Biographies

Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia and was Post Doctorate Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland in 2003. In 2004 Geert Lovink was appointed Research Professor at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. He authored the books Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007).

Ramón Reichert is Professor at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. His research interests include the historiography of media and technology, the impact of new media and communication technologies such as the Internet, social media, visual culture and identity politics. He is author of Im Kino der Humanwissenschaften: Studien zur Medialisierung wissenschaftlichen Wissens (2007), Amateure im Netz: Selbstmanagement und Wissenstechniken im Web 2.0 (2008), Das Wissen der Börse: Medien und Praktiken des Finanzmarktes (2009) and co-editor of Reader Neue Medien (2006).

Resources:

http://www.ufg.ac.at/Detail.3372.0.html?employee=197

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramón_Reichert

Jeanette Hofmann is a senior researcher at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB). Her research focuses on transnational regulation, particularly Internet governance, and on intellectual property rights. As part of her advocacy activities, she has been involved in the UN Summit on Information Society and its follow-up process. Since 2006, she has been a member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group that assists the UN Secretary General in convening the Internet Governance Forum. Her education background is in political science. Jeanette Hofmann holds a PhD from Free University of Berlin.

Resources:

http://duplox.wzb.eu/people/jeanette/index_e.shtml

Mathieu O’Neil lectures in American Civilization at the Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV and is Adjunct Research Fellow at the ANU’s Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, where he co-founded the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks in 2005. He also worked as a magazine editor and designer, and exhibition curator. His PhD, completed in 1996, surveyed zine networks in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2009 he published his book Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes and he founded and became the editor of the journal Critical Studies in Peer Production. In 2010 he joined the board of Les Amis du Monde Diplomatique.

Resources:

http://adsri.anu.edu.au/People/visitors/mathieu.php

http://mondediplo.com/2009/05/15wikipedia

http://www.amazon.de/Cyberchiefs-Autonomy-Authority-Online-Tribes/dp/0745327966

http://adsri.anu.edu.au/People/visitors/mathieu.php

Gérard Wormser
works at the Editorialisation des Sciences Humaines at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris-Nord. He is French and trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological and Sartrian traditions. As an editor, he began as the head of philosophy and social sciences at the Encyclopaedia Universalis in Paris, at that time a French subsidiary to the Britannica encyclopedia.

Nathaniel Tkacz
is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and works as a Research Fellow at RMIT University. His research lies at the intersection of network theory, software studies and politics.

Resources:

http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/research-students/nathaniel-tkacz.html

http://nathanieltkacz.net

http://nathanieltkacz.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/tkacz_power_visibility_wikipedia.pdf

Joseph Reagle
is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University where he studies collaborative cultures. As a former Research Engineer at MIT’s Lab for Computer Science he served as a Working Group Chair and author within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on topics including digital security, privacy, and Internet policy. A book based on his dissertation about Wikipedia collaboration will be available in 2010 from MIT Press.

Resources:

http://reagle.org/joseph/

http://vimeo.com/6832289

http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/06/neutrality.html
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/4328123.aspx
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6078526.aspx

Charles van den Heuvel holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and is a senior researcher at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He is involved in various projects on annotation and visualization in history, web archiving for research and Web 2.0 in the Humanities. He worked for various Dutch universities and research institutes. Outside academia he was a librarian at the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence, an inspector of Cultural Heritage for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Sciences and a map curator at Leiden University Library. His interests include urban history, history of cartography, history of science and more recently, history of information science.

Resources:

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0754649288/ref=sib_rdr_dp

http://conferences.lis.illinois.edu/EuroMod.05/abstracts.html#heuvel

Dan O’Sullivan
is a retired lecturer and teacher and a freelance writer and historian. He has degrees in history from the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia. Daniel O’Sullivan is the author of numerous books including, most recently, In Search of Captain Cook (2008) and Wikipedia: a New Community of Practice (2009). He lives in North Yorkshire, England.

