Digitala tjänster

Jag tycker det är spännande med den nya mastern i Borås som drar igång till hösten. Den är inriktad på digitala tjänster och är en möjlig fördjupning för dem som redan arbetar med digitala tjänster som bibliotekarier och kanske har en tidigare magisterexamen. Nu har de dessutom startat en blogg där de inte bara beskriver mastern utan även reflekterar över digitala tjänster och dess användningsområden i forskning och praktik.

Idag skriver Helena i deras blogg om möjliga karriärvägar. Något som jag också tangerat i tidigare blogginlägg.

Visualising the Public Sphere

I took part in an interesting workshop last week which was co-arranged by VKS and the Philosophical department at Gronigen University. The discussion spanned over a wide area of topics but with the common theme of how we could understand social, political and physical interactions and how that becomes visible in the public space. Anne Beaulieu talked about “Network realism: studying knowledge production around public databases of images”, Martijn de Waal presented ideas on “Urban screens and the Public Sphere”, Paul de Laat tried to connect two of his research areas with the title “Not so Public After All”, Judith Vega introduced “The visualisation for everyday life: pertinent or impertinent in regard to the public sphere” and Paul Wouters discussed the lessons learned from CYSWIK (Can You See What I Know), a two-day multisectorial workshop on knowledge visualisation. It is almost always fruitful to bring together people from different disciplines and see how the different approaches can hook together and form a bigger picture. One problem that where brought up for discussion was how new is new media? Is there new problems in this area or is it the same kind of problems only in a new setting? It all boiled down to that it is a matter of emphasis. A lot of people are using the digital media and the “user-generated” media and are treating it as something new and that is something we as researchers have to take into consideration.

This morning I was again listening to the Swedish radio and overheard their programme “På nätet” (on the net). They have apparently a series of five episodes about our social life on the net and today it was about blogquakes (“bloggbävning”, like a combination of blog and earthquake). The participants talked about the idea that the blogs are making the world more democratic, is it or is it not? This is the discussion that always comes back when talking about blogs and maybe a bit boring in a sense, but connected to the workshop above it suddenly makes more sense. The social practices in the public sphere that are now also present on the web is dynamic and changing and interesting to study further and especially by joining different approaches and disciplines ways of dealing with the problems or questions as research topics.

Signtific

I don´t really know how to use it, but still I find the idea of Signtific intriguing, a kind of collaboratory to forecast future?

They say that:
“Signtific is a community website for sharing, exploring, creating and discussing signals and forecasts related to disruptive trends in science and technology.”

http://www.signtific.org/

About Humanities laboratory on the radio

I listened to a Swedish Radio programme about Science news. Suddenly there was two researchers talking about studies done at the humanities laboratory (humanistlaboratoriet) at Lund University. They talked about how you can study peoples choices by using for example Eye-tracking equipment in a regular store. The strange coincidence is that their work was in a way connected to a dutch blog that I discovered yesterday in my task of collecting blogs by dutch researchers, the blog is about Neuro business . It was just a bit strange and made my world at Lund University somehow connect with my world in Holland…or at least made me do this association…

The poster from the seminar: Looking at a Scholarly Blogosphere

Download it to zoom in and be able to read 🙂

Invigning av institutionen för Kulturvetenskaper den 13 mars

Ja det är fredagen den 13:e som den nya institutionen ska invigas. Tyvärr kommer jag inte vara där, fast att vara i Amsterdam är ju inte så pjåkigt heller. Det kan säkert bli en trevlig, intressant, spännande och rolig eftermiddag dock:
http://www.kultur.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=10081&list_mode=id&calendar_id=4148

Institutionen är ny sedan årsskiftet och innehåller den perfekta sammansättningen:

Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap

Arkivvetenskap

Bokhistoria

Etnologi

Idé och lärdomshistoria

Intermediala studier

Konsthistoria och visuella studier

Musikvetenskap

Museologi

http://www.kultur.lu.se/

reading blogs…practising dutch…the image of librarians

Well reading blogs always make you stumble upon things and even though it is partly in dutch I could understand what this was all about:

http://www.moqub.com/2009/02/15/jij-lijkt-helemaal-niet-op-iemand-die-in-een-bibliotheek-werkt/

The always ongoing discussion about the image of a librarian. I wonder if other occupations are as obsessed with this as we are?

More about the book in English here:

http://books.infotoday.com/books/YouDontLookLikeALibrarian.shtml

CYSWIK Pre Valentines Reception at VKS

Yesterday it was a Pre Valentines reception at VKS (that is the reason for pink balloons) with an exhibition where I presented a poster, and there was of course also a number of interesting talks (programme). I liked the idea from Architects of Interaction where they had created a book which should work as a toolbox when you work with interactive work methods:

http://www.architectureofinteraction.net/

One other talk from one of my collegues Charles at VKS, was about joining Quantum Physics and the ideas of Otlet and Knowledge Organisation. He is exploring these ideas together with Richard Smiraglia and maybe Richard will write more about their “idea collider” in his blog eventually:

http://mac.liu.edu/users/richardsmiraglia/?tag=idea+collider

Yet another talk was from an artist, Esther Polak, who described how she as an artist used GPS to make peoples everyday life visible.
It was all done under the umbrella or label CYSWIK (Can You See What I Know?). Here artists and researchers are joining together and I think it is a great way to start a discussion about the visualisation of knowledge:

http://vks.cyswik.net/

Collection of Dutch blogs…getting started

I have started the collection of blogs in Holland written by active researchers. I have tried just very briefly browse through and see if the blogger or bloggers has a scholarly background, but I have too look at them again. One more selection criteria is of course that the blogs are updated regularly. The list is growing in my delicious account:

http://delicious.com/sakj/dutch-blog

Looking for the Dutch Academic Blogosphere

My main plan during my stay in Holland is to identify Dutch researchers that are using a blog as a tool and I hope that they will let me interview them. My searching has started and looking into a new slice of the blogosphere I would be happy to get help! I found this directory which I have started browsing:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/country/netherlands/

Not knowing so much Dutch is making a bit harder, but I’m getting by with the combination of knowledge in Swedish, German and English and the blogs that I have found interesting until now seem to use mostly English.

If you have any tips fo me where to find the Dutch Academic Blogosphere I would appreciate all help I can get 🙂 It is interesting that I suddenly understand that my knowledge about the Swedish blogosphere is quite large, I know where to go, what tools there are etc. Here I have to lean on more general tools like Technorati and the mentioned blogcatalog above.