Today we had another chance to marvel at the brilliance of Andrea Scharnhorst. Her lecture was about visual interfaces to knowledge, which she said have taken on more importance in information sciences. The reason, she said, is that with the flood of information available to the public now, visualizations can help people see patterns and important points more easily. The problem becomes finding the right visualization to present the information. Some good examples of information visualizations can be found on the Places & Spaces website.
Archive for the 'around town' Category
Maarten Marx, an information systems professor at the University of Amsterdam, gave our guest lecture today about using technology to do automatic quantitative analysis of publicly available records. He talked mainly about his Political Mashup project, which aims to use data from newspapers and online sources to connect political topics and entities. As more and more text becomes available for analysis, having a way to automatically process and analyze it will be increasingly important. Text will be the main data of the future, Maarten said, and there will be new opportunities for research and quantitative analysis.
Today was a much-needed day of rest. I went to church this morning and got a spiritual recharge — something I’ve been overlooking since coming to Europe three weeks ago. The members of the congregation were very friendly and welcoming, and a couple of them even translated the services for me. The only weird thing was trying to sing hymns in Dutch, but I did give it a go. I may have even learned a tiny bit of Dutch pronunciation from it. After church I did laundry, wrote postcards to my family, and went for a short bike ride. I think I may be ready for another intense week now.
After hours of riding public transportation to get to and from the Kroller-Muller Museum yesterday, it was time to stretch out my legs a bit. I decided a bike ride to UNESCO world heritage site Kinderdijk was just the thing. It’s not too far from Rotterdam, but my first attempt at trying to find the place took me two hours — and I ended up back in Rotterdam. After studying the map much, much more carefully, I took a completely different route from the one I originally planned and got there in a much more reasonable 45 minutes. It was great strolling among the 19 working windmills that still pump water off the land surrounding them.
Trent has kind of a complex about getting lost, probably because he does it like, oh, all the time. Personally, I like getting lost. Today after lecture, I decided to ride around Kralingse Bos, a huge park north of Erasmus University. It can’t even touch Amsterdamse Bos in sheer awesomeness, but it was nice to ride around the lake and be out in the open. When I finally left, I thought I was heading out the same way I came in, but apparently I was mistaken. I got profoundly lost.
I rode around some very industrial areas of Rotterdam for awhile and then around some very rural areas. It was delightful I finally found my way back to Erasmus University, and I was pretty sure I could make my way back to Hotel Baan from there (not completely sure). One of the things I like about getting lost is that I’m forced to examine my surroundings more closely than I usually do, and I often see something wonderful that I would have missed otherwise. Today, I saw a bike that was a little stranger than most, so I rode closer to get a better look. What I saw made me smile for the rest of the day: A newly-wed groom was taking his bride out for a spin on his bike equipped with a big cargo cart. Things like that should happen more often.
Yesterday part of the class got stuck in an elevator at Erasmus University on our way upstairs to the guest lecture. Yep, I was one of the unlucky ones who got stuck. Unfortunately, I’m very claustrophobic, so the experience was a lot more unsettling than I let on at the time. So, what does this have to do with a very cool art museum? Nothing, except that when I was looking at a painting by one of the Surrealists, I heard a weird buzzing in my right ear and suddenly got extremely dizzy — I guess my brain needed its own version of surrealism. I went back to the hotel (it was only about 5:30 p.m.) and slept until the next morning. Greta thinks it was a delayed reaction from my elevator experience, and I’m going to agree with her on this one. I’m going to try riding the elevator again when we go to Erasmus tomorrow to try to deal with my irrational fear. I don’t know, though, whether I’ll be looking at surreal paintings again anytime soon.
From the day I arrived in Rotterdam, I’ve been on a mission to buy a bicycle so I can get around using my preferred mode of transportation, which happens to be the same as many Dutch people’s. Yesterday Molly and I went to a bike shop near Rotterdam’s Centraal Station, but it was a bust. All the bikes were out of our price ranges, and the shop owner was arrogant, to boot.
After lecture today, we decided to try again. Jonathan found a bike yesterday at a shop on Niewe Binnenweg, so we thought we’d walk up the street and see if we could find something, too. Continue reading ‘Back on my fiets’
The past couple of days have been pretty uneventful. We moved from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, and I spent a few hours walking around to get my bearings. Hotel Baan is a vast improvement over the Bicycle Hotel. I feel much more comfortable here, and not having to share a shower with the whole floor is a giant plus. The layout of the room is a little weird — the shower and toilet are in the entryway — but it’s a minor niggle. We had another group dinner with more delicious food at Soif. I can’t wait to find a bike so I can take my preferred mode of transportation around town. Hope I can find one.
We had our first free day – with no lecture – in Amsterdam today, so folks were left to their own devices for entertainment and enlightenment. Well, mostly. Sue organized a canal tour in the morning, so people just had to come up with a way to fill their afternoons.
The canal tour was lovely. I had taken a tour of Amsterdam’s many canals a week earlier, but the two experiences were completely different. Continue reading ‘‘ware the chipkaart’
I went to my first library of the trip, and I have to say that I’m deeply impressed. Judging from the Openbare Bibliotheek, it’s evident that the Netherlands values libraries. Such care was given to the design of the building and its contents, from the bookshelf arrangement to the labels on the books. I could see myself spending a lot of time there.
I was especially impressed by the setup of the children’s section. Continue reading ‘Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam’
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