Curriculum Vitae Erik Borra

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Personalia

Name: Erik K. Borra
Telephone: +31 (0)641 548 649
Email: mail [at] erikborra [dot] net
Homepage: erikborra.net
Date of birth: 1 April 1981
Place of birth: Jette (Belgium)
Nationality: Belgian
Languages: Dutch (mother tongue), English (excellent), French (good)

Education

• University of Amsterdam, M.Sc., 2006, Artificial Intelligence - specialized in Cognitive Science and Information Retrieval
• University of Amsterdam, B.A., 2003, Artificial Intelligence
• University of Amsterdam, Propaedeutic, 2000, Interdisciplinary "Beta-Gamma" and Artificial Intelligence

Work

University of Amsterdam employment

• New Media Consultant, MApping COntroversies in Science and POLitics, University of Amsterdam, January 2008 - present.
• New Media and Concept Developer, leading the programmers team, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, June 2007 - present.
  • Digital Methods Initiative
• Junior Docent, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, February - July 2007.
  • "Orientation in New Media", 4 groups of 18 students,
• ICT Developer, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, May 2004 - October 2005.
  • Organization and management of a media lab, weblogs, wikis and streaming media servers.
  • Mediator between the New Media Section and the university's ICT service.
  • Consultancy
  • Solving computer problems the ICT service could not handle, like web conferences, laptop connections, videoconferencing, support of Linux en Mac OsX, development of wordpress plugins.
  • Support of various classes, both technical support and explaining principles and software.
• System Administrator, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Amsterdam, September 2001 - November 2002.
• ICT Developer, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Amsterdam, November 2000 - July 2001.
  • ILIAS web classes

Other employment

• ICT developer, freelance, Amsterdam, March 2006 - .
• Lead ICT developer, Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam, February 2004 - .
• "Doing docs differently", consultant, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Doclab, Amsterdam, November 2008.
• New Media Consultant and coach, Mediamatic Social RFID Hackers Camp @ Picnic08, Amsterdam, September 2008.
• New Media Consultant, Match4jobs, Amsterdam, September 2008.
• Internet Television Front-End Engineer, Entriq, June 2007.
• ICT developer, Sonologic, Den Haag, May 2004 - September 2005.
  • Consultancy and prospecting of new assignments.
  • Various programming assignments, mainly related to the web.
  • Maintenance of FreeBSD servers.
• Y2K technician, City Bank, Brussels, March 1999 - May 1999.

Other initiatives

• Co-founder, Open-search.net, September 2006 - .

