The first time I read the proposal of the CREATE project I was fascinated by both of its two sides: the leading question “Why is Amsterdam such a creative city?”, and the aspiration to answer it by using information technology tools.
To grasp the making of Amsterdam as a creative city, the question “How do cultural industries contribute to the social and economic growth of a city?” arises. They are a major influence in a city’s economic stability but also in the wellbeing of its inhabitants. Typically, all creative cities have in common a highly concentrated network of artists, performers, knowledge workers, and cultural actors. Cultural production creates not only aesthetic delight but also contributes to a city’s capacity for innovation and competition. In order to analyse all these facts and how relevant they are for the making of a creative city, one of CREATE’s main task consists in the construction of a central infrastructure for combining, analyzing and visualizing existing datasets on cultural heritage in a cross-genre network that reveals their relations and independencies. It´s on this part of the CREATE project where I will contribute helping to develop a generic tool for exploring the different datasets.
About me: First I studied Philosophy, writing my Master Thesis about Georg Cantor´s Set Theory. After this, my interest for Logic grew and I decided to start studying Mathematics. The main focus of research at my university was in programming, so I wrote my thesis in this field. When I finished, I started working as an mobile app developer, which made me gain some hands on experience in the advantages and difficulties of object-oriented programming. Due to my background as a Humanities student with Information Technology experience, I am more than glad to participate in CREATE, where I can finally apply all different aspects of my skills and interests.
“Why is Amsterdam such a creative city?” I will try to play my part in CREATE to help answer this question. As a new Amsterdamer who just moved here and started discovering the streets and history of this wonderful city, I cannot imagine a better starting point and environment for working on this topic.