Yesterday I was at the KNAW dialog “Publish Open Access or perish?“. Open Access (OA) is somewhat of a personal interest of mine, and I’ve been following this debate for a couple of years now. The discussions here were interesting, as questions were raised about the implications for researchers, and humanities scholars specifically.
On Wednesday January 23rd, the PoliMedia project team organized the symposium ‘Linking political debates and media’. In this symposium the project team presented their current research, and invited two speakers also doing computational research on political and news-media data.
The afternoon was opened by chair Laura Hollink (VUA), who asked for a show of hands. Both the humanities and computer sciences were well represented, mirroring the crossroads of political analysis by computational means.
Continue reading “PoliMedia symposium: linking political debates and media”
On Wednesday November 28th, the PoliMedia project team gathered to discuss our progress and decide about the future directions of the project. Each partner presented their achievements of the past 6 months, which is the first half of the project-timespan. An interface designer was invited to lead discussion about the interface and to develop wireframes.
The aim of PoliMedia is to enable analysis of media coverage of political debates, by linking the debates in parliament (Dutch Hansard) with newspapers (National Library), radio bulletins (National Library) and television programmes (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision).
Continue reading “Developing a new search system – PoliMedia progress”
In our online surveys amongst potential users of the AXES prototypes, a total of 1633 people responded to questions regarding their usage of online search engines and audio-visual databases.
With these surveys, we found that in general, users below the age of 45 are more confident than older users. Moreover, we found that for researchers, academics and journalists alike, searching material online usually means “Googling it”.
So here it is, the blog I have been pondering about for the past 2 years, but for which I never quite saw a use case. But, during the recent Open Access week, the use case struck me: opening up my research. With this blog, I hope to achieve two things: