Shazam: predicting future hits
Have you ever listened to a song and almost died trying to find out the name of the song? Then Shazam is going to be your best friend. Shazam is a music recognition app that was launched in 2002....
Artificial Intelligence: an objective method for measuring beauty?
Last August, a team of biogerontologists and data scientists, organised the First International Beauty Contest Judged by Artificial Intelligence ever: Beauty.AI (Beauty.AI). With the support of major (tech)companies, like EY, NVidia and Microsoft, a team of scientist developed various...
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...
Towards a methodology for Web-based investigative reporting
This article discusses the implementation of new online methods in the field of investigative journalism. The development and nature of investigative reporting are shortly discussed before turning to the ways Internet research is conducted in the field of new...
Is micro blogging the future for writers?
Micro blogging gained a lot of success over the past few years. With the arrival of web 2.0 there was a need for a new form of writing. Long articles and ongoing features were not what people wanted anymore....
Digital text and Language Learning
The replacement of printed text by digital text might strike us as another carefully manufactured revolution, but those who have had a lifelong use of communications and media technologies surrounding them might not be as intimidated by this transition...
Scientific referencing and hypertext: The necessity of a visual overview
This entry is meant as an introduction to the tool my group and I are developing for our Datavisualisation class. We will be trying to geographically map the rise and diffusion of different research fields over time. The reason...
EcoScanner: Self-tracking Sustainability
Piloting the EcoScanner: A Self-tracking Solution to Sustainability Annika Heinemeyer, Daniel Jurg, Molly Doell, Ziwen Tang Abstract Modern consumers are using apps to track all types of behavior (sleep, running, eating etc.). But while there are some...
Free as in ‘labor’, not as in ‘movement’: Google’s Local Guides and Gamifying Digital Maps
In the past few years, tourism has hit an all-time high across the globe. With decreasing costs of transportation and travel, more and more countries are seeing unprecedented numbers of visitors. By May 2018, Turkey had received 11.8 million tourists,...
Amazon: Bigger data are not always better data?
Most new media studies focus on the giants of the web, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter. They are specialized in search engines and social media and have accumulated tremendous data assets among their business. Boyd & Crawford (2012)...
Reflections on Genealogy Data in the Era of Dataveillance
Living in a highly digitally mediated world, it is of crucial importance to critically consider the issues of Bid Data. The rapid ongoing process of datafication, where most of the social reality is transformed into quantifiable pieces of information,...
How to Study Shadow Curators? Biases in the YouTube Algorithm
It is getting harder to pinpoint the interferences when it comes to our experience in digital media. We are constantly living under the flood of content the internet has to offer, never really realizing that our choices are being...
Facial ID scanning: An advertisers’ dream, or a consumers’ nightmare?
A couple of weeks ago, a traveler noticed a camera in one of the digital advertising screens at a train station in the Netherlands. A photo of this ‘hidden’ camera was then posted on Twitter, questioning the purpose of these...
Ask the masters: “Does the word “commonism” already exist? -Internet and Google search advice
-At the bottom of this post, you can find interesting links which explain the meaning of commonism- We have received a question from Mieke Gerritsen, who has made a beautiful graphic design with the word “Commonism” on it. She...
Ask the masters: Top down = control & bottom-up = action?
Anthony Townsend argues in his essay ‘Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City‘ that the technology of context-aware computing (of which locative media is a part): will be characterized by an interplay between top-down systems for command and control and...
Kick off! Mediamatic RFID & Physical Computing Hackers Camp @ Picnic 07
RFID Hackers Camp kicks off at Westergasfabriek, the PICNIC 07 location. With a group of great hackers, designers and engineers the camp aims to bring together creativity, knowledge, and skills from various fields and disciplines to realize innovative and...
Hello Twitter! “I have forgotten my umbrella”
A good chance that while browsing through the endless database of Twitter one could come across a line like this: "I have forgotten my umbrella"...in fact you will. The expression of mundane or day to day activities and thoughts...
Moving Movie Industry Conference
Introduction Friday October 31 the –free- Moving Movie Industry Conference organized by the Stifo@Sandberg took place at the theater in the Public Library in Amsterdam. It was a full days program with different speakers around the theme of how...
The universal library of enhanced e-books
Kevin Kelly explains in his article Scan this book! a future in which it is possible to create a universal library. In this library all the existing books should be present in a digital form. For a long time...
IDFA: Doc Lab Live Screenings or the Googlization of Cinema?
Doc Lab programmer Caspar Sonnen explains he is focused on “finding ways to reach an audience bigger than just new-media experts… the point is that there are great stories emerging online and we have to show them!” This seems...
Virtueel Platform at PICNIC 2010: HOT and NOT
I can call myself HOT officially since last Thursday the 23th. Attending PICNIC 2010 with 99 fellow HOT-students is a hot experience indeed. Packed in a decorated marquee, listening to Sebastian Chan who is currently the Head of Digital,...
The Invention of the Century: Privacy
Privacy is considered to be an important issue for it is not just a social structure within a community, which can be regulated by social control anymore. It has developed to a dialectic notion of widespread surveillance activities within...
Visualizing Scientific Research Collaboration: A Review of the Beauchesne-Map
Introduction In recent years there has been an increase in interest for international scientific collaboration (Luukkonen, 1993, Ponds, 2008), but the phenomenon is anything but recent: the first signs of it where seen in the nineteenth century (Luukkonen, 1993:...