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

Tracking the Stars: Co-star and the Creation of the Digital Celestial

Ayoub Samadi Introduction A centuries old practice clad in contemporary systems of information processing. For millenia, astrology has been engulfed in the depths of time and rationality and has not only until recently began to regain the reverence it...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

Data Visualization: A Case Study of Information is Beautiful Awards

By Qianyu Feng, Dania Awin, Marta Espuny, Kirsten Hartman Intro & conceptualization. Living in a data-driven world, data visualization is becoming more and more relevant. Developed from scientific visualization, information visualization gained its popularity in the 2000s with the...

By Marta Espuny on 10/24/19 Comments Off

Too long; Didn´t watch

We all know the feeling – there are just not enough hours in the day to attend to all the interesting things out there. There might now be a solution for at least one aspect of the dilemma, a solution, that people...

By Alina Niemann on 09/16/15 Comments Off

Nothing to Represent Something

On the 6th of September 2014 the conference “Visualise it!” took place in Utrecht. One of the speakers was Andy Kirk, his presentation ‘The Design of Nothing‘ focused on the question: ‘what...

By Dominique Verschragen on 09/11/14 Comments Off

Tangible Data Visualizations

We live in a world of three dimensions (alright 4, and a spattering of more depending on which school of quantum theory you adhere to). However, when it comes to visualizing data, the results are surprisingly 2-dimensional, and mostly...

By Philip Anderson on 04/22/14 1

Data visualizations in popular Dutch media

EVERY TWO DAYS WE CREATE as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That is something like five exabytes of data: 5.000.000.000.000.000.000 bytes. It is no surprise...

By M. van Helvert on 04/17/14 1

Data visualization: New professionals in demand

Data is the biggest change in the digital society that appeared during the era of the Internet and technologies. Information is exploding: 90% of the world’s data was generated over last two years. Data visualization and analytic view makes possible...

By Indre Lauciute on 04/16/14 Comments Off

The distinct disciplines of infographics and information visualisations

Within the data visualisation community there is in general a strong premise that infographics and information visualisation are two distinct disciplines. Infographics present information as statistical charts, maps, and diagrams which are often annotated with text and beautified with...

By Joram Binsbergen on 04/16/14 6

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

#IC14NL: Selfiecity

The 7th Infographic Conference took place last month on March 7th and featured Selfiecity, a collaborative project led by Lev Manovich and the Software Studies Initiative that was presented to the audience by fellow team member Mortiz Stefaner. Launched in...

By Nicholas Vieira on 04/11/14 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

The Innocence of Infographics

Interactive infographics are becoming a major trend in data visualization. Infographics are a relatively new way to simplify complex stories, data and findings. They can be very useful in organizing a large amount of information in an easy...

By Sander van Haren on 10/08/13 Comments Off

Using open data to analyse patterns

In the last few years data has become more and more important. Government agencies and commercial companies create and collect a lot of data. On the internet users are increasingly generating data through clicks, likes and other metrics such...

By Joram Binsbergen on 09/11/13 Comments Off

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...

By Lucas Reehorst on 05/27/13 1

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...

By Ana Crisostomo on 05/04/13 1

“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.

By Alain on 03/21/13 Comments Off

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...

By Eva Anagnostaki on 03/20/13 Comments Off

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’,...

By Katía Truijen on 03/20/13 Comments Off

‘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...

By Ineke Scheffers on 03/20/13 Comments Off

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...

By Alex Maat on 03/20/13 1

Making Visible the Invisible: Information Visualization Through a Fine Art Lens

“Big Data will replace ideas, paradigms, organizations and ways of thinking about the world.” –Steve Lohr It is difficult to mention the present-day ubiquity of data without resorting to clichés. We are frequently reminded that data is in use...

By Maya Livio on 03/14/13 Comments Off

Does Form Ever Follow Function?

I was lucky enough to attend to the Infographic Congress, in Zeist, on March 1st 2013. Dedicated to data visualization, this congress featured numerous speakers whom all presented data visualizations. Some of these graphic works were so old that...

By Jules Mataly on 03/14/13 Comments Off

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

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