Resources:

http://www.amazon.com/Wikipedia-Dan-OSullivan/dp/0754674339

http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/8375124

Alan Shapiro is a trans-disciplinary thinker who studied Science and Technology at MIT and Philosophy, History and Literature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is the author of Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance (2004), widely recognized as a seminal work in science fiction studies and the conception of futuristic technoscience. He is the editor and translator of The Technological Herbarium by Gianna Maria Gatti (2010), a major study of art and technology. He is a practicing software developer and is the co-inventor, with Alexis Clancy, of the New Computer Science, which promises to be something like a new Manhattan Project. He is currently founding a utopian company called Shapiro Technologies, which will be based on the principles of friendship and ‘not working’. Alan Shapiro is recognized as one of the leading experts on the philosophy and cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlanNShapiro

Rachel Somers Miles
works on projects and publications for the Institute of Network Cultures, replacing Sabine Niederer while she is on leave between March and the end of July, 2010. Rachel moved from Toronto to Amsterdam in September 2008 to attend the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Masters programme at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on media art, and has recently completed her thesis. She also holds a previous Masters degree in Media Studies from Concordia University, Montreal (2008). From March 2009 to February 2010 she was an intern, and then employee, of the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam, working in the preservation department on a number of media arts documentation and research projects. She is also currently working at Virtueel Platform, Amsterdam, as a researcher for “Project Observatory,” which focuses on a number of significant media art case studies, including the artist group Blast Theory, UK, and the Runme.org online software art repository. While at the INC she will be working on projects such as Video Vortex and Urban Screens, as well as on the publication series Studies in Network Cultures. Email: rachel[at]networkcultures.org

Scott Kildall
is a cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, print, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork in the form of interventions into various concepts of space. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art and Technology Studies Department. He exhibits his work internationally in galleries and museums. Scott Kildall has received fellowships and awards from organizations including the Kala Art Institute, the Banff Centre for the Arts, turbulence.org and the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

Resources:

http://www.kildall.com/

http://wikipediaart.org/

Patrick Lichty
has been a digital intermedia designer, artist, writer, and independent curator for over fifteen years. His work comments upon the impact of technology on society and how it shapes the perception of the world around us. He works in diverse technological media, including printmaking, kinetics, video, generative music and neon. Venues in which He has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney and Venice Bienniales as well as the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). Patrick Lichty is Editor-in-Chief of Intelligent Agent, an electronic arts/culture journal based in New York City, and featured in the new documentary by the makers of American Movie, called The Yes Men.

Resources:

http://www.patricklichty.com

http://www.voyd.com

Hendrik-Jan Grievink oobtained his Master in Design from the Sandberg Institute, the postgraduate course of the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He works as a graphic and editorial designer within various media and contexts, with a strong focus on the relationship between production and consumption of visual culture. He is co-editor of nextnature.net and designer of Fake For Real: a memory game about reality and simulation in western visual culture.

Nishant Shah
is Director of Research at the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. His doctoral and post-doctoral work raise questions about digital identities, cultural productions and new pedagogies in the emerging field of Internet and Society. His work cuts across different parts of Asia and seeks to articulate new vocabularies, frameworks and methods of research and intervention in the region. He is currently engaged in working on a project on Digital Natives and potentials for socio-political transformation and mobilization.

Felipe Ortega
is researcher and Project Manager at GSyC/Libresoft, a research group at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He has over four years of experience analyzing the Wikipedia project from a quantitative point of view. Felipe Ortega holds a PhD in Computer Science. His thesis is the first research work to offer a comprehensive, side-by-side comparison of the top ten language versions of Wikipedia from different perspectives. He is also interested in the analysis of FLOSS development projects, as well as other open content creation initiatives and open on-line communities on the Internet. He holds Programme Chair of WikiSym 2010, to be held in Gdansk in Poland, on July 7-9, 2010, co-located with Wikimania 2010.

Resources:

http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe

http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/thesis-wkp-quantanalysis

Stuart Geiger
is a researcher at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program in Washington, D.C. He studies knowledge production in distributed or decentralized organizations, paying close attention to the sociality of technologies that sustain collaboration. His research specifically focuses on the production and maintenance of order in both Wikipedia and scientific research networks. He uses a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods and is influenced by a number of disciplines, including media and communication studies, science and technology studies, critical software studies, and information studies.

Resources:

http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/

http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/cscw-sustaining-order-wikipedia.pdf

http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/academic-works/2008/12/08/do-you-support-wikipedia-news-from-the-trenches-of-the-science-wars-2.0/

http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/academic-works/2007/12/20/the-wikipedian-discourse-a-foucauldian-archaeology/

http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/academic-works/2007/05/31/there-is-no-cabal-an-investigation-into-wikipedias-legal-subculture/

http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/academic-works/2007/05/10/senior-thesis-democracy-in-wikipedia/

Esther Weltevrede is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the New Media program at the
University of Amsterdam. She is Internet researcher and analyst-designer at the
Research Program Digital Methods Initiative, which aims to develop novel methods and tools for studying the Web. Since 2007 she is a member of Govcom.org, a foundation dedicated to development of political tools on the Web. Her PhD research is about national web studies. As part of the Digital Methods Initiative, this particular
study aims to develop methods with a locative-technical focus.

