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Where should I live? Visualizing well-being in different countries

Where should I live? Visualizing well-being in different countries

  Raw data on its own does not contain much meaning. It presents values of quantitative or qualitative variables that are results of measurements and computations. Data needs some context so that it can be analyzed and visualized in...
The Not-So-Functional Art: Putting Information Visualisation Back Into Context

The Not-So-Functional Art: Putting Information Visualisation Back Into Context

“It’s always been a tricky balance between getting the story across, and making a great image. But thanks to some serious computing power, we’ve arrived at a crunch point. In one corner of the ring is information, and in...
Visualizing Our Global Mood 140 Characters at a Time

Visualizing Our Global Mood 140 Characters at a Time

“We need a new way to convey information, a method which is simple to teach and to learn, and at the same time comprehensive and exact. What I might call ‘consistent visualization’ is such a way.“ These are the...

Open-access journals: First Monday leads by example

At a time when publishers, academics and libraries are struggling to navigate a new publishing landscape, some are turning to Internet scholars to lead the way. First Monday is “one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet,...

“The Transformation of Publishing Has Already Occurred…”

 ‘ … what is left is the playing out of this transformation in all its complexity.’ (Murphie, 2008)   Asked this week to contribute to the debate surrounding what is at stake in the production of open knowledge, I...
iTunes U – one billion downloads of open knowledge

iTunes U – one billion downloads of open knowledge

One billion is a solid number. That’s the amount of downloads Apple’s iTunes U has collected as of late February 2013, as specified by their press statement. Released in 2007, just before the first iPhone, it provides free educational...
Open Access; The Predicament of Learned Societies

Open Access; The Predicament of Learned Societies

Within academia, learned societies represent the pinnacle of higher educational study within their respective fields. Producing and compiling the works and research methods of the finest minds society has to offer, learned societies provide the finest examples of contemporary...

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...
Open Knowledge and Visual Information

Open Knowledge and Visual Information

Open knowledge takes root What exactly is at stake with the advent of open knowledge and widely shared information? Let’s take ourselves back just over a decade to a time in which information and especially creative information was being...
Academia.edu: Social Networking Meets Open Access Publishing

Academia.edu: Social Networking Meets Open Access Publishing

Scholars are the driving force behind the scientific and social progress of humanity. Even though this statement sounds very grandiose, it is not untrue.The “makers of knowledge” have been throughout the centuries the most revered, respected social castе. They...

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...
Some Thoughts on Credulous Readers and Open Access

Some Thoughts on Credulous Readers and Open Access

One of the advantages of open-access publishing is that it increases the visibility of science literature. Since the articles are free of charge, and therefore very easily accessible, many (non) academic readers around the globe can profit from them. What...
The Rise of an Open Access Culture

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...
How Open Knowledge can make and break us

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...
Wikipedia: everybody is an expert

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...
Written to be Read: How Elsevier was Stopped from Impoverishing Academia

Written to be Read: How Elsevier was Stopped from Impoverishing Academia

Imagine: you’re looking for some background literature on your thesis subject in an online academic database. Browsing a multidisciplinary scholarly archive, that allows you to search through several academic archives and journals all at once (like JSTOR or EBSCO...

The Green Model: a Business Model for Open Access Content

In Alaska, it is illegal to give beer to a moose, even if it is a light beer. In Alabama, it is illegal to drive while blindfolded. What I find interesting about these laws is not necessarily that they...
The Quantified Self & Big Data: causing a new turn in science?

The Quantified Self & Big Data: causing a new turn in science?

How much time do you spend on Facebook? How many of your friends are living in Amsterdam? What is the best time to wake up in the morning? These questions are hard to answer and can take a lot...
Im .mobi lize: Addressing Amazon’s Platform Fragmentation

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...
What to do with all that big data?

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...
Information visualization within Web 2.0: Google Flu Trends and Foursquare

Information visualization within Web 2.0: Google Flu Trends and Foursquare

Every day, users on the Web generate large amounts of data. At the same time it seems that the use of information visualization has increased with the rise of Web 2.0. The term information visualization is defined by Stuart...

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...
Visualizing Emotions: Turning ‘Dry’ Data Into Stories

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...
Big data, long data and… ephemeral data?

Big data, long data and… ephemeral data?

Currently the topic of data is mostly approached in terms of volume and temporal scope – a perspective translated in expressions such as “big data” and “long data”. Nevertheless, these terms are somehow abstract to most users and only...