Author Profile

  • Stefania Bercu
  • Url: http://caldutsibine.wordpress.com
  • Posts: 8
  • About the user: I'm a Sociology graduate from Bucharest, currently located in Amsterdam and doing a masters in New Media.

Author Archive

26 Days of Peace – a collection of tactical media projects

Stefania Bercu | 13 February 2011, 1:51 pm | 4 comments | tags: , , , ,

Since the end of the Second World War, the world has only known twenty-six cumulated days of peace. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Gulf War gave rise to a hope that we could blissfully live in a global capitalist democracy, but this changed with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Slavoj Zizek calls the…

Impure: a user-friendly visual programming language from Bestiario

Stefania Bercu | 30 October 2010, 7:01 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , ,

Last week, Barcelona/ Lisboa –based company Bestiario presented the audience of VisWeek 2010 with their latest information visualization programming language, Impure, an initiative to help democratize the Web by presenting Internet citizens with a flexible, easy to use tool to manipulate data and share knowledge.

Impure allows users to engage in creating info visualizations, by working with…

E-books: que sera, sera. (but that’s ok, as long as we’re still reading)

Stefania Bercu | 28 October 2010, 3:09 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , ,

One of the main challenges that the emergence of e-books has brought upon us is linked to the idea of ownership, be it the ownership of copyright or the actual feeling one gets when purchasing a book. Some argue that in order to feel that a book belongs to you, there is a need for the physical object: the smell…

Twitter: what are you feeling?

Stefania Bercu | 11 October 2010, 3:29 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , , ,

What if our words had no hidden meaning? What if we didn’t play the mind games that we play in deconstructing and (over-)analyzing every sentence or word or gesture and we would have to look no further than the dictionary to know the exact meaning of a word? Can you imagine there not being any metaphors, euphemisms or sarcasm involved…

Hacktivists and trolls on Wikipedia

Stefania Bercu | 08 October 2010, 5:34 pm | tags: , , , , , ,

In the past few years, a lot of research efforts have been directed towards topics that gravitate around Wikipedia, be it trying to determine the motivations of users to contribute with their own content, the proper use of Wikipedia in academia etc, but according to Pnina Shachaf and Noriko Hara in a recent number of Journal…

Web 2.0+ User=♥? An ANT approach to User-Web relationships.

Stefania Bercu | 27 September 2010, 12:44 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , ,

In reviewing the Digital Folklore Reader last week, I came across Olia Lialina’s essay Vernacular Web 2, in which she argues that the void caused by the demise of the playful, cheeky and, most importantly, personal homepage has been filled by dull designer-developed profile pages or templates. “The online life of a today’s user [...]is disciplined and fomalized.…

Book review- Digital Folklore Reader

Stefania Bercu | 20 September 2010, 9:24 pm | tags: , , , , ,

Reading Digital Folklore is like taking down that shoe-box of old photos from the top shelve and treating yourself to a night of reminiscing. You grimace at how goofy your hairdo looked 15 years ago and laugh at how you used to match pink leggings with animal print and secretly wish you would still lack the self consciousness that…

Creating documentaries to engage the viewer: Prison Valley- a webdoc.

Stefania Bercu | 11 September 2010, 12:02 pm | 5 comments | tags: , , , , ,

Prison Valley posterIn November, 2009, Philippe Brault and David Dufresne, journalists for Arte.tv were onstage at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam to present the online platform and the first 30 minutes of edited footage of their upcoming project: Prison Valley- a webdocumentary. Prison Valley is a road movie about a small city in the state of Colorado,…