Masters of Media

“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 their posts, we should use them as efficiently we can, and seek to discover new potential [...]

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.

The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. (Friedman 2008) Friedman’s definition is simple and concise, yet broad and applicable to any type of visualization. What it fails to provide is what happens after the communication act. Would it be reasonable to say that some data visualizations have [...]

Master students from UvA & maHKU proudly present seven multidisciplinary data visualization projects at SHOW ME THE DATA 2013 This year with three special guest speakers: John Verhoeven, Inspiring Data http://inspiring-data.com/ Arjan Scherpenisse, MiracleThings http://miraclethings.nl Jelle Kamsma, Datajournalist When: March 28, 16:30 – 19:00 Where: UvA, Room OMHP F0.01, Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, 1012CN Amsterdam Documentation on the [...]

Although it has been criticized as being a main cause of the musical industry decline, the online piracy of music files actually appears to help to provide access to legal content, shows a recent study of the European Commission’s research side, Joint Research Centre. The study engaged 16.000 European consumers and comes to show that, [...]

Nonlegal consumption and circulation of content have powerful implications for the sociopolitical changes that are en route to shifting the momentum of production in today’s world. In terms of contemporary art and the effects of freely shared visual information, there has been a widespread proliferation of images due to the Internet. In particular, due to [...]

“WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A COLD WAR BETWEEN THE LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES IN THE INDUSTRY*”, boldly states tech journalist Dieter Bohn in his overview of Apple’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s battling ecosystems [1]. This “war” won’t be won by whoever sells more phones, tablets or computers, though. The tech behemoths are wrestling each other [...]

Thanks to the internet there is a lot of information available, for not much more than the cost of an internet connection. With the access to all that information, we might start to think that all that information is free. In a way it is, of course: it doesn’t cost us money to view the [...]

In my previous blog post I pointed out that free information does not exist, for there’s always someone who has to gather the information, and that person needs to live. It sounds like a way advocate the way things are organized in the publishing industry. Yes, they would say, information is not free and thus [...]

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 their 2010 article “Speculative Visualization: A New Rhetoric for Communicating Public Concerns”. According to these academics, [...]

Isn’t it remarkable that a profile on a social network site is almost always linked to a person that exists in real life? Most profiles are related to someone, some group or something that is palpable. Of course, some people do have more than one profile, due to the wish of not linking private and work, or maybe due to…

Anders set up a Commodore to give us a nice blue and white powerpoint straight from the machines memory. I have been wondering if this was an act of maximum open source or not…
Chipmusic and the 8bit demoscene - Hacking, Open Source and Remixing
Lecture by Goto80 aka Anders Carlsson
http://chipflip.wordpress.com/

demo•|ˈdemō|: noun
A demo is a linear, non-interactive audio-visual presentations that runs in…

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has once again put itself into the eye of the storm. The organization recently released a commercial where we see a child polishing a shoe, a little girl standing on a street corner and a young boy training to become a child soldier. The commercial starts with the line “Children are fast learners” and closes…

Last week an controversial article on the English Wikipedia has been censored by British ISPs. The UK-based IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) blacklisted the article 'Virgin Killer' and the related image as potentially illegal in the United Kingdom. Also the image is not just being blocked but the access to the Wikipedia article itself. In what way is the freedom of speech on the Internet affected here?

A PICNIC Special this year was called ‘Games go Social’ which was about the future of gaming and social networks. An upcoming trend as both industries are evolving is that both can learn a lot from each other and lately the 2 industries have been converging. Gaming companies are adding more and more social features while social networks and virtual…

It seems now that it may be Facebook Connect, and not OpenID, that will lead the data portability movement. Do we trust our online identity to the Facebook corporation, with almost every page on the Internet serving as some extension of the Facebook platform?

IE6 is my grandmother on her deathbed and she just won't die. Her skin is obviously wrinkled and dated, she doesn't have any recollection of the past, and she is sucking the life (and money) out of everyone around her. God, can you please pull the plug!?

6 days ago Lev Manovich released his softbook Software Takes Command. He described his book as a software, as it will have its patches in the same way as a new installments requires its bug (big?) -fixes:
One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary…

The BBC recently broadcasted ’James May’s Big Ideas’. In this sequence of documentaries May, probably best known as anti superhero in ‘Top Gear’, explores in the episode ‘Man-machine‘ some projects on cyborgs, avatars, artificial intelligence and robots. Unfortunately, the episode isn’t available online (yet), but there are some parts of it on Youtube.

Explaining the Asimo robot:

The computerization of our own brain, or mediation of…

On November 28 the event FIFI 2008 is taking place and is being organized by the ISP XS4ALL who celibrates its 15th birthday this year. The event consists about workshops on open-source creativity, FABLAB, Web 3.0 and more. There are three main themes, 'toolbox for the future', 'secured? let yourself hack' and 'privacy: secret or property?' What's the extended valulue if this event is compared to Picnic 08?