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

App Review: Flitsers.mobi

Are you tired of all those fines in your mailbox because your speed was too high? Are you again surprised by another sneaky hidden speed camera? Those times could belong to the past since the app Flitsers.mobi released in...

By Erik van Mastrigt on 10/08/11 1

Interview with Arkadiy Kukarkin, developer at the Hype Machine

How about an introduction: *Scroll down for the interview! The Hype Machine is a website that keeps track of what music bloggers post on their blogs. A selection of blogs are selected by the makers of the website. The...

By Clément Adam on 11/02/11 Comments Off

Visualizing Emotions: Turning ‘Dry’ Data Into Stories

The best data visualizations are the ones that tell you a story. A good data visualization has the ability to show you something that you wouldn’t have seen by only looking at the data, it presents the data in...

By Lydia van der Spek on 03/06/13 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

FRAND

The research that I did for my bachelor thesis (‘FRANDS. Who are they and what do they do?‘), focused on the so called ‘frand community’. In this first blog post of mine, I would like to introduce the concept...

By M. van Helvert on 09/12/13 Comments Off

Cinemetrics: Creative Ways to Measure and Visualize Movie Data

Visualizations with meta data from movies is nothing new, however those mostly depict available data sets about movies’ budgets, box office and their awards. Only recently designers and film historians with the help of media visualization techniques and tools...

By Katja Viarshynina on 04/03/14 Comments Off

Encountr: Sharing Experiences in a Media City

With the ubiquitous presence of new media in our urban environments, we can refer to the context that we live in as The Media City. Taking this concept as a main element in our research, our approach has been...

By Talía Cu on 10/21/16 Comments Off

Painting your password on your face: Apple´s new Face ID and its implications on the security of its users.

On the 12th of September, Apple launched their new flagship model, the iPhone X. As usual, it was either met with oohs and aahs, or it was met with cynicism. This article will not focus on the price, design...

By Jimi Cornelisse on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Uber, uber bad.

It seems that Uber, the global transportation technology company, is having issues with keeping itself out of trouble. Last year, Uber agreed to pay a fine of 20,000 USD as well as adopting a more stringent privacy practice after...

By Jessie Jashithra Assokan on 11/29/17 Comments Off

Qutoutiao: Make Digital Reading More “Valuable”

With 48.8 million “employees”，Qutoutiao Inc. (means “fun headlines”), a two-year old mobile-news company becomes one of the biggest news and video aggregator in China. Being available at application stores since Jun. 2016, the number of Qutoutiao’s users has witnessed...

By Jueling Hu on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

The Age of AR Augmented Reality (AR) is set to be the next big step in computing, and experts are predicting a big growth of the AR sector, estimating it at around 140 billion Euros worth by 2024. Many of...

By Max Rogall on 10/23/18 Comments Off

What Does a Feminist Approach to Deepfake Pornography Look Like?

Ida Raffaghello (11903341), Laura Kastalio (12768537), Sanne Kalf (11290196) and Erinne Paisley (12516325)Word count: 2749 Introduction This project focuses on the research question: What does a feminist approach to deepfake pornography look like? Deepfake’s have their historical roots in...

By Sanne Kalf on 10/24/19 Comments Off

Running for Research

Contextualizing Research Based on Strava Metro Data In December 2020, the exercise tracking service Strava released their annual data report, confirming in numbers that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed people’s workout habits. Forced to spend more time at home,...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

Reflections on the application of big data: Is big data omnipotent? Do not superstitious about big data!

IBM defines big data as a term applied to data sets whose size or type is beyond the ability of traditional relational database to capture, manage and process the data with low latency and characteristics of big data include...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

My Fitness Pal; the power of search engines and world building

Jasmin Figure 1 In 2021, the Fitness market (estimated by The Wellbeing Creative Co.) was valued at $96.7 bn. This calls into question for us as media scholars; how does the fitness market manifest and present itself within the...

By on 10/08/21 Comments Off

Fighting Fire with Fire: Can AI Prevent Calamitous Misuse of Deepfake?

Members: Neelesh Vasistha — neelesh.vasistha@student.uva.nl Sarah Burkhardt — sarah.burkhardt@student.uva.nl Wen Li — wen.li@student.uva.nl Sofia Rastelli — sofia.rastelli@student.uva.nl It is late evening on November 2nd, the night before U.S citizens will vote in a pivotal election. You’re sitting at home,...

By Neelesh Vasistha on 10/16/20 Comments Off

Health QR code (system): reasonable data collection or tracking surveillance under the fantasy of Big Data?

Health Code, a personal QR code created by the government of Hangzhou in cooperation with mobile giant Alipay and designed for collecting and controlling the covid-19 cases, was initially launched in Hangzhou on February 11th, 2020 and was widely...

By Li Shen on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Picturing visual search technology

Visual Search affords searching with images instead of words. How is this computer vision kind of technology used? Applications range from marketing, to car parts and health care. Debate arises on security and privacy issues.

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Fansub apocalypse: How copyright protection laws deprive Chinese fans from accessing non-Chinese content

Chan Ji, Adam Kouki, Linxin Liu Keywords: #Fansub#人人影视#Chinacensorship#Streaming In February 2021, the Chinese government cracked down on Renren—a platform that provides more than 8 million users with community produced subtitled versions of foreign films and TV-shows (hereafter: fansubs). The...

By Linxin Liu on 10/29/21 Comments Off

Framing AlphaZero: An infrastructural approach to A.I.

Man V.S. Machine It was in May 1997 when world champion chess player Garri Kasparov lost the now infamous chess match to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Deep Blue was considered the first artificial intelligence program to win a chess...

By on 09/23/19 Comments Off

Recognition: looking through a mediated lens

“Can a machine make us look afresh at great art through the lens of today’s world?” (Tate). This is a question art institution Tate Britain poses about their online program Recognition, launched two weeks ago. This program uses Artificial Intelligence (AI)...

By Rianne Riemens on 09/21/16 Comments Off

Interactive music videos

Its feels like yesterday. Me as a teenager watching MTV in my room all day long. But even more , I remember how frustrated I felt that I couldn’t see my favourite videos whenever I wanted. Not to mention...

By Anne van Egmond on 09/08/14 Comments Off

Website defacement and the ethos of the unknown

Website defacement (along with practices like distributed denial of service attacks and password cracking) is one of the most frequently deployed methods used by hackers. Perhaps the most infamous example of this practice is the defacing of the PayPal...

By Jakko Kemper on 09/12/13 Comments Off

Interactivity in the Online Graphics of The New York Times and The Guardian

Almost every story a journalist writes contains the five W’s: who, what, where, why, when. However, in the last two decades the journalistic profession and it’s employer were forced to make some new transformations. These changes have been caused...

By Marije Rooze on 05/06/11 2