Erik Borra is new media developer and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam’s M.A.
program in New Media, freelance programmer-designer and web analyst. He is the lead programmer, as well as researcher, for the Digital Methods Initiative through which he is involved in the ‘Mapping Controversies in Science and Politics’ European
research project (MACOSPOL). This employment is a continuation of his work for
Govcom.org, a foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political Web tools. This
work consists of mapping issue networks on the Web by using the Issue Crawler
software, as well as devising new tools such as the Issue Feed (beta), Issue Scraper
– which makes comparative analyses of webspheres (e.g. news spheres and
blogospheres), a surfer pathway browser, and tag ecology visualizers.

Hans Varghese Mathews read philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, studying logic and aesthetics, and went on to obtain a Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, studying algebraic topology primarily, with mathematical logic and philosophy as subsidiary subjects. He has been a research associate with the Indian Statistical Institute, and has written extensively on visual art for Frontline. He currently directs mathematical modeling for an analytics firm and is a contributing editor to the online journal Phalanx. He has an abiding interest in the formal understanding of painting and poetry and a more recent and dominating interest in the mathematization of the social sciences.

Resources:

http://www.cis-india.org/about/people/distinguished-fellows

http://www.phalanx.in

Caroline Nevejan
is an independent researcher and designer focusing on the implications of technology on society. Having been involved with interdsiciplinary projects 24 for over 20 years, she speaks a variety of professional languages. She has been initator, conceptualizer, producer, manager and director of local, national and international work. Currently she is visiting fellow with the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems group at theVrije Universiteit van Amsterdam (iids.org), research fellow with the PrimaVera Program for Research in Infomation Management, associate with Performing Arts Labs (UK) (pallabs.org) and member of the Dutch Council for Culture and the Arts. Her research interest is focused on the design of presence and the design of trust in social interactions between people, in organizations and in larger social and political structures. She uses methodologies from the social sciences as well as from the design discipline. Having a profound theoretical interest she finds it a challenge to bridge knowledge, insight and skills between different domains.When ‘making things happen’ in a design process she is convinced this only works when people involved contribute.

Andrew Famiglietti is a Brittain Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of technology. His dissertation Hackers, Cyborgs and Wikipedians investigates the political economy of Wikipedia and related Wiki based websites. His research interests include cultural studies, new media, participatory culture, and the copyleft movement. Moreover, he is currently developing applications for Wiki software in the composition classroom.

Resources:

http://blogs.bgsu.edu/afamigl/about/

Teemu Mikkonen
is a project researcher at the University of Tampere in Finland. He works at Tampere Research center for Information and Media (TRIM) in the department of information studies and interactive media (INFIM). He is finishing his Master in social sciences, majoring in sociology, and is preparing his doctoral thesis on the KnowId–project. He has researched various projects relating to open source/free software communities, such as Managing OSS As an Integrated Part of Business (OSSI*) and Building Open Source Communities (OSCOMM). He focused on Wikipedia and wikis in his Master thesis and other articles. Other topics of research include open innovation (OpenInno), innovation environments, municipal democracy (in the Tampere region) and social media in general and also uses these topics for teaching at the departments of INFIM and social research.

Resources:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1457232&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=73739433&CFTOKEN=43714087

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1457232&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=73739433&CFTOKEN=43714087

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1623/1538

http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/tt/article/viewFile/319/28

Florian Cramer
is head of the Networked Media Master and communication research program at the Piet Zwart Institute at the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University.

Resources:

Wikipedia”>http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Cramer”>Wikipedia

http://pzwart.wdka.nl/networked-media/2010/01/02/florian-cramer/

Johanna Niesyto
is PhD student in Political Sciences. She works as research fellow in the project Changing Protest and Media Cultures at the collaborative research centre Media Upheavals at the University of Siegen in Germany. Her key interests cover globalization, public spaces, democracy, political campaigns, contentious politics, political consumerism, cyber culture, and social web. In her thesis she looked at Wikipedia as translingual public space of political knowledge production. Johanna Niesyto has collaborated with S. Baringhorst, V. Kneip and A. März to write and edit Politik mit dem Einkaufswagen (Politics with the shopping trolley, 2007), Political Campaigning on the Web (with S. Baringhorst and V. Kneip, 2009) and Protest Online/Offline (2010).

