Anne Helmond. New Media Research Blog
Simple instructions to connect to the Eduroam network via Android with your University of Amsterdam credentials. Tested on the Nexus One.
That’s it! Happy surfing and browsing.
We are now accepting applications for next year, due 1 April 2010. Please help spread the word by sharing the Call for Applications .pdf with friends and colleagues.
Call for Applications: UvA_NewMediaMA_2010-11.pdf
The International M.A. in New Media & Digital Culture (NMMA) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is accepting applications for 2010-2011 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. Our permanent faculty are recognized experts in their fields, who are committed to their students. The program admits approximately forty students per year, classes are no larger than 20 and often smaller, and the faculty-to-student ratio is 1:8.
Tuesday the 22nd of September was a big day for both graduating New Media MA students and New Media studies itself. The first official graduation ceremony (which were previously held together with Film and Television studies in Mediastudies) marked the beginning of a new era for New Media within Mediastudies. New Media has grown in both quality and quantity over the past few years and this ceremony illustrated New Media as a mature field of study within Mediastudies.
The Masters themselves organized a graduation day that started with a symposium titled “AMSTERDAM – Creative and Critical Media Futures.” In the symposium Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie – Centre for Culture and Politics) and Floor van Spaendonck (director of Virtueel Platform) addressed the following questions: What is Amsterdam’s role as a center for creative practices and critical discourses pertaining to New Media? What roles can we envision it playing in the future?
Both Kluitenberg and van Spaendonck started their presentation with the importance of De Digitale Stad (the Amsterdam Digital City) within the history of new media in Amsterdam. It brought back memories of my own experiences with the Digital City in 1996 and how it was metaphorically and spatially organized as a city with a main square and where inhabitants would inhabit a house. Of course, the Post Office was my favorite part of the city, along with the chat area. For more information and research on the Digital City see Reinder Rustema’s collection in both English and Dutch.
After the symposium Prof. Frank Van Vree welcomed the audience and graduating MA’s as the Chair of the Department of Media Studies. Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff (MA New Media, 2009) addressed the audience with a small personal speech about being a New Media MA at the University of Amsterdam.
The diplomas were granted by thesis advisors Prof. Richard Rogers, Jan Simons and Edward Shanken (unfortunately Geert Lovink could not be there). After the diplomas there were drinks, a buffet and a party which marked the end of the graduation day.
The first New Media MA Graduation Day was a big success. Thank you organizers, and congratulations MA students, you are now officially Masters of Media!
More photos on Flickr.
Students from the MA New Media (UvA), MA Information Science (UvA) and MA Editorial Design (MaHKU) presented their interactive visualization projects at Crea.
Introduction by Yuri Engelhardt
The Visualizing our World of Data program contained eight presentations (not all of them are described here), many of which were based on Flickr. One of the requirements of the assignment was to gather a suitable dataset within a week, which led many students to opt for the easy to use Flickr photos/API.
WorldMinder was inspired by GapMinder and contains public awareness data. When mapping world data you need an orientation point and a graph is not suitable for that purpose. Instead, data is mapped onto a world map. It is supplemented with a scatter chart and the main interface view shows three sets of data in one single visualization.
The application has several functions:
WorldMinder is a framework for visualizing datasets and for posing new questions. You can map and chart different datasets and pose new questions through combinations. It is meant as a framework and hopefully in the future it would allow you to import your own datasets and map/visualize them. In the current version you can use it to link different types of visualizations and as a framework for posing questions. What is interesting in this application is that there are “dataless” countries. There is no way to see “non-data” in a scatter chart. WorldMinder also shows you which countries have no available data.
On a technical note, WorldMinder used PHP to retrieve the data, Flash to visualize the data and it’s all stacked in layers using JavaScript. JQuery was used for the interaction between the different displays.
WorldMinder works fine with: Safari 4.0 beta & Firefox Mac/Linux.
This project reminded me of the ‘US presidential speeches tag cloud’ by Chirag Mehta. The main difference is that it shows all the political parties in the Netherlands and words frequently used in their party programs in order to show their political discourse.