Projects

Online / Software

• "W139 is here," (with Roel Wouters and Vincent Lindeboom), a physical website as a permanent installation in W139 gallery, Amsterdam, php/ajax/xml/python/css/c/dhtml/imagemagick, w139, Amsterdam, in preparation.
• "MappingControversies.net," (with DMI), Faceted Multi-Level Classification of controversie mapping tactics, perl/ajax/css, February 2009 - .
• "Issuefeed.net," (with govcom.org), Issue Discovery and Feed Delivery System, php/perl/c/ajax/dhtml/css/javascript/api, March 2008 - .
• "Leakygarden.net," (with DMI), shows which social networks, i.e. 'walled gardens', leak data, and which are watertight, ajax/php/html/css, November 2008.
• "Metareporter.nl," faceted search plugin for wordpress, ajax/php/html/css, September 2008.
• "Scrape Google," (with govcom.org), Lipmannian Devise (after Walter Lipmann) which provides a coarse means of showing actor partisanship, built on top of a Google Scraper, php/javascript/dhtml/css, May 2008 - .
• "Vriendjespolitiek.net," (UvA/HKU project), a social network (Hyves) profile scraper, crawler, and data mining resulting in a political voting recommendation, php/xml/ajax/svg/sql/dhtml/css, May 2008.
• "Tape Mixer," a music video mash-up linking Last.fm recommendations to Youtube clips, also providing pictures, lyrics, biographies, and web shop integration, php/sql/javascript/ajax/rss/xml/dhtml/css, October 2007 - .
• "Issuescraper.net," (with govcom.org, sonologic.nl, and anderemedia.nl), suite of scraping tools: Google, Google News, Google Scholar, Google Images, Yahoo, Technorati, Del.icio.us, etc, php/sql/ajax/xml/rss/perl/shell/dhtml/css/svg 2005 - .
• "Tools.digitalmethods.net," (with govcom.org and Digital Methods Initiative), news and engine scrapers, robots.txt sniffer, internet censorship exploration proxies and other new media and digital methods research tools, php/sql/ajax/xml/rss/perl/python/shell/dhtml/css/svg, 2004 - .
• "Issuecrawler.net," (with govcom.org, sonologic.nl, and anderemedia.nl), Issue Network Mapping Software, server-side network location and visualization software, in java/postgresql/php/xml/svg/rss/html/css, 2002 - .
• "ipbrowser," (with Alexander Galloway, Rosa Menkman, Laura van der Vlies, and Michael Stephenson), alternative browsing, javascript/php/dhtml/css, August 2008.
• "deletefrominternet.com," (with Michael Stevenson and Esther Weltevrede), web service to nominate web pages for deletion, javascript/php/dhtml/css, February 2008.
• "elfriendo.com - taking the work out of social networking," (with govcom.org), mySpace profile scraper, crawler, and data mining, php/xml/ajax/dhtml/css, Montevideo, Amsterdam, January 2008.
• "Misspelling Generator," (with Linda Hilfling), Firefox extension generating Google misspellings, javascript, Impakt, Utrecht, January 2008.
• "Masters of Media Wordpress Theme," UvA Mediastudies, html/css/php, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, October 2007.
• "iTea," (with mediamatic.net), interactive RFID installation querying Google about person information and visualizing it through a projection on a table surface, php/perl/rdf/processing/dhtml/css/shell, Picnic07, Amsterdam, September 2007.
• "Interactive Geographical Visualization of the NISEnet Network," (with Informationlab), sql/xml/google maps/dhtml/css/ajax, Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, San Fransisco, US, June 2007.
• "Open-Search," (with Open-search), distributed search engine, ajax/java, November 2006 - June 2007.
• "Whatever Button," (with Michael Stevenson), changes Firefox form buttons like 'I agree' in Whatever, javascript, April 2007.
• "The Oracle Machine," (with Jeroen Joosse and Karel Brascamp), Scraping Google for producing Oracles about user defined issues, php, de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, January 2007.
• "Issuedramaturg.issuecrawler.net," (with govcom.org), Google Page Rank Monitoring System, svg/php/html/css, 2007 - .
• "Infowarroom.org," (with Roel Wouters), a research pile based on user-generated content using the del.icio.us tag network around 'media criticism', php/shell/dhtml/ajax/css, de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, December 2006.
• "Bliki," a Wordpress plugin automatically linking weblogs to wikis, developed for de Nieuwe Reporter, php, March 2006.
• "Smile," a website showing a random Flickr photo tagged 'smile', php, January 2006.
• Website development, various projects, 1996 - .

Research

• "Digital Methods Initiative," UvA Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 2007 - .
• "Open-Search: a distributed, peer-to-peer, search-engine," Amsterdam, 2006 - .
• "Palestinian Networks in Cyberspace: Emerging trends and their implications for politics, governance, security, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," (with govcom.org and the Information Society Project, Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Program, University of Cambridge), UvA Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 2007 - 2008.
• "Mapping Public Media," (with govcom.org), Ford Foundation with American University, Amsterdam, 2007.
• "Internet Censorship," (with govcom.org, University of Toronto, and Harvard University), UvA Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 2006 - 2007, 2009.
• "Poignancy in the U.S. Political Blogosphere," (with govcom.org), Amsterdam, 2005.
• "The News about Networks 2: Making Issues into Rights?" (with govcom.org), de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, June 21 - 24 2004

