Published on Thursday, September 16 2010
LECTURE ANNOUNCEMENT
Digital Methods: Seemingly Intractable Issues
By Richard Rogers and the Digital Methods Summer School Group including PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture
Organized by: New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
Date & Time: Thursday, 23 September 2010, 11:00am – 1pm
Location: University Library, De Doelenzaal (Room C.007), Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam
Admission: free
The new media lecture is dedicated to digital methods, a term and program of research developed since 2007 at the University of Amsterdam [1]. Digital methods seek to analyze Web data in order to make findings about societal conditions and cultural change. Among the basic problems faced by digital methods researchers is the question of the status of Web data. Often considered messy, dirty, incomplete and otherwise reputationally challenged, under which conditions may Web data be seen as robust? Another set of fundamental problems concerns the idea of the Web as virtual, representational or otherwise having a special, ungrounded status. Where does the study of online culture end, and social and cultural research begin? When may the allegedly virtual be considered the baseline against which the real is measured and judged?
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Published on Friday, June 4 2010
With members of the Digital Methods Initiative we participated in Hack de Overheid where we created a mockup of Tikkr. Tikkr displays the pulse of media spaces and the pace of issues across different media spaces.
The web may be seen as having different media spaces or spheres which have a different pace and where authority is established differently. For example, an issue may be discussed on Twitter and not in the news. On top of that, an issue may “jump” from one media space to another. Until now there has not been a visual overview of where an issue is discussed on the web, its pace, or pulse, and how it may syndicate to other spheres. Tikkr provides the pace of different spheres where an issue is discussed and provides us with a media pulse.
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Published on Monday, May 31 2010
On Tuesday May 25, we celebrated the book launch of Frank Meeuwsen’s Bloghelden, a history of the Dutch blogosphere from 1995 to 2005, at SETUP in Utrecht. I was asked to give a presentation on a project Esther Weltevrede and I are working on: Mapping the Dutch blogosphere over time.
Photo: 2010 Jöran Maaswinkel (@JeeeM) Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0
In his article ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’ from 2003 author Frank Schaap distinguishes two types of bloggers in the Dutch blogosphere: the lifeloggers and the linkloggers. These two types of blogs, the lifelogs and the linklogs, have very specific and different linking patterns. Anno 2010 we can distinguish a new type of blog: the platformlog.
The aim of this study is to map changing blogging practices within the Dutch blogosphere. This may be done by looking at changing linking practices and studying the linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere.
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