Political Discourse Bubbles
One of the most interesting uses of this project is the feature to map a discourse over time. How has a party program changed and which issues lose or gain attention from political parties? On a small critical note I would like to point out that there is quite some noise in the early periods. The old Dutch way of spelling “the” “and” and all these small words that are filtered out in the tagclouds do appear in the early periods with their old spelling.
New Media Events (Firefox and widescreen only) shows you pictures taken during so called new media events such as The Next Web and the Web 2.0 expo. The team described the application as a way of socializing but I don’t socialize with other new media event visitors through such applications. There are plenty of existing platforms that allow for direct interaction and the sharing of pictures such as Twitter in combination with Twitpic or Mobypicture.
Currently it is a New Media Events calendar which may serve as an archive. New media events are added by the team itself and photos will only appear if tagged appropriately.
The Global Party Viewer aims to visualize events occuring in a specific place in the world on a specific time using Flickr images and their metadata. The application distinguishes between different types of music (rock, classical, techno) but is able to map events with different music types onto the same location by creating an overlap. The GPV is based on the premise of: the more popular the party, the more pictures are shown. With the increase in camera phones and GPS that provide location aware pictures such visualizations will be come richer and richer.
Global Party Viewer
It would be interesting to coorporate with event planners that integrate Flickr pictures such as Upcoming.org which provides specific event tags that may be used by Flickr users.
ShotSpot shows you places worth a visit through the lens of Flickr. It maps specific Flick images (eg: tagged with ‘bike’ – it currently only takes English tags) and places them on the map if the user has geolocated the image. As a visitor, or tourist, where do you go if you want to see a lot of windmills? It also maps the number of pictures taken from a specific object over time which allows for questions: Where do I go in February to see beautiful waterfalls?
Unfortunately using pictures taken at a specific time as a measure for a popular destination disregards the fact that people with jobs usually go on holidays in December or July-August which will cause a rise in the number of pictures. ShotSpot does look at the unique number of visitors for a specific destination and not at the amount of pictures a user uploads during that time.
Another interesting measure for popularity would be Flickr’s own interestingness. Interestingness is based on the number of views and the number of comments. As noted by Prof. Roger Rogers another interesting Flickr specific feature to look at would whether or not the user has a pro account.
ShotSpot (Windows Only/Firefox or Chrome browser – Also works on my Mac with Firefox)
http://www.ronkok.com/work/infvis/pub/
Other projects
PhotoTrail, Zoom into the Zoo, World through my Eyes and “A Tag’s Life” by Daan Odijk.
A tag's life
Previous projects
Two blog postings about last year’s projects / presentations:
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/05/22/visualizing-the-network/
http://www.latebytes.nl/archives/2008/05/een-gevisualise.html
Audience
Photos by Ork de Rooij.
When: Thursday 14 May 2009, 15:00-17:45 o’clock
Where: CREA Theater, Turfdraagsterpad 17, Amsterdam, http://crea.uva.nl
Entrance: free
In a unique cooperation of three master programs, students have developed eight interactive visualization projects. Graphic designers from the Utrecht Graduate School of Art and Design, media analysts from the Faculty of Humanities and computer scientists from the Science Faculty of the University of Amsterdam have spent the last three months working together in multidisciplinary teams. Based on large collections of Flickr photographs, political party programs, and global statistical data, visualization tools have been developed that enable surprising discoveries about the world we live in.
This event is organized by: MA New Media (UvA), MA Information Science (UvA), and MA Editorial Design (MaHKU). Supported by: MultimediaN & CREA.
Life has been busy lately!
Jasmin flower tea
I started teaching four groups of Introduction New Media for the second year and three groups of Academic Research. As of March 17 I will also be teaching at The Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences (HvA) at the Interactive Media department.
So, while I’m also looking for a new apartment in Amsterdam and planning a writing scheduled for the Networked book, blogging might be irregular. Maybe I’ll start writing shorter pieces, or move my main activity to Twitter, I haven’t decided yet.
I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now but I can never find the time to complete it. So stay tuned, I hope to find a new blogging rhythm within a month.
Just press the big shiny button
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.
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