Masters of Media

As a former literature student, one might expect me to be on top of all the new, digital developments in the book business that are happening as we speak. Unfortunately I am not. My technical knowledge is quite limited; however I do know something about the literary world, among others that publishers have to catch [...]

Disclaimer: This blog is written by someone who lacks any digital knowledge. Bumping into inaccurate use of terms is a risk you take by reading this blog and I hereby give you the responsibility  of pointing out these errors. (But gently please) Reading equals writing? You are reading this blog I have written. Which means [...]

Although I’m only 25 years old, I sometimes feel like I should join my 80-years-old uncle Wim. He lives in a peacefull retirement house called Aar en Amstel, which means as much as ear of corn by the river the Amstel. Namely: contrary to most people my age I don’t own a smart phone, a [...]

With the dominating presence of smartphone and tablet technologies within todays current market, it is clear to see why major comic book publishers have placed large amounts of focus and resources into the digital publishing frontier. Both interactive elements placed within digital comics themselves, and the eulogised benefit of being able to hold an innumerable [...]

Amazon’s Kindle has become somewhat of an industry leader for digital books or e-book consumption. With millions of digital books selling through the single platform reader as well as garnering a general mainstream acceptance, there is a growing concern over the misuse or misrepresentation of certain books being purchased by consumers. Recently popular books such [...]

The meaning of art has been questioned many times. In my opinion the main function of literature is its ability to entertain the reader while letting him reflect and think deeper about life. Appealing to influential literature historians, literature has had this function for ages. Unfortunately modern world is about to put an end to [...]

.ibooks is Apple’s proprietary ebook format based on the EPUB standard, created with the free iBook Author layout software for publishing ebooks. Due to some dissimilarities between CSS tags used in the iBooks format file, it isn’t compatible with the EPUB open standard. Distribution and selling of ebooks generated using iBooks Author and thus, .ibook [...]

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 start to become attainable when the focus moves to personal data. In this particular domain, the [...]

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 a way that the viewer can explore and understand it. Transforming data to symbols causes us [...]

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 familiar with the subject visualised would gain interest and more importantly, understanding. Data extracted from a number of different topics is visualised for [...]

“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 2013. Big data has a very broad definition, but you can describe it as the information [...]

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 as next generation thanks to its ability to compete with the ePUB3 interactive books format employed [...]

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 Card as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition” (7). [...]

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 of time if you try to find out manually. However, there are appearing more applications and [...]

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 are odd in a self-evident way, but, rather, that they exist. Obviously, something has to have [...]

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 90’s it is possible to publish scholarly articles online, so that the information and research are [...]

Every time I want to access a scholarly article I need to enter my university password and when I want to make a source available for others – as in this blog – it is almost never possible. I love it when an article or a book is published directly on the internet. No passwords [...]

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 Academic Search Complete), you find exactly the kind of article you were looking for. You click [...]

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 you didn’t even know it existed two seconds ago? Maybe you’ll love it!’. To tell you [...]

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 are behind the discoveries of the wonders of technology and science and we owe the world [...]