New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

How free is Open Access?

Open knowledge sharing implies a certain form of democracy: all resources are to be found online, read and distributed by anyone at any time for free. Distributing knowledge as an ideological cause you might say. The general idea of...

By Myrthe Bösensell on 03/11/13 Comments Off

Open access: anyone can be a scientist?

Thanks to Twitter anyone can be a journalist and thanks to WordPress anyone can be a writer. But to be an academic you need to be high-achieving before getting published in a fancy magazine. At least, you needed to...

By Marijke van Leeuwen on 03/10/13 1

The Rise of an Open Access Culture

In the age of a digitalizing and rapidly changing world, scientific publishing has seen new challenges and opportunities with the wide adoption of the Internet. Before the 1990s, electronic mailing lists were often used as a method for distributing...

By Monika van Dijke on 03/10/13 Comments Off

How Open Knowledge can make and break us

When I was little, my best friend Emily came over one day, and asked for a peanut butter sandwich with chocolates sprinkles on top. I told her it looked disgusting, but she replied: ‘how can you judge something, when...

By Maaike Hansen on 03/10/13 Comments Off

Wikipedia: everybody is an expert

In her article ‘Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication’ Kathleen Fitzpatrick talks about the financial downsides as well as the values of open-access scholarly publishing. Due through the growth of the Internet since the early...

By Steff van Dorp on 03/10/13 Comments Off

Im .mobi lize: Addressing Amazon’s Platform Fragmentation

Coinciding with the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire in 2011-12 (depending on your location), The global corporation also announced their ‘next generation’ ebook format, KF8, and their first attempt to step away from their now dated Mobi format. Pitched...

By Matthew Elworthy on 03/07/13 Comments Off

What to do with all that big data?

“Big data will be bigger in 2013” according to the article on the website of Telegraph written on the 26th of December 2012. Even though ‘big data’ was ‘big’ in 2012, they predict that it will be bigger in...

By Jaimy Quadekker on 03/07/13 1

Visualisation Aesthetics: Creative ways of visualising food and nutrition data

Communicating data can be a difficult task to embark on. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges would be to present / visualise data in a way that even viewers that are not informed or familiar with the subject visualised...

By Paola Gulian on 03/06/13 1

EPUB – A Book Pirate’s Go-To Format

EPUB, short for “electronic publication”, is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It was initially developed in 2007 as a way to streamline digital publishing. What the IDPF didn’t consider back then, is the...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/03/13 Comments Off

More than the written word

As a former literature student, one might expect me to be on top of all the new, digital developments in the book business that are happening as we speak. Unfortunately I am not. My technical knowledge is quite limited;...

By Myrthe Bösensell on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Does Adobe Digital Editions replace the paper book? A consumer’s report.

Although I’m only 25 years old, I sometimes feel like I should join my 80-years-old uncle Wim. He lives in a peacefull retirement house called Aar en Amstel, which means as much as ear of corn by the river...

By Marijke van Leeuwen on 03/03/13 Comments Off

DjVU – Something old, something new

“I’m an e-book nitwit and frankly I don’t care”. About a year ago I still could not believe e-books could be anything but miserable. I was sure that I would never feel the same way about reading from a...

By Maaike Hansen on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Privacy in the era of Amazon Kindle

Privacy. According to The Oxford English Dictionary it is a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. When we were young, we were taught that it is not polite to read over someone else’s...

By Monika van Dijke on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Goodreads: share what you’re reading.

In his article ‘The abuses of literacy: Amazon Kindle and it’s right to read’ Ted Striphas talks about the e-reader gadget Kindle, one of the many devices that allows readers all over the world (in Kindle’s case, Amazon customers)...

By Steff van Dorp on 03/03/13 1

Now for Some Light Reading: A Bibliofile’s Review of the Sony PRS T2 e-reader

For a long time, I felt an aversion towards e-readers and electronic reading. How could reading from a screen ever top reading from paper? How could one simple, small device triumph over bookshelves crammed with beautiful books? Of course,...

By Ingrid van der Mooren on 03/03/13 Comments Off

What VHS and PDF teach us about the e-book format

Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most well known computer formats in the world. It can be used to read electronic books. PDF is also very interesting because it’s developed into the standard document file. I will...

By Tomas Blansjaar on 03/01/13 Comments Off

From brick-and-mortar to eCommerce… and vice versa

Being able to buy your Ikea sofa online and going to a retail store to get your Google products. It may seem odd when stated like this, but we are seeing more trends of companies making a turn in...

By Leonie Nijenmanting on 03/01/13 Comments Off

Web historiography of MuchMusic.com

“Just as video killed the radio star three decades ago, the Internet has killed music television in the new millennium.” – Greg Quill The Role of Music on MuchMusic.com from 1996 to 2012 Before MTV’s arrival in Canada, the...

By Jolien Siemerink on 11/18/12 Comments Off

Virality through Facebook

Facebook is now more than nine years old and it is very interesting to see what changes Facebook is going through. It started out with Facemash in 2003, developed into thefacebook.com and now we all know it as Facebook....

By Jaimy Quadekker on 11/15/12 Comments Off

The Attractive Symbols of the Web

At the beginning of the twentieth century, photography was considered to be the most neutral expression of optical data (Lupston 1986). This changed the perception and according to the Austrian philosopher, economist and sociologist Otto Neurath this development demanded...

By Lauressa Ford on 11/14/12 1

Passwords – a short film

For the Wildcard Symposium 2012 (WCS12) our group; Lisa Bergenfelz, Vicentiu Dinga, Paula Gulian, Matthew Elworthy and Joseph Jackson chose to interpret and present the theories of Jean Baudrillard brought forward in the book Passwords through a short film...

By Lisa Bergenfelz on 11/02/12 1