blog. Wybo Wiersma .net

Dutch Society Committee Dinner

It keeps surprising me how much happens in an Oxford year. So many experiences, both great, ...read more

May I present to you: AgentBase.org. AgentBase allows you to do Agent Based Modeling (ABM) directly in the browser.

You can edit, save, and share models without installing any software or even reloading the page. Models are written in Coffeescript and use the AgentBase library. ...read more

Oxford Union committee Hilary Term 2014 (spring)

Another year in Oxford, and one that felt like it lasted a lifetime! To begin, I passed my transfer. Which is the first of 3 milestones of the Oxford PhD. It consists of a detailed research proposal + a defence of the methodology & approach. For those interested, it can be found here. ...read more

A swim with friends in the river at Port Meadow

Last year at almost any time there was something more interesting to do in Oxford than updating this blog. Such as friends to meet, papers to read, famous speakers to hear at the Oxford Union, or a sunny swim in the river ...read more

Trinity term (the 3rd) has just started in Oxford, and I (Wybo) have just handed in two 5000-word papers.

The first paper is about circadian (24-hour scale) time-effects on Hacker News. Its main hypothesis is that the time at which people arrive on the site (greatly) impacts whom they are most likely to interact with. This because replies that make very similar points as previous replies to the same post, are generally not appreciated very much, and visitors thus can only (productively) reply to relatively new posts (not older than 2 hours). ...read more

Other essays I completed during the second half of my time at King’s are (from 1st halve are here): Keywords in context (a mixed bag, on concordance analysis of Hannah Arend’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the process of concordancing, and collective responsibility), and Critical mass in collaborative hypertext environments (on critical mass in hypertext environments in general). This latter essay is available on LogiLogi

A poster on LogiLogi, and it’s “Quest for Critical Mass”, was presented at Digital Humanities 2010. And we won an European Science Foundation bursary for it. On our poster we report on recent improvements of LogiLogi, provide some background theory about critical mass, and identify factors that can be of influence on attainment.

The conference has just ended, and it was a great event, featuring topics as diverse as literary ...read more

LogiLogi, and it’s Quest for Critical Mass will be presented (as a poster) at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, this June. First of all we will analyze the concept of critical mass, as it applies to collaborative (hypertext Digital Humanities) web-applications, and at all the factors that come into it, such as network-effects, and bifurcation points.

Surprisingly little has been written ...read more