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

Is ‘Think Dirty’ Actually Making you Think About your Decisions? How an Easy-way Access to Information could also be Misleading

Think Dirty is an app that encourages consumers to make conscious decisions while buying beauty, personal, and household products to discover whether they contain toxic ingredients. But can we trust this app when it comes to the accuracy of...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Reality Slap Plugin: You Never Know When It Hits You

With the number of Tweets, Facebook statuses, Instagram pictures and Stories many users share on a daily basis, we think it can be exhausting to keep track of the wide-ranging visibility a single post can have. With a public...

By Jason Park on 10/22/18 Comments Off

Flat Genie: Your trusted resource for living in amsterdam

We proudly present FlatGenie.com, a website developed for the New Media Practices project. Flat Genie is a place to find accurate, personal, and easy-to-use information about living in Amsterdam (and soon other cities around the world). There are three...

By Joram Binsbergen on 10/23/13 1

Big Think: The Importance of Yesterday

Archiving online can be a tricky undertaking. On the one hand we can’t get enough of it when it comes to news and scholarly articles or any other form of factual information but on the other hand there...

By Richard Zimerman on 10/19/12 2

Readers as users – an analysis of the guardians website

Considering that we have been publishing in print for more than 500 years, online publishing that has a history not much longer than a decade can only be seen as being in it´s very early stages. Newspapers that has...

By Lisa Bergenfelz on 10/17/12 Comments Off

WikiLeaks or We Keep Leaks?

On the 17th of June in 1972, 5 men got caught while attempting to infiltrate the democratic headquarters located at the Watergate hotel in Washington. Their objective was the placement of electronic listening devices to monitor the meeting hosted...

By Robert Silvis on 09/08/12 1

Mark Changizi – “Cultural selection as the new blind watchmaker” at “I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there”

In his presentation at MOTI‘s “I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there” theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi elaborated on the research method he applies to investigate the field of why it is that the human...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 12/21/11 1

Book review: Programmed Visions by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Wendy Chun’s Programmed Visions book is the third published in a software studies book series initiated by Matthew Fuller. Software studies is a relatively young discipine in digital humanities. Yet, it’s an emerging field, gaining momentum from the overall intrusion...

By Eelke Hermens on 09/26/11 3

Book review: Enfoldment and Infinity by Laura U. Marks

What are the parallels and relations between Islamic art and New Media art? That is the main question Laura U. Marks poses in her book ‘Enfoldment and Infinity. An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art’. The title of her...

By Stijnie Thuijs on 09/21/11 1

Data visualization and story telling

For as long as people have been around, the have used stories to share information, cultural values and experience. Most of the times this is done orally, but even in ancient times, mankind created drawings to visualize their information....

By Joris Pekel on 05/06/11 Comments Off

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...

By Fenneke Mink on 05/04/11 2

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...

By Fenneke Mink on 04/20/11 Comments Off

Commons-based peer produsage? Rethinking online production.

The Internet, and the emergence of Web 2.0 in particular, have been celebrated for their liberatory potential, setting free the individual consumers once bounded by industrial inertia. We only need to take a quick look at the Arctic Monkey’s...

By Lennard Torbijn on 10/31/10 Comments Off

Who do you think you are?

Review: Karin Spaink, Wie is U? Ever had a Déjà vu, the feeling that you have experienced something before? It’s a strange feeling. You can’t exactly explain what it is and where it comes from, but it’s there. You...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 09/15/10 Comments Off

Democracy of the Algorithm

Working on the Society of the Query conference, I often find myself confronted with an unquestioned believe in what are believed to be the empowering or even emancipating qualities of universally accessible open and free information. Michael Stevenson once...

By Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff on 11/03/09 2

‘Useless Content’ – Part 1

‘Wikipedia is not a valid source’. That’s a common critique on the online encyclopedia. Erin Harty from the University of Idaho stresses that the information on Wikipedia doesn’t have any academic background and that it ‘is not really an...

By ellen sluis on 09/22/09 Comments Off

Wikipedia: on the Value of Information and the Concept of Censorship

It’s a fact that people more and more gather information from the internet and other digital sources instead of learning -to master- that information. What will be the long term effects of this development? Does the posibility to search...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 09/20/09 Comments Off

The Building Blocks of Information Visualization

Thursday Christian Behrens and Yuri Engelhardt did a workshop on the Universiteit van Amsterdam on the building blocks of information visualization. Christian Behrens created out of his master thesis on designing pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design,...

By Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff on 10/03/08 Comments Off