What are these notes?
Why I am writing here, what is to be expected, and who inspired me.
While I love doing research, and am lucky enough to be paid to do so, it can be quite restrictive in its form. Going from introduction to related work to methods etc. gives a structure that is useful and efficient for the reader of your paper, but a bit stale for the writer of it.
The same goes for the research subject. My research is constrained to (hopefully) scientifically relevant topics that help push our domain (and the world) forward. Everything has to be peer-reviewed to check the novelty, validity and soundness of the work, and for good reason, obviously.
These notes are essentially my small personal research projects. I don’t have to care about preregistrations or p-values (or other scientific p-starting words), and I can decide for myself when the work is done. Whenever I have a question that isn’t directly answerable by Google, or when I’ve read something interesting that I have an opinion on, I want to write it down here.
Why write them?
One of my earliest memories of using a computer as a child is of me writing out stories in Word. I used to love writing tales on paper, but having the power of the home computer (pronounced /ˈkɔntjutər/ by little me) in the living room opened up a world of opportunities. Being able to go online and look for images to match the story has been ingrained in my memory, as it felt like the future was here.
Fast forward to now, and the future is even more here than I could have imagined then. The computer has become the central machinery in my (and most people’s) life, and it can do a lot more than google fun images for storytelling’s sake. Especially in my work, where AI is not only the main research subject but more and more also the research instrument (or even a competitor), I sometimes miss the feeling of creating something myself. While AI can help in areas you’re less familiar with, they should not become replacements for your own skills.
I love these tools, and find it fascinating to see how the world has changed since I started studying AI in 2015. However, I want to use them as support to feed my curiosity instead of replacing it. These notes are mostly here for me to practise freewriting and to have a place to dump my micro-obsessions with questions that pop up in my brain. The less interesting parts (implementing the website, cleaning data, checking spelling) are the parts I outsource to the artificially intelligent.
What inspired me
Joris, an old colleague of mine from the 
Data School in Utrecht, used to combine his PhD with his work as a journalist at 
De Groene Amsterdammer. This has always been something I wanted to do too, as he could take the findings and tools he acquired in his “formal” research and write about them in an unconstrained manner in his articles. I love reading his work (like Vrouwen geven niets om jou, Dat zijn toch gewoon al onze artikelen and De bubbel van dun, dunner, dunst) and still follow every article he writes.
Then there are some of the articles from the 
NYT and 
NRC, especially those made for interactive web interfaces (their election coverage in particular). They are on my list too, although more so for their clean way of presenting information and their writing quality than for their content.
The biggest influence is probably 
The Pudding, though. Their work is so diverse and so uniquely presented, while still being consistently interesting. If you have time, look into How Sonic DNA Connects Generations of Music, In pursuit of democracy or What does a happily ever after look like?
Fun
The main goal is mostly just to have fun. To be able to spend an afternoon or two on a topic, find something interesting and jot it down. The first entry is already in, and is something I had been wanting to do for a long time: read it here.