Author Profile

  • Sander Leegwater
  • Url: http://sanderleegwater.nl
  • Posts: 8
  • About the user: Hi, I'm Alexander (or Sander for friends) Leegwater – a Multimedia Designer, Bachelor in the Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam – and currently working on my Masters of (New) Media at the 'Universiteit van Amsterdam'. Besides schooling, I'm working as a part-time 'front-end' web-developer at www.digital4u.nl.

Author Archive

Visualizing for different purposes

In my previous blogpost, I finished with the statement that there are many other authors (besides Manuel Lima) that talk about artistic ways of information visualization and the distinctions these cultural practices have from traditional (conventional academic) information visualization. Kosara wrote the article ‘Visualization criticism – the missing link between information visualization and art.’ In this he introduces the notions of pragmatic and artistic visualization to delineate between two very different approaches within the general field of visualization.

Information visualization, not only an academic practice?

The definition by Card et. al. of information visualization as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition (1999),” is the basis for many. But there are also parties involved from outside the academic fields in the popularization of information visualization, as Viégas and Wattenberg write. Tag clouds for example go against certain theoretical design principles but still seem to work. Lima praises the way “they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for information visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community (2009),” resulting in the development of a multiplicity of projects.

The vigilance of the Wikipedians

In the last couple of weeks I got some responses to my post concerning the revisitation of my Wikipedia article about Richard A. Rogers – in which I told that I was stupefied by the speed with which I was blamed for ‘self-promotion’ and ‘bias’ and about the fact that the original article was…

Aphoristic message (overload?) by a CMC world

Communication is as old as humans (or humanoids) itself, from a grunt, a shout to a simple gesture – we have always had the ability to convey messages to others around us – whether we’re correctly understood is a whole other matter. ‘Aphorisms’ (the ability to make short, powerful and easy to remember messages) “have been around…

My Wikipedia-page revisited…

Last week all of the Master students where assigned to start a ‘new’ Wikipedia article, which we all did but with which most of us had a lot of troubles. Most articles where deleted within minutes after creation, others where submitted to be deleted for various reasons. My own article about ‘Richard A. Rogers’, one of our Professors, was also…

Social Networking Sites (SNS); are we helping in the shrinking of our own privacy?

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are commonly known to just about everyone nowadays or so it seems, who doesn’t at least own a FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Hyves, Ning account or combinations of these and many, many others! But do you know who has access to them? What’s exactly on them? Are you sure their isn’t some hidden fact which you’d rather…

Wikipedia assignment: Is ‘WikiTrust’ the next step towards a more reliable online-encyclopaedia?

Once again the online-encyclopaedia Wikipedia is in the spotlight of attention; after years of various forms of praise, critique and academic studies – in which several different and overlapping aspects of Wikipedia have been discussed – the encyclopaedia has decided once again it wants to increase its authority on the internet. This should be achieved (somewhere this fall [1]) by enhancing Wikipedia’s reliability through the use of coloured text; this technique, called WikiTrust, is a project of professor Luca de Alfaro [2] from the University of California, Santa Cruz, which “is part of ongoing work [..] on reputation systems, online collaboration, and information trust.” The name ‘WikiTrust’ can be a little misleading though, since it has no way of telling how trustworthy texts really are. “‘It can only measure user agreement,’ said de Alfaro. ‘That’s what it does [2].’”

Book Report of ‘Ourspace – Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture’ by Christine Harold

This book really hit an personal snare with me, because I have been trying to avoid most commercial expressions by any medium for years now. I really regard it as an invasion of my privacy – I didn’t ask to be battered with consumerism for all my life – but it seems that’s just how everyday day life has to…