Masters of Media

“Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” This is what the [...]

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 be, because now in the internet era discussions about scientific open access platforms are more and [...]

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 longer texts to different people. Since then, technology has progressed and has become indispensible. Journal articles [...]

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 research publications, the best discounts on package holidays, mortgage advice, airport parking, cinema admissions, car servicing, [...]

Open Access in the scholarly world has a lot of advantages. Steyaert et. al discuss them all in this article. Briefly the advantages are: a more easier access to research publications, a faster publication process and a broader public. On top of that these benefits increase the chance on a higher citation ratio. There are [...]

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 aggressively debated both in the public sphere as well as in the Supreme Court of the [...]

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 a generous idea. Great. My ‘only’ concern is that the average online reader is far too [...]

We live in a knowledge economy these days, which means that economic growth for a big part is the result of the knowledge we have. Our economy has shifted its focus from agriculture to industry, and now it is moving towards services, based on knowledge. At least that’s what Wikipedia says. Usually this is a [...]

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 as stated by Kathleen Fitzgerald in “Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of [...]

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 content from universities, libraries, museums and other institutions from more than 30 different countries that allow [...]

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 research publications, the best discounts on package holidays, mortgage advice, airport parking, cinema admissions, car servicing, [...]

 ‘ … 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 was instantly reminded of a news article from the BBC, that demonstrated how high the stakes [...]

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, solely devoted to the Internet.” Created in Denmark in 1995, First Monday has grown into a [...]

“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 words of the Australian philosopher Otto Neurath who already underlined the importance of visual impressions for [...]

“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 the other is art, and they’ve been slugging it out.” Three years ago, in a blog [...]

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 it is maybe inappropriate to refer to them as data visualizations, and maybe the term fact [...]

When it comes to the aesthetic aspect of data visualizations, many times I feel like a nine year old girl (which is very strange) in a candy store who is blinded by all the pretty colors and shapes. Yes indeed, this example might not be the ideal way to start a critical approach on any object [...]

  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 order to become meaningful, or in other words: to become information. In that way, data can [...]

“In today’s digitally connected world, data is everywhere: in our phones, search queries, friendships, dating profiles, cars, food, reading habits. Almost everything we touch is part of a larger data set.” -Nick Bilton By now, this statement is a cliché. Data is in use all around us–from academic institutions to corporations to the military–and its [...]

  “In today’s digitally connected world, data is everywhere: in our phones, search queries, friendships, dating profiles, cars, food, reading habits. Almost everything we touch is part of a larger data set.” -Nick Bilton By now, this statement is a cliché. Data is in use all around us–from academic institutions to corporations to the military–and [...]