Projects

Digital Scholarship

The VKS Digital Scholarship initiative endeavors to increase access to VKS scholarship, increase direct participation in the communication of and discussion about its research, and to increase visibility of research practice as it happens in the field. The new website operates on an Open Source platform and the VKS will distribute as Open Source any related VKS-developed software. More information here.

PhD Project (in progress)

Open is the New Secret: Managing Intellectual Content and Competitive Advantage in Open Collaboration

The emergence of openness as a collaborative practice is often at odds with entrenched modes of secrecy as a means to protect intellectual resources. To complicate matters, the popular conception of openness, from projects like open source and open access, has come to represent an exaggerated ideal of the Internet as an egalitarian medium. Nevertheless, openness appears increasingly as an alternative to closed modes of collaboration, which historically were oriented towards a “skunk works” conception, one that held secrecy as a quintessential dimension of successful research and innovation. In todays ICT-mediated world, open is the new secret–it is rapidly displacing secrecy as the popular mode of collaboration. While there has been much attention paid to the few high profile successes, such as Linux, Wikipedia, and the Open Knowledge Project, there is little known about openness as a dimension across collaborative contexts. Openness is therefore itself still a secret. The aim of this study is to examine openness across different knowledge production domains, to both locate it as a move away from closed collaboration and to develop a better understanding of its affordances and limitations in contemporary practice.

Can You See What I Know?

CYSWIK @ PICNIC
23-24 September 2008, Amsterdam

The Virtual Knowledge Studio organizes an interdisciplinary workshop entitled: Can You See What I Know? (in short: CYSWIK). This workshop was a special during PICNIC (2008), Amsterdam’s third annual creative industries conference at Westergasfabriek. In the workshop we developed ways to visualize transdisciplinary knowledge by bringing together experts, academic and students from a variety of creative fields such as, audio-visual arts, interactive design, art, architecture, music and others. On 26 September the results of the workshop were presented in a plenary session prepared by PICNIC about the outcome of all PICNIC specials. For more see the CYSWIK blog and CYSWIK in video.

CYSWIK: Pre-Valentine Reception
Friday, 13 February, 2009, Amsterdam

The Virtual Knowledge studio held a reception to re-connect with colleagues from the CYSWIK@PICNIC workshop and to celebrate some exciting new projects. Projects presented and on display ranged thematically across diverse topics such as the announcement of a new collaboration between Arts and Genomics, The Virtual Knowledge Studio, and Waag Society. Updates from collaborations that emerged directly from the PICNIC workshop activities included the Knowledge Collider project and the project on “Inter” disciplinary and “inter” cultural research. Additionally, there were presentations about the latest developments in GeoTales, Architecture of Interaction, and the PhD in Arts program at the University of Leiden. For more see the pre-Valentine archive.

VKS Summer School
2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010

This program is an international collaboration involving faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students in a collaborative Summer School of the Virtual Knowledge Studio (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Honors Program of the University of Washington (Seattle), and the International School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Amsterdam). Students in the program engage the city of Amsterdam through the use of innovative social science methods by employing digital technologies in a reflexive research design. Data collection and analysis techniques include still image photography, sound and voice recordings, short video clips, and the use of geo-location tagging (eg. Google Earth and Geographical Information Systems) software. The fourteen-week program begins in Seattle where students prepare research designs at the University of Washington. In Amsterdam, students employ the research designs developed in spring to engage in self-directed research as a means to learn about Amsterdam’s history, art, architecture, public policy, and urban culture. Accomplishment of the small-group research projects result in a collection of digital content that is used to create multimedia presentations. Additionally, the collective data repository and individual project findings become the basis a meta-level synopsis of the overall program. The program concludes with student presentation of their research. An archive of student research projects can be found here.