A wolf in sheep’s clothing
On the first of September this year, Google surprised the world with a new logo that will replace the old quirky logo that has appeared above the search box since 1999. According to the Google design...
Give us your data and you will never walk alone
Last week, five students from the University of Michigan launched (Mashable, Tech Times, Business Insider) a smartphone application called Companion. This application enables users to be accompanied by their contacts to virtually walk them home at night. The so-called...
Alba: Improving or Controlling your Life?
During TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco the start-up Stack Lighting announced a new way to light your house: Alba. Alba is described as the world’s first responsive LED lightbulb, that is equipped with sensors that will know when you...
The Internet is now built on mass surveillance
Brought to light in recent months, the Edward Snowden-powered NSA leaks have publicized the wholesale spying efforts by US and UK intelligence agencies that undermine the very fabric of the Internet – turning it into a vast surveillance program...
‘Bashing’s’ Datavisualization as Information Intervention
Living in the era of Big Data, data visualization is booming in science, marketing and journalism (( Segel, Edward, and Jeffrey Heer. “Narrative visualization: Telling stories with data.” Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions 16.6 (2010): 1139-1148. )). In...
Where should I live? Visualizing well-being in different countries
Raw data on its own does not contain much meaning. It presents values of quantitative or qualitative variables that are results of measurements and computations. Data needs some context so that it can be analyzed and visualized in...
Visualizing Our Global Mood 140 Characters at a Time
“We need a new way to convey information, a method which is simple to teach and to learn, and at the same time comprehensive and exact. What I might call ‘consistent visualization’ is such a way.“ These are the...
Tweeting politics – preaching to the choir?
In May 2012, the French chose Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as president. François Mitterand lost power in 1995, and since then the government majority had been right wing. After his defeat, Nicolas Sarkozy...
iPhone 5: The Ultimate User Review
Device reviews are not really the subject of choice on this blog. However, measuring the general sentiment on social networks towards a certain gadget can be quite insightful. In this post I will be examining the iPhone 5 through...
Data visualizations: a global matter
Two levels of information processing Our world is saturated with information. Images, objects, texts, numbers, audio, moving visuals, and everything in between. There’s a reason some call the present the Information Age and invent terms like informatization. All...
Show Me the Data 2012
Show me the data is an annual conference about data visualizations, developed by multidisciplinary students of the master New Media and Computer Science at the UvA and Editorial Design at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design...
Seminar: CBS Datavisualization – Bas Broekhuizen
Last Friday the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) held an interactive data visualization day “Datavisualisatie in beweging” initiated by web designer Eugene Tjoa and Bas Broekhuizen. With this seminar statistic data supplier CBS invited several data visualization professionals, to present their...
The How-I-met-your-MOM-Project
New Media Studies is a programme that is constantly changing, evolving and thus outdated on an annual basis. Its theoretical base is a solid one, its pragmatic learnings are however determined by the hegemonic character of the relation between...
Crowdflow: pretty pictures with our iPhone localisation data
Smartphones have changed the way we think about pretty much all aspects of communication. We’re used to having internet access in our pockets, GPS, barcode readers – you name it. There are thousands of applications to make our lives...
Children’s Online Privacy
Internet to me is a medium of convenience. The awkward feeling of being confined, limited, almost physically paralyzed, creeps on to me after being disconnected from the virtual dimension of the world wide web for more than one day....
Bernhard Rieder: 81,498 Words: the Book as Data Object
[This post was originally published on The Unbound Book Conference Blog) The second session of day 1 of the Unbound Book conference – also titled The Unbound Book – was moderated by Geert Lovink, and discussions of what a book becomes once...
A Question of Data/Art
A question of data/art* *delete as necessary A well known problem of data visualization is according to Lev Manovich that “people intuitively identify visualizations as infovis even though they consist not from vector elements but from media text or...
Mondrian in the age of Information Visualization.
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) started painting his artworks in the style of the Amsterdam Academy. He made dark realistic landscapes and later in his carer he painted more lighter paintings when he evolved towards De Stijl. From the...
You are what you tweet?
The pitfalls of twitter research Twitter research could be a valuable tool when it’s done properly. When we take into account that we already have a bias because twitter users are not a random sample from society, we could...
The Internet – a ‘seductive data set’ accessed at the touch of a button
The rapid expansion of internet uptake throughout the world created a potential for new social experiences, and thus offers researchers new environments for their social enquiry (Beddows, 2008). Kaye and Johnson predicted already in 1999 that the World Wide...
Hyves, THE information source for companies
How would I do research in web 2.0 and Social Network Sites? First I have to make clear for myself what web 2.0 exactly is. According to Tim O’Reilly, one of the founders of web 2.0, web 2.0 existed...
Book Review: “Nach Feierabend: Daten” [After work: Data]
Data have an incredible argumentative potential. Data can be produced, filed, saved, evaluated, spread, sold, aggregated, falsified, interpreted, transmitted, protected, processed and combined. Data show relations, support theses and disprove assumptions. Data can also change over the time and...
Mobile city conference – Stephen Graham on the politics of urban space
Introduction by Ole Bouman: At the NAI, values of architecture are defended that we are fond of to defend. Most architects and policy makers do belief that architecture is about shelter and enclosure, occupation and representation. Archiving architecture used...