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Data Journalism in the Netherlands

Tuesday the 6th of December 2011. Trending topic on Twitter is #nederlandvanboven. Non-Dutch users are confused, what is this hashtag so many people are tweeting about? It is the television documentary Nederland van Boven (the Netherlands from above), inspired...

By Annet Bos on 03/20/12 Comments Off

Open data? We need to speed up!

Europe is ‘sitting’ on a supply that has a potential market value of billions of Euro, that could encourage new innovations, and that could increase the transparency and governance of public life. That resource is the data held by...

By Natalia Miszczak on 03/26/12 Comments Off

Data Visualization Templates

Templates are ready-made project files that can be customized and used as the basis for various types of media content. In the world of graphic design, web design and motion graphic design, the use of templates is widely spread....

By Jorrit Schaap on 07/03/12 Comments Off

The effect of new media in teaching music

A thirteen-year-old child walks into the music classroom and recommends the guitar teacher a song of an independent, French punk band. The teacher listens to the song on YouTube and concludes that it is a bit too fast. The...

By Jeroen Rademakers on 09/13/12 Comments Off

WikiLeaks or We Keep Leaks?

On the 17th of June in 1972, 5 men got caught while attempting to infiltrate the democratic headquarters located at the Watergate hotel in Washington. Their objective was the placement of electronic listening devices to monitor the meeting hosted...

By Robert Silvis on 09/08/12 1

Soundcheck: Independent Bands in the Age of Online Music Marketing

Ever since “digitization” took over “globalization” as the biggest phenomenon in the modern world, there’s very little that remains inaccessible – art, dance, films, world news, sports, music and what will you – everything is usually not more than...

By Audrika Rakshit on 09/09/12 Comments Off

Design your own reality with Stiktu

Recently, Dutch software-firm Layar introduced Stiktu, an application that lets users be creative with augmented reality. The app runs on iPhone and Android platforms and aims to be the next best thing in social media, blurring the boundaries between...

By Robert Silvis on 10/05/12 2

Analyzing “new media” job postings in The Netherlands

The New Media and Digital Culture MA at the UvA attracts a significant number of international students to Amsterdam every year since its initial academic year in 2006. Assuming that some of these students would like to pursue a...

By Ana Crisostomo on 10/13/12 Comments Off

iPhone 5: The Ultimate User Review

Device reviews are not really the subject of choice on this blog. However, measuring the general sentiment on social networks towards a certain gadget can be quite insightful. In this post I will be examining the iPhone 5 through...

By Bozhan Chipev on 10/18/12 Comments Off

The End of the Golden Rule

Capitalism in Cyberspace In February 1996 the American political activist John Perry Barlow published his political web manifest ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. This declaration of independence was directed at all the governments of the industrial world and...

By Lauressa Ford on 10/15/12 Comments Off

Twitter Chatter and Stock Market Trends

Social media as trend indicators It is not uncommon that when “social media networks” are mentioned, the most common associations among people are with platforms that promote interaction with, and sharing and exchange of user-generated content. With its exponential...

By Audrika Rakshit on 10/15/12 2

Interview: Laurentiu Pop (HTTPool) on Digital Advertising

Laurentiu Pop is Managing Director for HTTPool Romania (part of the HTTPool Worldwide network) and has been passionate about digital for nine years. He started as a junior ARBOmedia, one of the biggest adnetworks in the country. Then he...

By Diana Necula on 10/17/12 Comments Off

The Prosecution of Jokes on Social Media: Lets Ask the Audience.

Last week a 19 year old man from Lancashire in the UK was found guilty of section 127 of the Communications Act; a British law which makes it an offence to send any message that would be considered ‘grossly...

By Matthew Elworthy on 10/16/12 1

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

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...

By Mihaela Naftanaila on 03/20/13 Comments Off

The digitalisation of hobby warfare

This year, hobby war gaming celebrated its 100th birthday. Created by H.G. Wells in 1913, it evolved into many different gaming systems, set in different realities. In this article I shall focus on one of the most popular tabletop...

By Jakub Dutka on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Reputation Economy: Digital behavior and data as a benchmark for e-trust

As Alison Hearn argues in her article, many different user activities such as Blogging, ‘Facebooking’, posting videos on YouTube, writing (informational) reviews and rating services or products are considered as a contribution to the development of the digital public...

By Serkan Yildizeli on 09/11/13 1

Listen to This: Don’t Miss the Sound to Convey Data!

Aristotle wrote in his work Metaphysics that sight is man’s most significant sense. “We understand because we see”, Alberto Cairo similarly states in his book The functional Art. Philosophy has tried to understand sight and the relation between images and human perception since the beginning...

By Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez on 04/15/14 Comments Off

KEEP CALM and USE COMPANION APP?!

An innovative app that accompanies you with safety back home. Five students from the University of Michigan designed a GPS application, named Companion App. This new app allows your contacts from your smartphone to accompany you virtually when you...

By Aliki Eleftheriadou on 09/14/15 Comments Off

Poem Viewer: Towards a new “view” on poetry

“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words”. Paul Engle The word poem, derived from the Greek word...

By Maria Charitou on 09/14/15 Comments Off

Women and Soccer Do Go Together – EA Sports FIFA 16

I’m no soccer fan, I actually belong to that group of people that is only into soccer during the World Cup, however as I crossed to the headline of arstechina.com “The tech that’s putting women in EA’s FIFA games...

By Ana Garza Ochoa on 09/15/15 1

Facebook’s new virtual assistant ‘M’: mastermind or menace?

Facebook recently introduced the world to ‘M’, its brand new virtual assistant that will reside in Facebook’s messaging app. Will, because for now, the new application is still in its test phase. Nonetheless, this rather unexpected move of Facebook...

By Lianne Kersten on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Semantic Search Servants: Facebook’s M and the new way of searching the web

“You think I’m weird?” “Kind of.” “Why?” “Well, you seem like a person but you’re just a voice in a computer.” – Theodore meets his new virtual assistant, whom he later falls in love with (Jonze, Her). Facebook M...

By Elias Gorter on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Is This Legal?

The Is This Legal? smartphone app. provides users with easily accessible and transparent information about legal systems they are subject to in their current, geotagged location – complicating users’ readings of foreign national identities. ITL’s concept arose from brainstorming,...

By Richa Watts on 10/15/15 Comments Off