In my second week in Medellín I spent some time on my project with Hiperbarrio. The organization tries to reach social inclusion through means of digital media in several depressed neighbourhoods in Medellín. By giving workshops in photography, blogging, podcasting and the use of free software, they try to keep the youngsters off the streets.
There is no doubt that the human brain is an amazing and complex bodily organ, perhaps even the most amazing of them all. Personally, I do not think I will ever cease to be amazing by it. But, despite its impressive capabilities, the brain has its limitations too. In fact, Norman goes as far as to say that…
When reading articles and books on data visualization, the focus is often on ampiflying cognition by using external (visual) aids. In this blogpost I attempt to conduct a kind of meta-analysis on data visualization by looking beyond the content of the visualization and concentrating more on the intrinsic motivations of the user.
This entry is meant as an introduction to the tool my group and I are developing for our Datavisualisation class. We will be trying to geographically map the rise and diffusion of different research fields over time. The reason for wanting to see these developments are diverse, but one of them derives from the increasing amount of (academic) information on…
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) started painting his artworks in the style of the Amsterdam Academy. He made dark realistic landscapes which became lighter along Mondrian evolved his painting career to De Stijl. From the year 1911 in Paris he became influenced by the styles of symbolism and cubism. Here he comes to a greater abstraction…
eDarling -The new way of meeting a partner, that really suits you
On their frontpage, eDarling.se suggestively guarantees its visitors a suitable match. So how does an online dating site such as eDarling set out to get to know you, in order to match you with another individual, which really suits you? Simple,…
We’re seeking bloggers for the Unbound Book Conference (http://eboekenstad.nl/unbound/), a timely international forum on the future of the book and reading and publishing in the digital age.
Dates
Thursday, May 19 @ Hogeschool van Amsterdam
Friday, May 20 @ Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), Den Haag
Saturday, May 21 @ Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (ObA)
Speakers include:
Frank van…
The last couple of weeks, myself and my data-visualization team, have been working on our Europeana project. Europeana is a big heritage-digitization project funded by the European Union. Their goal is to digitize all of Europe’s heritage objects and to make them available online. There are several reasons why the EU wanted to create such a huge and expensive…
Going through an older post in the MoM’s blog referring to Walter’s Ong book “Orality and Literacy”, I discovered a term referring to a new “hybrid form” of culture that has spread on the internet: The Secondary Orality. The term is emphasizing the “re-emergence of an oral type of discourse within literate cultures which is fostering a communal sense and is
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Google’s Street View is immensely popular, but where does the idea of seeing locations on street level come from? And how can it be used to enable users to gain insight in their local environment? Put differently, how can Google’s Street View gain street credibility*?
Google’s Street View offers the possibility to view locations as if you’re walking through them.…
A rectangle walks in a bar and orders a drink. An attractive circle sits on a bar stool next to the rectangle. ‘Hey Circle, want to get primitive?’ The Circle looks the rectangle slowly up and down and says: ‘Sorry, you’re not my type.’
The main characters in this joke can be seen as one of the stock characters…
Arriving in Hong Kong felt a little weird for me, as frequent mainland visitor with Chinese origin. It was a like coming home, but this time home was a bit off. Now after a couple of days I realize that Hong Kong is in many ways like a European city, only with loads of Chinese people, and smellier…
The internet has been heralded and praised for bringing democracy. It is stated since the advent of the internet that knowledge is no longer bound to limitations, as it goes freely over the web disseminating to all possible directions. It is what we can learn from each other where we all supposedly benefit from. It’s the so called ‘wisdom…
Want to listen to new music but sick of staring at your old MP3 collection?
Streaming applications like Spotify, Last.fm and Pandora (US only) recommend related artists.
Sites like The Hype Machine and Elbows aggregate music blogs for instant internet radio streaming.
More importantly, websites such as Musicovery (the original interface) and TuneGlue…
This post is a bit of an experiment. Basically, it's a summary of what I would like to write my thesis about. In the spirit of open collaboration, I'd like to know what you think of this idea. Obviously, it needs to be fleshed out further and could use more examples, but I'm hoping the gist of it is clear. I'm already aware of a couple of gaps or possible retorts, but I'd like to see what some fresh eyes can come up with. So, in advance, thanks for reading and any and all comments would be very much appreciated.
Storytelling is the conveying of narratives, an idea as old as human history itself. The origins of narration are difficult to grasp, and because this phenomenon plays such a prominent role in most of our lives, no one is able to imagine a life without it. Storytelling is an essential condition in order to communicate.
Basically, what the media does…
In my last blog post I explored the notion that information visualization is not merely a tool, or art, or an agent of clarity but also has the capacity to generate emotion in users and arguably, become a player in our emotional processing. However, as our information visualization project develops I realize the bigger challenge is not just how to inspire emotion but how to effectively visualize it. Food (one of the variables in our project) is a highly charged, emotive and textured subject and it deserves to be visualized in all its layers and complexity. This lead me to wonder if visualizing emotional content or emotional intensity is perhaps one of the biggest challenges information visualization faces? And have any projects successfully done this?
This idea of mapping music visualizations as a means of discovery is something that I have previously touched on. In looking at examples of music visualizations that have bore applications, something that I find particularly interesting is that some of the least mainstream genres of music have quite extensive applications built around them. As experimentation with music evolves so…
Imagine yourself in the following situation: You, a scientist pur sang, are busy researching and analyzing A and you are having doubts about the values in the model, suspecting a technical error. Without hesitation, you compose a tweet describing the research and the problem, attach a photo made of the model, add a hashtag (e.g. #science or #labhelp) and…
In my last writing “Data Visualization and Political Election” I have portrayed the historical significance of data visualization analyzing political elections. Political elections has a huge historical significance which involves sociological context, cultural context or even economical context as Bernhard Rieder has pointed out in his presentation. Nowadays the area of gathering the data has expanded from…