One cannot help noticing that the Dutch have a new King. Even as a republican, I have to admit that the Orange family has done a great job of promoting the Orange monarchy. Willem Alexanders stylized WA logo has been (and still is) displayed on public buildings. Pictures of Maxima and Willem Alexander looking optimistic have been staring us in the face (or next to us staring in a radiant future) from billboards. They had a million or so children attending the “koningsdag” (kingsday) games donned in orange t-shirts with a cartoon king, and a televised opening of the games showing them being nice and friendly surrounded by young children. They have given carefully controlled TV interviews and of course had a day long televised coronation event that gave rise to an endless stream of news items, and allowed them to appear with traditional regalia as well as designer dresses, and parade their young daughters. Last not least, the campaign “went viral” as companies gave away orange crowning “wuppies”, sold orange t-shirts, pastry, flags and peppers, and citizens dutifully dressed up in orange, often reusing the orange they had acquired for sport events like the football championships. In short, from a marketing point of view, the coronation was part of a well used, crossmedial event to market the house of Orange and the monarchy. 

The future or now?

Go to the ant, you lazy man! Observe its ways and become wise
Proverbs 6:6

Last oktober, Christian Wartena and I finished a paper on the distributional semantics of tags, that we worked on for a long time. We now have some students which might be using these ideas, so I thought it might be useful to explain the ideas in simple terms here.

In the Museumkompas  project, we are developing, among other things, crossmedial concepts for museums. The mediabattles are an important part of this work, but of course students are not the only source of inspriration. Thus our interest in interesting examples of crossmedial museum exhibitions.

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

Figure 1 Roland Barthes teaching