Masters of Media

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...

By Charlotte on 03/13/13 Comments Off

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...

By Mathias Schuh on 03/13/13 2

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...

By Robert Silvis on 03/13/13 1

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,...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 03/13/13 Comments Off

“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...

By Matthew Elworthy on 03/13/13 Comments Off

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...

By Vicentiu Dinga on 03/12/13 Comments Off

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...

By Joseph Jackson on 03/12/13 Comments Off

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...

By Myrthe Bösensell on 03/11/13 Comments Off

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...

By Geoff Kim on 03/11/13 Comments Off

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...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/11/13 Comments Off

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...

By Marijke van Leeuwen on 03/10/13 1

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...

By Doris Zevenbergen on 03/10/13 Comments Off

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...

By Monika van Dijke on 03/10/13 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

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...

By Steff van Dorp on 03/10/13 Comments Off

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...

By Ingrid van der Mooren on 03/10/13 Comments Off

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...

By Crispijn Sleeboom on 03/09/13 Comments Off

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...

By Serena Westra on 03/08/13 1

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...

By Matthew Elworthy on 03/07/13 Comments Off