trying to use social media to their advantage (Groen et al, 2008). The degree of success however differs.

tagged with: phd, entrepreneurship, social media

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Bringing the Past to the Present: The use of tagging and storytelling for the enrichment of digital cultural heritage

By Erik Hekman on 18 May 2011

Together with Harry van Vliet I recently submitted an abstract to the International Conference on Knowledge Work and Innovations. In this paper we address the use of social tagging and storytelling in order to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. The purpose of this conference is to deepen the co-operation between the members of the strategic partner network: HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and Polytechnic University of Valencia by discussing the new practices of knowledge work and innovation creation. We submitted our paper to the Applied Arts track. Let's hope it gets accepted.

tagged with: roots2share, ikweetwaditis, social storytelling, social tagging, cultural heritage

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Help I’m in the Cloud!

By Erik Hekman on 20 January 2011

If someone told me five years ago that my data, my precious data, would be in the hands of a third party such as Dropbox I would have never believed him. The same matter for not owning a MP3 collection anymore, but streaming it for 10 euros each month using Spotify. In an information-centered society the data one owns becomes crucial for survival. Work, photo’s, bank account information, contact details, email correspondence, and other relevant information are neatly stored in folders on hard drives and (if someone is smart enough to back up) external hard disks. The thought of my data leaving the room would have frightened me five years ago.

tagged with: cloud, gaming, internet

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A trip down memory lane

By Erik Hekman on 30 November 2010

Last week the faculty of communication and journalism organized a staff trip to see the movie ‘the social network’ in Pathé Rembrandt Utrecht. The movie focuses on the creation of Facebook, a popular social network site (for those who lived in a cave the last seven years).
At first I was reluctant to go to the movie at all assuming it was a mere movie about sex, drugs and rock and roll with a Silicone Valley touch. I was wrong… It was techno-music. The faculty asked me to participate in a panel discussion about social media and social networks afterwards so I had to go. Forming a panel could and should be a movie on itself but eventually a panel was formed. With little expectation I entered the movie theater.

tagged with: stick-it, social network sites, facebook, business models

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PhD research proposal; social media a marketplace for esteem?

By Erik Hekman on 15 October 2010

More people than ever before interact with each other. Numerous individuals connect with friends, family and even strangers on Facebook, share their thoughts, activities and experiences on Twitter and publish, comment and rate video clips on YouTube. The latter examples depict only a small array of the social activities in which users partake using social media services. Human activities on the Internet, made possible by these social media services, continue to grow. It is not a complete surprise that companies, politicians, scholars and the popular press display a deep interest towards these social media services that facilitate human activity.

tagged with: social media, research

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A new academic year

By Erik Hekman on 7 September 2010

The start of the new academic year (last week) at the university of applied sciences Utrecht went considerably smooth. A few minor glitches such as classrooms double booked or too small for 35+ students. But considering the additional students from the rather-new-but-extremely-popular Communication and Media Design (around 240 new students) the building is holding up. And as long as the wireless network is working I’m a happy camper. Comes to show that I’m easily pleased when it comes to services within the university. I don’t mind the long queues at the canteen, coffee machines or the printers but don’t take away my Internet.

tagged with: services, education, social media

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