Monthly Archives: November 2009

Siva Vaidhyanathan on Googlization, “Only the elite and proficient get to opt out”

Chris Castiglione | 30 November 2009, 3:35 am | 2 comments | tags: , ,

The term Googlization, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, is the process of being processed, rendered, and represented by Google. His upcoming book The Googlization of Everything investigates the actions and intentions behind Google. At The Society of the Query Vaidhyanathan choose one issue from his book: the politics and implications of Google Maps’ Street View.


Google’s Global Dissociative Identity Disorder

Harro Heijboer | 30 November 2009, 1:22 am | tags: , , , , , ,

A lot has been written already about the local and global. Comparing this to other local Google websites and the general Global Google (google.com). But how global is this Global Google actually? Is google.com really global? Is the result on google.com for example the same in the United States as it is in Australia?


Web Words: a Vocabulary of the Web Interface

Michael Stevenson | 25 November 2009, 7:19 pm | tags: , ,

The Web is ‘Search’ and ‘More.’ We already know this intuitively: online content, and our experience of it, is mediated by the range of views and actions made available by the interface and, increasingly, the engine. Web Words is an initial contribution by digital methods to the study of the words employed for what one sees and does on the Web, as well as their larger, online-cultural meanings.


Super 90s Hacker Video Mash-up

Morgan Currie | 25 November 2009, 5:43 pm | 3 comments

New York based curator Laurel Ptak strung together this mash-up of Hollywood films from the 90s and early 2000s depicting the moment of the hack, that roller coaster ride through the computer’s dark neon tubes in pursuit of some financial system’s collapse, some code to decode, some bad guys to shut down, some nuclear holocaust to thwart.


What Real Time Strategy game must I play?

Kai Henriquez | 24 November 2009, 8:14 pm | tags: , , , , ,

So you like Real Time Strategy games and want to find new games previously unknown to you, but potentially worth playing?


IDFA: Media Fonds lecture Ira Glass & Media Mix Master Julien Temple

Paulien Dresscher | 23 November 2009, 2:51 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , , ,

On this very memorable Saturday afternoon the Red Bull drinking special Doc Lab guest and master storyteller Ira Glass, and the British wine-sipping documentary, clip, and fiction filmmaker Julien Temple were present at the Escape Club to talk about their work and to share their insights of film making and storytelling.


IDFA: ABOUT VERTOV 2.0 AND SHAW’S ARCHIVAL EXPLORATIONS

Paulien Dresscher | 22 November 2009, 8:11 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , ,

The next few days I will do some blogging on the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam with the focus on those events in which new media practices are visible in traditional forms of filmmaking or are influencing form, context, and content of the documentary genre.


A story about YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community

Simeona Petkova | 20 November 2009, 10:54 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , , ,
<p style=”text-align: justify;”>“From You to Tube: YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community” is a short video created by Lasse Timmermann and me for the Digital Methods Seminar. It  follows the conceptual and methodological framework of “distilling the ‘textual grammar’ of a website history”<a href=”#_ftn1″>[1]</a> set

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Lev Manovich: Studying Culture With Search Algorithms

Chris Castiglione | 20 November 2009, 1:15 am | 3 comments | tags: , , , ,

New media theorist Lev Manovich summarized his latest contribution to the field of software studies: cultural analytics. Whereas traditional cultural analysis relies on real-world resources (human interpretation and physical storage), cultural analytics relies on the computer and search algorithms in order to discern and interpret culture.


Ingmar Weber: Free the Query Logs

Morgan Currie | 17 November 2009, 2:40 pm | tags: ,

With Google seeping into every nook of the Society of the Query conference – the subject, direct or indirect, of most presentations and discussions – you might ask why Google isn’t here to speak for itself. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the company makes it very difficult for staff to speak at events (look at how rarely they attend the industry’s…