Resources:

http://transnationalspaces.wordpress.com

Mayo Fuster Morell
is promoter of Networked Politics Collaborative research into new forms of political organization and develops techno-political tools within the frame of the Communication Commission of the World Social Forum and European Social Forum. Currently, she is finishing a doctoral research on the governance of platforms of participation for building digital commons at the European University Institute. She explores the democratic logic of the Internet in knowledge-making processes and the relationship between governance models and community growth. She developed a large N-mapping of governance forms and comparison of three case studies: Wikimedia, World Social Forum and Flickr governance models. Last year she was visiting researcher at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and provided teaching assistance at the Communication Department at Stanford University. She co-wrote the books Rethinking Political Organisation in an Age of Movements and Networks (2007), Activist Research and Social Movements (in Spanish, 2005) and Guide for Social Transformation of Catalonia (in Catalan, 2003).

Resources:

http://www.onlinecreation.info

Amit Basole
holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently residing in Sarnath in India where he is a member of the Vidya Ashram Collective. Amit Basole has worked on Eurocentrism, Indigenous Knowledge, Marxian Political Economy and Gandhian Thought. His current research investigates the dialectic between artisanal production and people’s knowledge among weavers and other small artisans working in India’s informal economy.

Resources:

http://people.umass.edu/abasole

Maja van der Velden holds a PhD and is a researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo. She is currently investigating the relationship between autonomy and automation, including the way privacy is negotiated via the Internet. She combines degrees in Information Science and Semitic languages with work and activism as a squatter, journalist, mother, ICT trainer, and system designer in bringing to her work a self-critical and ecological technoscience perspective.

Resources:

http://www.globalagenda.org

Athina Karatzogianni is a Lecturer in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. She is the author of The Politics of Cyberconfict (2006), Power, Conflict and Resistance: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (with Andrew Robinson, 2009), and editor of Cyber Conflict and Global Politics (2009). She has also written on crossdisciplinarity, the open source movement and war coverage in global hotspots. She is currently working on research projects ranging from networked resistances in the global system to conflict in online collaborative and migrant networks and cyberconflict in unrecognized and small states.

Resources:

http://www.hull.ac.uk/humanities/media_studies/staff/athina_karatzogianni/index.html

Lawrence Liang (IN)
is a one of the coufounders of Alternative law Forum (ALF), a collective of lawyers working on various socio legal issues. His key areas of interest are law, technology and culture, the politics of copyright and he has been working closely with Sarai, New Delhi on a joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons. A keen follower of the open source movement in software, Lawrence is the author of Sex, Laws and Videotape, and has lectured at various universities including Yale, Stanford and Columbia.

team

Sabine Niederer
works as the managing director of the Institute of Network Cultures, a new media research centre based at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Department of Interactive Media. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies, as part of the Digital Method Initiative. She has taught media and design theory and produced various international conferences focusing on new media. Niederer has co-edited the Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (2008), and the Urban Screens Reader (2009) and is the curator of new media art project Impakt Online.

Resources:

www.networkcultures.org
www.digitalmethods.net

Margreet Riphagenhas been project manager at the Institute of Network Cultures since August 2008 and produced Winter Camp 09. She graduated in 2000 in Integrated Communication Management at the Hogeschool of Utrecht. She worked as a producer at Waag Society for a few years after which she moved to Media Guild, a not-for-profit organization that fosters innovative starters in the field of new media and ICT. After setting up Media Guild, she left to work on Blender, a 3D open source animation suite. For Blender, she was co-producer of Big Buck Bunny (Peach open movie project) and produced an open game. Aside from working as project manager at the INC, she now coaches Interactive Media students at Amsterdam University of Applied Science. Margreet Riphagen is also involved in MediaLAB Amsterdam, a creative, interdisciplinary workplace where inquisitive students and researchers collaborate on innovative interactive media ideas.

Juliana Brunello
holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Sciences with emphasis on Media Studies from the Universität Siegen in Germany. She finished her studies in October 2009 with a thesis that involved the concepts of reality construction (Berger/Luckmann) and the Scientology Organization, based on media (e.g. books and Internet websites) analysis. She worked at the Verein für soziale Arbeit und Kultur Südwestfalen in the research/pedagogy area for two years, before becoming a research intern at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. She is originally from Brazil, São Paulo.

Serena Westra
is an intern at the Institute of Network Cultures and assistant producer for the Critical Point of View event. She studies Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in New Media and completing a minor in Sociology. She is interested in the position of new media in society and power structures on the Web.

biographies

team