Masters of Media

Rebecca Jane Harshbarger is an American journalist who freelances at the New Vision newspaper. She has a BA in African Studies, a Masters in Journalism and specialist in print and web reporting, podcasting and blogging. Last summer she was an intern at the New Vision for 10 weeks and since March this year became a freelance reporter. 

The New Vision Group…

Manovich's lecture was terrible in terms of both its preparation and its intellectual content. As a member of an audience, I find it disrespectful when a speaker - the keynote speaker no less - does not have a well-prepared talk and fumbles through a generic set of keynote slides. This fumbling was all the more annoying because the audience could not see the whole slide - particularly the text - at once. The examples he provided of "Cultural Analytics" would have been laughed at by any serious social scientist or art historian. I would have laughed too, if I hadn't been so pissed off.

Gladys Buteraba works at the Monitor as the Helpdesk Administrator. The Monitor is Uganda’s other second daily newspaper (www.monitor.co.ug). It is an independent daily founded by a group of journalists. Currently, it is owned by East Africa’s biggest media house, The Nation Group of Companies that publishes the biggest circulating newspaper in East Africa. It also owns radios and televisions…

The WEX Machine, The W139 EXtender, is a mirroring portal extending the W to the WebWebWeb. It is a new website and permanent installation for W139, an Amsterdam-based exhibition and production space for contemporary art, by Roel Wouters and Erik Borra.

On Friday June 12 the new W139 website will be launched and demonstrated. On a spot-lit table with a touch screen,…

Even though the site Wikipedia itself is the most known project of the Wikimedia foundation, there are several sister projects that are interesting and worth of researching. There is, for example, the Wiktionary, which is, quite obviously, a dictionary, but also less common projects like Wikispecies, a ‘free directory of life’ that aims to describe all sorts of life on…

As Wikipedia is currently the number 7 most visited website in the world according to Alexa, and a major source of information for all layers of society, it makes sense to engage in a critical review of its benefits, risks and impact on knowledge formation.

This week assignment for New Media Practices was writing an Wikipedia entry. Although this clarified a lot about Wikipedia and its policies, the job caused me a lot of frustration. I wrote an entry about the Brazilian NGO I worked for, but unfortunately some active Dutch Wikipedia users thought my contribution was Useless Content.

‘Wikipedia is not a valid source’. That’s a common critique on the online encyclopedia. Erin Harty from the University of Idaho stresses that the information on Wikipedia doesn’t have any academic background and that it ‘is not really an encyclopedia but an online magazine written by volunteers who do not need to have any specialized knowledge on anything at all’.

A conflict usually has two or more oppositional factions. They all have their own reason for this conflict, they all have a different point of view on this conflict, and most important; they do not agree with each other on who is right or wrong. These points of views are not only visible in what the opposing factions say but…

Wikipedia is quickly emerging as a research object. Considering the incredible amount of (meta)data Wikipedia contains there are legions of possible ways to do useful Wikipedia research. Today, I would like to talk about the possibilities and benefits of analyzing activity streams and document network location. In other words: network analysis for Wikipedia.

While I was working on adding information to…