Last week the Netherlands-German border was struck by a 4.2 earthquake which went unnoticed by many but not on Twitter. It was joked that the quake had a bigger impact on Twitter than anywhere else. I was interviewed by Radio 1 about this phenomenon and I briefly talked about the resemblance between the recent East Coast quake and our Dutch quake as reported on Twitter.

One of the similarities was the posting of images illustrating the “devastating” effects of the quakes. The fallen plastic lawn chair became an iconic image of the East Coast quake and was copied by many Dutch Twitter users posting similar images.

by @BYT BrightestYoungThings on Twitpic

Schade is enorm!! #aardbeving by @domien on Mobypicture

This may be understood in the light of the web’s sharing culture and meme culture where a particular idea spreads itself online. The fallen lawn chair image became an iconic picture and spread itself virally through re-posting and sharing. The idea of ironically depicting the “devastating” mess and “destruction” of the earthquake was copied in the Dutch quake and produced its own viral image of fallen over toys. More on the quake and Twitter in the interview on Radio 1 (in Dutch): Aardbeving deed het goed op Twitter

More on Internet Memes and the East Coast earthquake meme on Know Your Meme.

Abstract interpretation of the Dutch blogosphere 2001 #1

I am currently working on analyzing the Dutch blogosphere with my colleague Esther Weltevrede with help of colleague Erik Borra from the Digital Methods Initiative. In an early exploratory phase Esther and I started to learn how to use Gephi to visualize our data and networks. In one of my early attempts I created this beautifully abstract interpretation of the Dutch blogosphere. Gephi creates design by research!

Abstract interpretation of the Dutch blogosphere 2001 #2

Actual findings and paper will follow in a few weeks!

International M.A. in New Media ­University of Amsterdam.
Call for Applications ­Fall 2011 admission deadline: 1 April 2011

Overview

The International M.A. in New Media & Digital Culture (NMMA) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is accepting applications for 2011-2012 academic year. The NMMA is a one-year residence program undertaken in English at UvA in the heart of Amsterdam. Students become actively engaged in critical Internet culture, with an emphasis on new media theory and aesthetics, including theoretical materialist traditions and practical information visualization trends. The overall focus of the MA is on training the students as new media researchers.Our permanent faculty are recognized experts in their fields, who are committed to their students. The program admits approximately forty to fifty students per year, classes are no larger than 20, and the faculty-to-student ratio is 1:10.

Curriculum

1st Semester: students follow a course in academic blogging, led by critical Internet theorist and tactical media practitioner Geert Lovink. Their entries form the internationally noted Masters of Media site, http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/, regarded as a top blog for new media research and nominated for a Dutch award for best educational blog. The concurrent new media theories course focuses on classic texts by innovators from Alan Turing to Tim Berners-Lee. The final first semester class, Digital Methods, given by the program Chair, Richard Rogers, trains students in novel techniques for Internet research, http://www.digitalmethods.net/.

2nd Semester: the student chooses between courses on digital aesthetics, new media politics or information visualization. The digital aesthetics course is theoretically inclined in the traditions of art history and visual culture, and the new media politics class is concerned with the transformations the Internet is bringing to politics. Information visualization is a joint theoretical-practical collaboration between designers, programmers and analysts, where the product is an online tool, digital visualization or interactive graphic. The course of study concludes with the M.A. thesis, an original analysis that makes a contribution to the field, undertaken with the close mentorship of a faculty supervisor. The graduation ceremony includes an international symposium with renowned speakers.

Graduates of the NMMA have gained an analytical and practical skill-set that enables diverse careers in research and practice-related areas that make use of the Internet, including business, government, NGOs, and creative industries that are evolving with emerging new media. Our graduates include Lotte Meijer, winner of a Webby award, and Eva Kol, whose MA thesis, Hyves, was published by Kosmos in 2008 and sold over 5000 copies its first year in print.

Student Life

The quality-of-living in Amsterdam ranks among the highest of international capitals. UvA¹s competitive tuition (see below) and the ubiquity of spoken English both on and off-campus make the program especially accommodating for foreign students. The city¹s many venues, festivals, and other events provide remarkably rich cultural offerings and displays of technological innovation. The program has ties to organizations including PICNIC, the Waag Society, Institute for Network Cultures, Virtueel Platform, Netherlands Institute for Media Art, govcom.org, and other cultural institutions, where internship opportunities and collaborations may be available, in consultation with the student¹s thesis supervisor. Students attend and blog, twitter or otherwise capture local new media events and festivals, while commenting as well on larger international issues and trends pertaining to new media. The quality of student life is equally to be found in the university¹s lively and varied intellectual climate. NMMA students come from North and South America Africa, Asia and across Europe and from academic and professional backgrounds including journalism, art and design, engineering, the humanities and social sciences. The International M.A. in New Media is a digital humanities program of study.

Faculty

Richard Rogers, Professor and Chair. Web epistemology, Digital methods. Publications include Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004/2005), awarded American Society for Information Science and Technology¹s 2005 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award, and the End of the Virtual (U Amsterdam P, 2009). Founding director of govcom.org.

Geert Lovink, Associate Professor. Critical Internet theory, Tactical Media. Publications include Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (Routledge, 2007). Co-founder nettime listserve (1995 ­ present); founder, Institute of Network Cultures, 2004. http://www.networkcultures.org/.