Infographics

• "Country codes of the World," (with Esther Weltevrede), August 2008.
• "Tag Cloud of words from Newspaper Titles with Stadionplein and its Translation in Historical Pictures," (with Roel Wouters, Luna Maurer, and Timo Hofmeijer), Items, Amsterdam, June 2008.
• "The Position of Data Art within Information Visualization," (with Minke Kampman and Paulien Dresscher), 29 February 2008.
• A Website is Gone - The Drama of 911truth.org in Search Engine Space," (with govcom.org), September 2007.
• "Thnx for the Add," (with Roel Wouters), Flyer depicting the mySpace friends network of 10 key Amsterdam dj's, Amsterdam, May 2007
• "Celebrities have favorite issues" and "Celebrities have favorite charities," (with govcom.org), tag cloud graphics exhibited at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time-based Arts, 2007.
• "Public Media Projects and their Publics," (with govcom.org), graphics commissioned by Center for Social Media, American University, 2006.
• "The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it?" (with govcom.org), six graphics commissioned by University of Toronto (Open Net Initiative) and Harvard University (Berkman Center), 2005 - 2006.
• "What the Hack Extended Event Network Map," (with Koen Martens, Anat Ben-David, and govcom.org), July 2005.
• "Digital Divide Cartogram," (with govcom.org), May 2005.
• "Digital Divide Cartogram (inverted)," (with govcom.org), May 2005.
• "Coming to Terms: Conflict Analysis of the usage, in official and unofficial sources, of 'security fence,' 'apartheid wall,' and other terms for the structure between Israel and the Palestinian Territories," (with govcom.org), six-piece pdf set, 2004 - 2005.

Exhibitions

• "W139 is here," (with Roel Wouters and Vincent Lindeboom), Physical Website as Permanent Installation in W139 gallery, Amsterdam, March 2009 - .
• "Misspelling Generator," (with Linda Hilfling), internet installation generating Google misspellings, the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time-based Arts, Amsterdam, November 2008 - January 2009.
• "Misspelling Generator," (with Linda Hilfling), internet installation generating Google misspellings, International Design Biennial, Paris, 15-30 November 2008. Winner of Young Design Award!
• "elfriendo, taking the work out of social networking," (with govcom.org), internet installation at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time-based Arts, Amsterdam, January 2008.
• "Misspelling Generator," (with Linda Hilfling), internet installation generating Google misspellings, Impakt festival, Utrecht, 2008.
• "Text Jockeying a Debate," (with Vincent Lindeboom and Fabian Krausz), debate augmentation through text jockeying with the Oracle Machine, Een kunst om te delen, Track 030, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 13 November 2007.
• "iTea," (with mediamatic.net), interactive RFID installation, Picnic07, Amsterdam, September 2007.
• "The Oracle Machine," (with Jeroen Joosse and Karel Brascamp), oracle machine using Google scrapers projected in public space, de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, 2007-2008.
• "Issuedramaturg," (with govcom.org), Google Page Rank Monitoring System, Impakt Festival Utrecht, 2007.
• "Issue Celebrities," (with govcom.org), video and graphics installation at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time-based Arts, Amsterdam, February-March 2007.
• "Internet Censorship," (with govcom.org), graphics exhibition at Protect the Net, the Munk Center for International Affairs, University of Toronto, December 2006.
• "Inverted Digital Divide Cartograms," (with govcom.org), graphics exhibition at Here Be Dragons: Cartography of Globalization, Toronto Free Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 12 November - 17 December 2005
• "The Places of Issues," (with govcom.org), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Curated By Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 17 March - 3 November 2005.

Movies

• "Google and the Politics of Tabs," The Demise of the Directory: Web librarian work removed in Google, (with Digital Methods Initiative), 2008.
• "A Thousand Dinners A Night: Amongst the Issue Celebrities," (with govcom.org), made for Montevideo installation, Amsterdam, February 2007.
• "Issue Crawler Backend Movie," (with govcom.org), made for ZKM exhibition, Karlsruhe, Germany, March 2005.

Invited Talks and Significant Appearances

• Three guest lectures at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam.
• "Doing docs differently", lecture, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Doclab, Amsterdam, 23 November 2008.
• "Vriendjespolitiek.net," Visualizing the Network, Waag Society, Amsterdam, 21 May 2008.
• "MACOSPOL," (with govcom.org), research workshop, Mapping Controversies in Science for Politics, Zurich, Switzerland, 28 - 29 April 2008.
• "Cartography and the Web," (with Esther Weltevrede), lecture, St. Lukas hogeschool, Brussels, Belgium, 1 February 2008.
• "MACOSPOL," (with govcom.org), research workshop, Mapping Controversies in Science for Politics, Paris, France, 29 - 30 January 2008.
• "Space for People: Suggested Fields," (with govcom.org), research workshop, Video Vortex2, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, 22 - 26 January 2008.
• "Palestinian Networks in Cyberspace: Emerging trends and their implications for politics, governance, security, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: the sequel," (with govcom.org and the Information Society Project, Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Program, University of Cambridge), research workshop, Amsterdam, 7 - 9 November 2007.
• "Mapping Future Histories of RFID," (with DMI), presentation and workshop contribution, de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, 20 October 2007.
• "Forum on Quaero," conference presentation, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, 30 September 2007.
• "Palestinian Networks in Cyberspace: Emerging trends and their implications for politics, governance, security, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," (with govcom.org and the Information Society Project, Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Program, University of Cambridge), research workshop, Amsterdam, 5 - 7 September 2007.
• "Digital Methods," (with DMI), conference presentation, International School for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 23 August 2007.
• "Open-Search: a distributed search engine," conference presentation, Vers Geperst, Amsterdam, 29 May 2007.
• "The Future of Free Expression on the Internet," conference, Oxford, UK, 18 May 2007.
• "Dissidents and Restrictions," (with Open-Search), panel member, Impakt Festival, Utrecht, 31 March 2007.
• "Protect the Net," conference on Internet Censorship with with citizenlab.org, the OpenNet Initiative and govcom.org, Munk Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, CA, 29 November - 1 December 2006.
• Preparation for "Protect the Net," researching tools against Internet Censorship with citizenlab.org, the OpenNet Initiative and govcom.org, Munk Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, CA, July 2006.
• "Making Things Visible," (with govcom.org), WhatTheHack, conference presentation, Enschede, 27 July 2005. (pdf)
• "Life of Issues 9: Making Issues into Rights?," (with govcom.org), workshop contribution, de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, New York, June 2004.
• "The logs of your life," BNAIS, conference presentation, Amsterdam, 9 October 2003
• "Beta-Gamma Fifth Anniversary Conference and Celebration," University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2 - 5 October 2003.
• "Signaling Games," Dutch-Flemish Philosophers' Day, conference presentation, Amsterdam, 2 November 2002.

Publications

Significant Writings

• E. Borra, Using the Web for Documentaries, own blog, 2008.
• E. Borra, Vriendjespolitiek.net,: research into post-demographics, Masters of Media Blog, 2008.
• R. Rogers et al., Issue Mapping & Essay: "Public Media Projects and their Publics", (Ford Foundation with American University), 2007.
• E. Borra and M. Stevenson, Repurposing the Wiki Scanner: Comparing Dutch Universities' Edits on Wikipedia, Masters of Media Blog, 7 October 2007.
• E. Borra, "Automatic wrapper induction of HTML trees," M.Sc. Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2006.
• Blutner et al., Signalling games: How evolution selects optimal strategies, Handelingen van de 24ste Nederlands-Vlaamse Filosofiedag, Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, 2002.

Conference Reports

• "Recalling RFID," conference report about Remote Frequency Identification, Amsterdam, October 2007.
• "Report on the Forum of Quaero," conference report about the monopoly on information, October 2007.
• "Paraplay," conference report about digital self representation, 2 October 2006.

Grants

Principal

• Open-Search, a distributed search engine, (with Koen Martens and Richard Rogers), Digital Pioneers, 2007.

Partner

• Digital Methods Initiative, Mondriaan Interregeling, 2007 - 2009.

Subcontracted

• Mapping Controversies in Science for Politics (MACOSPOL), (with govcom.org), EU 7th framework, 2008 - 2009.
• Issuefeed.net, (with govcom.org), Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs, 2007.
• Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Mapping, (with govcom.org), Hivos, 2007 - 2009.
• Issue Celebrities, (with govcom.org), Montevideo Artists-in-Residence, 2007.
• Issuedramaturg, (with govcom.org), Impakt Festival Utrecht, 2007.
• George Soros Mapping, (with govcom.org), Open Society Institute, 2006.
• Criminal Justice Initiative, (with govcom.org), Open Society Institute, 2006.
• Publics for Public Media Projects, (with govcom.org), University of Pittsburgh / Ford Foundation, 2006 - 2007.
• Internet Censorship, (with govcom.org), University of Toronto & Harvard University / MacArthur, 2005 - 2006.
• Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, (with govcom.org), Cambridge University / IDRC, 2005.

Awards

• We won the Dutch Spinawards 2008 in the category 'Best innovation' with the applications developed at the Social RFID Hacker Camps, using mediamatic's IK-tag.

Other

• Part of creative-industries.nl, February - July 2007.
• Chairman of the Beta-Gamma Fifth Anniversary Celebration Committee, May 2002 - October 2003.
• Certificate Windows NT 4.0 Administration, 2002
• Belgian Driving License B (cars), 1999.

Competencies

• Expert skills in (web) scraping and web crawling in various (markup) languages like Java, PHP, Perl, HTML, XML, SOAP, RDF, etcetera.
• Expert skills in rich user interfaces (e.g. AJAX).
• Good skills in algorithmic information visualization.

• Linux: thorough knowledge of setting up and maintaining Linux work stations and servers.
• FreeBSD: experience in setting up and maintaining FreeBSD servers.
• Completely familiar with Windows 3.1 through Windows Vista.
• Completely familiar with Wordpress, Moveable Type, TWiki, Mediawiki, various social software applications, etcetera.
• Web server configuration in Linux: apache, ssh, http(s), php, mysql, pgsql, (s)ftp, ssh, mail, dns, ...

• Web technologies:
  • Thorough knowledge and quick application of php, mysql, postgresql, xhtml, dhtml, css, dom, xml, xslt, xpath, xquery, javascript, json, ajax, soap.
• Programming and scripting languages:
  • Completely familiar with PHP, Prolog and Matlab.
  • Average knowledge of Java, shell, Perl.
  • Basics of C and Perl: I am very familiar with their ways of thinking, data structures and statements but have as of now only an average programming experience.
• Thorough knowledge of SVG, basic knowledge of Flash.
• Experience with Google Maps, Google Earth, KML, geo XML, and GIS in general.
• Experience with RFID tags and readers.
• Experience with scriptable, (mostly) open-source, media manipulation software like imagemagick, mplayer, ffmpeg, vlc, pd, processing, MAX/MSP, etcetera.

• Familiar with programs like Photoshop and Office.
• For other competencies please consult the list of my subject matters of Artificial Intelligence (in Dutch).
• Fast learner.

Other fields of interest: web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0, web x.y, rfid, data mining, search engines, information extraction, privacy, machine learning, language and computation, (computational) psychology, web epistemology, (new) media, simulations of growth and development, algorithmic art, neural networks, genetic algorithms, mind-body, sustainable development, theater with sensors, behavioral marketing and targeted advertising, content filtering and recommender systems/society.