Masters of Media

De Balie’s Electrosmog festival this week argues that in the age of hypermobility, staying put can be a tactic of sustainability in itself. The festival self-consciously explores the ways we might reduce our carbon footprint by substituting technology for physical presence. Implementing a ‘no fly’ rule, the festival links panelists and performers around the world via live internet stream or, for…

This article discusses the implementation of new online methods in the field of investigative journalism. The development and nature of investigative reporting are shortly discussed before turning to the ways Internet research is conducted in the field of new media. By describing a number of distinct steps this article tries to sketch the contours of a methodology for this type of reporting in which strategies as well as responsibilities of investigative reporters doing Internet research are discussed. This is also the subject of my thesis so all feedback is more than welcome.

Bill Gates is to new media as Rupert Murdoch is to old media--an atavistic force of economics, mad gambling, and vector misdirection. And right now he is lobbying hard to remove key provisions regarding open standards and open source from European Union policy proposals and, reportedly, winning.

Virtualization of our daily tasks, as well as of communication processes, social activity, production, economics, media consumption, etc. probably have more impact on our temporal and special awareness and sensorial processes than we normally realize. Sarah and I came to this conclusion during the research that we decided to undertake for the seminar Scopic Regimes of Vituality.  Our final project…

Last week I had the chance to attend at a symposium held at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) entitled as ‘Privacy and Social Network Sites’. The keynote speaker of the day would be danah boyd, who has worked in many think tanks in the past (going way back to Friendster) and currently works at Microsoft’s research…

2010 has great potential in being the year that Information Visualization (InfoVis) went public and moved from being a term only used by enthusiasts, to an interest shared by a broader audience.

I am not saying this just because my interest in InfoVis has considerably grown during the last months; I am stating this because several initiatives that were recently brought…

We live in a constant struggle to steer through the big and varied torrent of data which is unleashed everyday. And data cover very different things. By following the Concise Lexicon for the Digital Commons created in 2001 by the contemporary art group Raqs Media Collective, data could be ‘artistically’ defined as follows: “Information. Can mean anything from numbers to images, from…

No one knows everything, but everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity[1]While the notion of collective intelligence –as coined by Pierre Lévy- has already been extensively discussed in regards to the collective phenomenon of Wikipedia, the current rise of the social use of information visualisations should also be seen in this perspective. While Pierre Lévy described how individual members of online communities combined their individual knowledge in order to create a shared expertise (collective intelligence),[2] he could not envision the collective use of data. The unanswered question posed by Lévy as to ‘…[how we will] be able to process enormous masses of data on interrelated problems within a changing environment?’[3] might have found its answer in the collective potential of information visualisations...

Google has “quietly” decided to pay humanities researchers $50,000 a year to dig into all the rich metadata accruing from its 12 million and counting library. Franco Moretti, whose “distant reading” analyzes literary trends from statistical data rather than close reading of texts, is among the humanity researchers going after the funds, and he’s well positioned for it.

Here’s a list of…

The definition by Card et. al. of information visualization as “the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition (1999),” is the basis for many. But there are also parties involved from outside the academic fields in the popularization of information visualization, as Viégas and Wattenberg write. Tag clouds for example go against certain theoretical design principles but still seem to work. Lima praises the way “they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for information visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community (2009),” resulting in the development of a multiplicity of projects.

Researchers in all areas of human knowledge are overwhelmed with data. Through the process of sensemaking, in which information is collected, organized, and analyzed, new knowledge is formed and further action is informed. We must make sense of data in order to produce real value from it. “The availability of information is irrelevant without a means to interpret it effectively”…

Foucualt’s writings reveal how power invades every aspect of knowledge. Ordering of space, for example, was essential to the modern government resulting in geo-power reflected in conventional cartographic practices. However, power of information society has shifted its focus from territory to population (biopower). Consequently, mapping has been reconsidered not only in terms of production of space and place, but also…

This week, I will be a blogger for the Lift Interactive Conference in Geneva. The Conference will be held on May 5-7 and will focus on the topic “connected people”

“Our next conference will gather one thousand participants to explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in techno-parlance as users, people ultimately define the success of all technological and…

Although most information graphics and information visualizations to date have strived to deal with vast amounts of important, albeit often unintelligible, data in new and meaningful ways in the hopes of educating or effecting change, some recent forays into the field are narrowing their focus on more quotidian and, perhaps, ego driven data sets, challenging the notions of its beneficent…

Natural disasters always have threatened man’s existence. However, as the report ‘New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts’ by the United Nations cites; “the number of humanitarian crises has been rising in recent years. Moreover, disasters strike more frequently, and with the most devastating impact, in the least developed countries.”[1] Of course, this claim seems somewhat subjective; it either proves the nearing…

Perhaps you’ve heard of the new tag in HTML5? The first major new version of HTML since HTML 4 in 1997 (how many Internet years are there in a dog year, anyway?) contains several new tags that allow for embedding of multimedia objects without the need for third-party software such as Adobe Flash or Java. Except, if the future belongs to the proprietary platforms, there will be one necessary piece of third-party code. And it could cost us all another chunk of our freedom.

The first session at the Geneva Lift Conference covered “The Redefinition of Privacy” and what privacy and personal security means in the 21st Century. Independent Futurist Christian Heller spoke on the topic of Post-Privacy. Below is a summary on his views on privacy.
Fuller believes that privacy is gone for good. In the future,Long term privacy will only be the exception. In general, the belief in society…

Information visualization field is becoming more and more into the physical space. Sometimes as an everyday life practice and often in the form of an ambient object .

We can observe projects in which data about casualties in Iraq is visualized through a tatoo made on a man’s back, that  shows the relations between places, deaths and military operations; energy consumption data…

After only a few days in São Paulo, I could already feel the Brazilian creativity, inventiveness, the passion for free culture, collaboration, FLOSS, and alternative technology. They are positive, optimistic and embrace digital technologies for their changing and empowering potential.

When we think of Maps, we are prone to think of a visual, detailed and accurate representation of an area. Our most common idea of maps is that they serve the purpose of depicting geography, we may think particularly about cartography and topography.

Maps are one of the ways we have been using since the Bronze Age, to make sense of the…