Author Profile

  • Heleen Kerkman
  • Url: http://www.heleenkerkman.wordpress.com
  • Posts: 7
  • About the user: After finishing my BA in Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam I recently started the Ma New Media.

Author Archive

Visualizing for America

Heleen Kerkman | 11 May 2010, 8:59 pm | tags: , , ,

On the 8th of this March, the Sunlight foundation launched the Design for America contest. This non-profit organization aims to make government data more accessible for citizens. The development of information visualizations from governmental data is becoming a fruitful way of translating the bulk of government data into an understandable and comprehendible modus. Through the Design for America contest, the Sunlight foundation is emphasizing the importance of data visualization in the process of bridging the gap between citizen and government.

INFORMATION VISUALISATION, SHARING THE STORY

Heleen Kerkman | 20 April 2010, 5:22 pm | 4 comments | tags: , ,

No one knows everything, but everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity[1]

While the notion of collective intelligence –as coined by Pierre Lévy- has already been extensively discussed in regards to the collective phenomenon of Wikipedia, the current rise of the social use of information visualisations should also be seen in this perspective. While Pierre Lévy described how individual members of online communities combined their individual knowledge in order to create a shared expertise (collective intelligence),[2] he could not envision the collective use of data. The unanswered question posed by Lévy as to ‘…[how we will] be able to process enormous masses of data on interrelated problems within a changing environment?’[3] might have found its answer in the collective potential of information visualisations…

Two months in China

Heleen Kerkman | 07 April 2009, 12:52 pm | 1 comment

Two months of my semester in Beijing have now gone by. With everyday feeling like a year of new impressions, it is crazy to see how fast time flew by. Right now I just made my first blogpost, but from now on there will be a weekly update. This…

Twitter elections 2008: a landscape of thoughts

Heleen Kerkman | 12 October 2008, 8:01 pm | 1 comment

The popular micro-blogging service of Twitter offers its users the possibility to update their online profiles with up to 140 characters at a time. These updates emerge on their profiles so they can be read by other users and appear on the home pages of users that optioned to ‘follow’ that particular member of Twitter. While initially the posting of…

Digital Handshakes in Networked Publics: a Case Study

Heleen Kerkman | 06 October 2008, 12:05 pm | tags: , , ,

In her essay ‘Digital Handshakes in Networked Publics: Why Politicians Must Interact, Not Broadcast’ Danah Boyd explains how politicians in the United States are misinterpreting the new options opened by current social network sites. Instead of using these SNS’s as a tool to interact with their -potential- voters, they create a site that still uses the old means of one-way broadcasting to reach their imagined audience.

Personalizing the Public Sphere: From Personal Start Pages to Personal Webtops

Heleen Kerkman | 22 September 2008, 10:09 am | tags: , , ,

Your personalized Internet. You can add what you like and remove what you don’t like and it’s totally simple. - Pageflakes* -

Pageflakes is only one of the dozen sites that offer to personalize your internet experience by creating a personal start page for you. The amount of websites offering this personalization of these start pages reflects the need for a more personal, or even a more private part in the online public sphere. While every site tries to win over the user by stating that they are not just another personalized start page, they all claim that via this personal start page the user will be able to personalize their part in the private sphere.

…Imagine This is a Review. Thoughts on: ‘Style First’ by Mieke Gerritzen

Heleen Kerkman | 14 September 2008, 8:22 pm | tags: , ,

In her paperback Style First, graphic artist Mieke Gerritzen directly addresses and confuses the reader by stating that ‘…this book provides no final definition of what style is about.’ Containing articles written by media theorists as well as designers such as Lev Manivich, Hendik-Jan Grievink and Ned Rossiter, this book provides the reader with different visions within the current discourse on style. The paperback itself is in fact the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Style First’ by Mieke Gerritzen that ran from October 2007 till February 2008 at the MUDAC-Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains.