ikCam picture taken at the Arcade exhibition at the Mediamatic Bank.

Mediamatic BANK is currently hosting an exhibition solely dedicated to gaming with old game consoles, arcade games and newly developed RFID games. We played videogames for hours, ranging from Mrs. PacMan to Dance Central on the Kinect. The exhibition on the Vijzelstraat 68, Amsterdam runs till March 27. Definitely recommended!

Arcade at Mediamatic

Arcade at Mediamatic

Arcade at Mediamatic

Arcade at Mediamatic

Arcade at Mediamatic

Slide 1:
Hi, I’m Anne and this is Esther and we are PhD’s at the University of Amsterdam with the Digital Methods Initiative. We will be showing the first results of a mapping project on the Dutch Blogosphere. It is a work in progress.

Slide 2:
Author on the Dutch blogosphere, Frank Schaap, distinguishes between two types of blogs: linklogs and lifelogs. Linklogs primarily post links to other websites (right), whereas Lifelogs primarily post details about their personal life and everyday experiences (left).

Slide 3:
The current Dutch blogosphere, however, seems to be characterized by the many references to social media platforms. Did the Dutch blogosphere transform from link- and lifelogs into platform-oriented blogs?

Slide 4:
Our aim is to map the changing linking practices of blogs in order to empirically analyze this shift. Following the definition of the blogosphere as the collection of all blogs and their interconnections we aim to map and characterize the Dutch blogosphere. So… which blogs?

Slide 5:
Well, good question! Starting points are very important! This collection of blogs is compiled from several expert sources, namely: lists from Frank Schaap, Merel Roze, Flabber, Frank Meeuwsen and Arie Altena.

Slide 6:
We used the Issue Crawler; a software tool that locates and visualizes networks on the web. It crawls the startingpoints, which means that it follows the hyperlinks from one page to the next, then analyzes and visualizes these connections.

Slide 7:
So what is the Dutch blogosphere? It is what the Dutch blogs link to. This means it also includes non-blogs. Moreover, these apparent strangers in our midst characterize the current Dutch blogosphere.

Slide 8:
First of all, there is a densely linked Dutch blogosphere. This snapshot from June 2010 shows the top 100 prominent blogs and related websites including news sites and social media platforms.

Slide 9:
When we zoom in we can see the links between the nodes and clusters made visible. What you see here is a literary cluster that includes professional writers like Ivo Victoria, Merel Roze, and Walter van den Berg.

Slide 10:
This second cluster is a marketing and technology cluster. It includes Bright, Frankwatching, and Dutch Cowboys. The latter is on the fringe of the networkcluster because, as you can see, it does not link back.

Slide 11:
In this detailed view of map we see the prominence of social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These platforms are most prominent within the marketing & technology and news & opinion cluster.

Slide 12:
One of the most central nodes, the micro-blogging platform Twitter is also the largest node in the Dutch blogosphere. When we look at the statistics we see that Twitter almost receives 35 thousand links from the rest of the network.

Slide 13:
Analyzing the links from the current Dutch blogosphere, platforms take a central and prominent position within it. How would one do an analysis on the historical Dutch blogosphere? Was the early 2003 blogosphere indeed organized around lifelogs and linklogs?

Slide 14:
Well, the historical Dutch blogosphere is a work in progress. The first question is: Which starting points to use? We took all the blogs on the Loglijst, a blog indexing site that was started in 2001. The Loglijst scraped and indexed Dutch blogs.

Slide 15:
However, when we checked all the blogs listed in the Loglijst for their response code, or put differently, check to see if they are still online and alive, we notice that many popular blogs from 2003 are no longer online.

Slide 16:
Fortunately, many of the “dead” blogs live on in the Internet Archive which has archived millions of pages from 1996 onward. One can revisit blogs from the past through their WayBackMachine which is the interface to the archive.

Slide 17:
The Internet Archive allows one to search for the history of one specific website or blog and as such privileges single site histories. When entering a URL the output is a list of archived snapshots ordered by date. (asterixes indicate changes to the website)

Slide 18:
This is one of the earliest archived Dutch blogs from 1999. We are automatically going to look up all the blogs from the starting list with one of our tools. Then rip all the links within the blogs and create network visualizations like we have seen before.

Slide 19:
The Dutch blogosphere is an under studied object and we wish to contribute by mapping its history. This proposed study enables us to create collections from the Dutch blogosphere for every year between 1999 and 2009, and compare and analyze these pasts states of the Dutch blogosphere.

Slide 20:
Thank you for your attention, kthnxbai, see you on digitalmethods.net

“Map Fest takes place at Mediamatic on July 6, 8 and 9. Map Fest brings together kindred spirits to explore, create, define and oppose maps.”

Day 1 is Mapping for Change. Day 2 is Mapping for Clarity with our Professor Richard Rogers. Day 3 is Mapping Ignite with super-fast-speedy-wonderful lightning talks including one by Esther and me!

Come and join us!

Sneak preview. Snapshot of the Dutch blogosphere 27th June 2010, with a marketing & technology blog cluster:

Snapshot of the Dutch blogosphere 27th June 2010, with a marketing & technology blog cluster

We are liquidating our library in protest of the cultural funding stalemate

Mediamatic will give away all its books. Our library will cease to exist in protest of the impasse between the Raad van Cultuur and Minister Plasterk on cultural subsidies. We call on the public to come collect the full book collection and to take care of the cultural capital themselves. Mediamatic can no longer do it on their own. (Press release June 19th, 2008)

A library filled with books and media objects waiting to be taken care of.

Mediamatic has been carefully documenting their collection of books, magazines, VHS tapes, Betamax tapes, CD-ROMs and a wide variety of other media objects in Filemaker. The first part of the project consisted of exporting this Filemaker database to a .cvs file that could be “cleansed” before importing it into Mediamatic’s anyMeta system.

The cleaning of data is a meticulous task for any (un)certified Data Care Specialist. Unfortunately the original Filemaker file had all the authors in one single field without a consistent notation. I spent the first week on preparing an import file for anyMeta and working with Mediamatic on database structures and press releases.

After 2500 items were imported into the database Roos and I went through the whole physical archive and moved it into the library space. We started planning and organizing the event that took place on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th of June.

Five minutes before take-off. Cybrarian crew from left to right: Me, Michael, Laura and Roos

The event on Saturday started at 4 o’clock and dozens of people who had been waiting outside for the doors to open entered the library. Even though we had friends helping us register all the outgoing books the amount of people who wanted to take care of all the books was overwhelming.

Crowds are gathering.

There were drinks and a DJ and a lot of press present to cover the bookparty. After day 1 about 70% of all the titles were gone and distributed among the members of the Mediamatic network.

Happy booklovers

On the second day there were still dozens of people taking up to thirty books home! It was less busy which gave us the opportunity to personally help people to enter stories on the books and take pictures for the website. One of the rules of the Mediamatic Distributed Library is that you will write down your motivation for taking care of this particular book and enter a picture into the system. A typical page will then look like this entry on the book Jargon Watch. The idea is to extend the information on the media objects and to build a social network around them using the existing Mediamatic network.

The Stedelijk Museum is going to take care of all the items that have not found a new caretaker this weekend and is going to distribute a part of the collection among other cultural institutions and libraries.

Mediamatic is thinking about organizing a follow-up event to meet your fellow booklovers, caretakers to provide a platform where you can exchange your books or bring new books for the distributed library. Keep your eye on the Mediamatic website for more information.

Press & Media coverage:

Parool.tv. Three seconds of me at 2:24 mins ;)

More pictures on Flickr.

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