Visualizing individual measures of emotion
Personal monitoring is becoming increasingly present in many of our daily routines as a conscious and voluntary choice. If you are an outdoor fitness enthusiastic, then you are probably aware of how many miles you ran last month and...
Improving your game performance with data visualization
Nowadays, more and more game producers release video games on digital distribution platforms. Besides the increase in digital distribution of game content, these platforms and game developers offer gamers an experience out of a gameplay environment. For instance, these...
The language of dynamic and interactive graphics
This blog post explores if and how the framework for the analysis of static graphics offered by Yuri Engelhardt in his PhD thesis, The language of graphics: A framework for the analysis of syntax and meaning in maps, charts...
Analyzing Information Visualization Projects on the Topic of Economic Inequality
The current paper focuses on information visualization projects related to the topic of economic inequality which can, in this particular case, be more specifically categorized under “speculative visualization” as defined by the authors Tanyoung Kim and Carl DiSalvo in...
The evil publishers and the worlds knowledge
In my previous blog post I pointed out that free information does not exist, for there’s always someone who has to gather the information, and that person needs to live. It sounds like a way advocate the way things...
The price of information
Thanks to the internet there is a lot of information available, for not much more than the cost of an internet connection. With the access to all that information, we might start to think that all that information is...
The Issues of Winning The Ecosystem War
“WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A COLD WAR BETWEEN THE LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES IN THE INDUSTRY*”, boldly states tech journalist Dieter Bohn in his overview of Apple’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s battling ecosystems . This “war” won’t be won...
Collage, Internet and the freedom of images
Nonlegal consumption and circulation of content have powerful implications for the sociopolitical changes that are en route to shifting the momentum of production in today’s world. In terms of contemporary art and the effects of freely shared visual information,...
European Commission: online piracy helps music sales
Although it has been criticized as being a main cause of the musical industry decline, the online piracy of music files actually appears to help to provide access to legal content, shows a recent study of the European Commission’s...
Show Me the Data 2013
Master students from UvA & maHKU proudly present seven multidisciplinary data visualization projects at SHOW ME THE DATA 2013 This year with three special guest speakers: John Verhoeven, Inspiring Data http://inspiring-data.com/ Arjan Scherpenisse, MiracleThings http://miraclethings.nl Jelle Kamsma, Datajournalist When: March...
What is data visualization’s goal? NGOs and real impact
The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. (Friedman 2008) Friedman’s definition is simple and concise, yet broad and applicable to any type of visualization. What it fails to provide is what...
“Color is difficult”
Color in information visualization is difficult because of the way our brains work, how we perceive color and cultural factors. But rather than discouraging to use color, this blogpost is for overcoming these difficulties and to deploy color intelligently.
Visual (for) thought: why data visualization should be used more in the classroom?
“Data is the new oil? No: Data is the new soil.”- David McCandless, TEDGlobal, 2010 Whatever data is, one thing is sure: we cannot overlook them. Since we live in the Big Data era,as Jaimy and Ana analyze in...
Mapping the Web
By zooming in and out, you navigate through the digital Pompeii of millions of abandoned homepages. While you pass the neighbourhood called ‘Pentagon’, you see military images and short stories about the army. By entering another district named ‘Vienna’,...
‘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...
Focusing on the future: Visualise the ‘tsunami of data’
If journalism is to die, at least it dies in a better shape. By help of interactive visualizations, journalists have new means to tell stories and build context around them. It is already a few years since data journalism...
Tracking a nations mood through Twitter: visualizing how you feel
There has been a shift from static to dynamic information visualization. Lately, information visualizations are being created by user generated input. Datasets can be created by scraping Twitter for certain keywords. The project “Pulse of the Nation” has visualized...
Piracy: A Desire, Promise, and Threat.
Today marks the tenth and final day of the Austin based multimedia festival South By Southwest. Running for more than 25 years, the festival is renowned for it’s huge number of performing artists, variety in content (from music, to...
Piracy in the Gaming Industry; Consumers at a Loss
Piracy has been both a key aspect and influencer of the video gaming industry ever seen its conception. It has affected the way in which games are perceived, played, made, and the way in which they are sold....
Piracy was my shot at equality
Piracy is not theft, let’s make this perfectly clear. Theft, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English, is “the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it”. Piracy, on the other hand, is...
Is piracy democratising education?
Piracy, be it of software, music or books, is rarely spoken of in a positive light (Liang 356). Governments and organisations around the world are scrambling to stop copyright infringement from eating into profits. My relationship with piracy started...
Leave the consumer out of it!
When watching the documentariesTPB AFK: The Pirate Bay, Away From Keyboard about a large lawsuit against The Pirate Bay and Google and the World Brain about Google’s plan to scan and publish every book ever made online in the...
P2P – Pirate to Pirate
You know that feeling when you’re in a candy store? Surrounded by mountains of chocolate, clouds of cotton candy and fountains of chocolate, the temptation becomes too much to bear. So what do you do? That’s right, when no...