Jan Simons, Associate Professor. Mobile Culture, Gaming, Film Theory. Publications include Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (U Amsterdam P, 2007). Project Director, Mobile Learning Game Kit, Senior Member, Digital Games research group. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.a.a.simons/

Yuri Engelhardt, Assistant Professor. Computer modeling and information visualization. Publications include The Language of Graphics (2002); founder and moderator of InfoDesign (1995-9); co-developer of Future Planet Studies at UvA. http://www.yuriweb.com/

Thomas Poell, Assistant Professor. New media politics. In 2007, he defended his PhD dissertation on the democratization and centralization of the Dutch state during the revolutionary period around 1800. Currently, he is doing research on social media and activism. http://nl.linkedin.com/in/thomaspoell

Bernhard Rieder, Assistant Professor.  Software theory and politics. Current research interests include search engine politics and the mechanization of knowledge production http://thepoliticsofsystems.net

Michael Dieter, Lecturer. Media art and materialist philosophy. His writing concerns critical uses of digital and networked technologies, and covers topics such as locative media, information visualization, gaming and software modification.

Sebastian  Scholz, Lecturer. Visual culture. His current research interests focus on relations of visibility, knowledge and media, the ‘newness’ of new media and the history and theory of (popular) television programs. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.scholz/

Application and Deadline

General deadline: 1 April for Fall 2011 admission. Applicants will be notified around 15 May. Applications received after 1 April may be considered if places are available. See http://www.studeren.uva.nl/ma-nieuwe-media/ for details.

More Info & Questions

• International M.A. in New Media & Digital Culture – University of Amsterdam, http://www.studeren.uva.nl/ma_new_media/
• Graduate School for Humanities, General Information, http://www.hum.uva.nl/gs/actueel.cfm
• Further general questions?  Please write to UvA¹s Graduate School of the Humanities, graduateschool-fgw ³at² uva.nl.
• Specific questions about curriculum and student life? Please write to Thomas Poell, Assistant Professor and MA coordinator of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, Poell ³at² uva.nl

Twitter penetration in the Netherlands

Credits: Michiel Berger (@michielb), Anne Helmond (@silvertje), Marvin de Reuver (@marvindereuver), Esther Weltevrede (@esthr) and Ton Wesseling (@tonwesseling)

This final image has been made with the help from Ton Wesseling who calculated the percentage of Twitter users per city, using data about the number of inhabitants per city from CBS (January 2010).

Looking at the Twitter penetration per city in the top 25 we see that Amsterdam retains its #1 position with an estimate of 3,78% of the population having a Twitter account while some other major cities drop in ranking (Rotterdam from 2 > 6 and Den Haag from 4 > 13).

In this new view we see some cities climbing (eg. Groningen #2 – 2,99% , Hilversum #4 – 1,89%, – Zwolle #5- 1,67%) and others declining (Rotterdam #6- 1,66% , Eindhoven #12- 1,45%, Den Haag #13 – 1,31%). Many of the cities that climb in the ranking are student cities like Groningen, Zwolle, Leiden, Leeuwarden, Delft and Maastricht.

Thank you Ton!

Download a hi-resolution map on our project website for beautifying your office.

Map updated on January 22: Added Apeldoorn (# 21 in absolute ranking and no longer in the top 25 for relative ranking) and fixed an error in the relative ranking row. Map needs more updating concerning bubble size.

Relative Twitter density in the Netherlands

Credits: Michiel Berger (@michielb), Anne Helmond (@silvertje), Marvin de Reuver (@marvindereuver), Esther Weltevrede (@esthr)

This the second map of the Dutch Twitter population according to the Twittergids data. In the first part I visualized the top 25 Twitter cities in the Netherlands. In this follow-up image Esther Weltevrede and I looked into the relative number of Twitter users per 1000 inhabitants for each province. Color density is relative to the highest penetration (province of North Holland).

What is striking is that the province of Groningen has a relatively high number of Twitter users per 1000 inhabitants.

Hi-resolution images available here.

Opening lecture of the New Media Masters Graduation Day. University of Amsterdam, 21 September 2010.

Joris van Hoboken, PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, talked about what Google knows and what Google wants. Google is no longer just a search engine, it is now an extraordinary collection of services. What does it want with all these services? An image of a whiteboard used during one of Google’s brainstorms reveals a desire for Digital World Dominance which may be achieved by providing all the services needed. Google wants to be the most trusted personal service provider. It wants to be the matchmaker of information demand and supply.

What Google knows.

Google knows a lot but we don’t really know for sure what it really knows. As a methodology van Hoboken applies the famous concept of the known unknowns, made famous by United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Google knows your friends and family. Google knows your digital literacy level, it knows how you search and how advanced your search queries are. Google knows if you are paranoid, if you go to the Google Privacy center. Google knows when we are sick, e.g. Google Flu Trends. Google knows when we are voting, e.g. Google General Election 2010. Google knows what we are voting and who we should vote for.

Google knows your unknown knows.

(c) Peter Steiner, July 5th 1993 for an issue of The New Yorker.

Google knows you’re a dog.

The power of Google is the power to decide which of the known unknowns are real. A problematic issue that needs to be addressed is that Google doesn’t want to take responsibility for what it knows.

More pictures from the Graduation Day on Flickr.