an old printing press

Adding the Arts to the Coauthorship Exercise

Today, we will have a workshop with the MishMash work package leaders, and for that I thought it would be useful to run a new version of the RITMO coauthorship exercise. The goal is to make contribution expectations explicit early, and to practice making fair decisions when contributions differ in type, timing, and visibility. Since MishMash embraces both artistic and scientific research and development, this version is designed for teams working across arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, design, and engineering. ...

June 3, 2026 · 3 min · 497 words · ARJ

SVG version of the disciplinarity figure

Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There, I introduced a figure based on a combination of Stember’s textual description and Zeigler’s sketch. Making a vector version I published the figure “properly” in my book Sound Actions, and, as described in this blog post), made a vector version (PDF) and source file (ODG) available on GitHub with a CC-BY license. Making a SVG version Recently, I have tried using AI tools to create SVG versions of various illustrations. This has worked remarkably well, including “SVG’ing” the MishMash emblem and the MishMash Cube. One of the cool things about this is that it opens for creative things, like making the MishMash bubbles blink. ...

May 2, 2026 · 4 min · 804 words · ARJ
A detail from a building in Montpellier, where I am currently participating in the MOCO conference.

Retrieving data from an ORCID profile

After concluding that it is not viable to use institutional person pages to build a “Who’s Who” directory for MishMash, I yesterday found that NVA can be a good solution. However, it would only cover affiliated (Norwegian) researchers, which may be too restrictive for MishMash, where we also want to list non-academic, non-affiliated, and international researchers. Then, ORCID may be a better solution. This is an international registry where researchers can register themselves (check my ORCID profile). However, what information is available there and how can it be retrieved? ...

April 23, 2026 · 3 min · 458 words · ARJ
A detail from a street in Montpellier, where I am currently participating in the MOCO conference.

Retrieving data from NVA

I have seen that it is possible to build a complete CV from NVA data, the Norwegian research registry. As part of my quest to collect data of researchers connected to MishMash, I am looking for the best data source(s). Starting with a quick check of my own personal page at UiO, showed that institutional person pages are not the right solution. But what about NVA? Perhaps that is a viable solution? ...

April 23, 2026 · 3 min · 503 words · ARJ
Fish looking for food could (perhaps) be seen as a metaphor for retrieving information from the web.

Building a 'Who's Who' directory from institutional data

The Open Graph standard has helped “automagically” collect information about partner events on MishMash.no. Now, we have started building a “who’s who” directory, and I have begun looking into how we can pre-populate pages from existing academic identity sources rather than asking everyone to fill out web forms. My first inclination was to look at what is available on institutional websites. Most researchers have at least one institutional personal website. In this blog post, I look at what can be retrieved from my UiO page. ...

April 22, 2026 · 2 min · 330 words · ARJ
A mosaic from Coimbra, Portugal. There is no connection between this image and the content of this post except that one could think of the Open Graph standard as building a mosaic of web content.

Understanding the Open Graph Standard

We are currently working on developing the MishMash webpages. Since I don’t like adding and editing the same information in multiple places, I have been interested in whether the MishMash pages can (as far as possible) “automagically” collect information from other locations. When setting up our partner events pages, I realised that it was possible to collect most of the useful information (title, location, date, image) from the metadata of the pages already hosted on other websites. This makes it much easier to add partner events than if we had to set up our own pages on MishMash.no, which would also duplicate much content. The standard making this happen is called Open Graph. Since I didn’t know about this before I began my little adventure, here is a short overview. ...

April 19, 2026 · 4 min · 844 words · ARJ

Testing GitHub Agents for cleaning up the Musical Gestures Toolbox

Over the last few days, we have run a toolbox hackathon between the three music-related research centres of excellence in the Nordic countries (MIB, MMBB, and RITMO). Researchers across all centres are actively developing various toolboxes, including myself and the Musical Gestures Toolbox (MGT). Due to all the MishMash things happening lately, I was unable to spend much time myself on hacking. Instead, I thought of the opportunity to test how GitHub Agents could assist. ...

April 14, 2026 · 5 min · 878 words · ARJ

MishMash formally opened

MishMash was formally opened yesterday with a full-day program featuring a hackathon, research application workshop, work package meetings, industry panel, match-making session, and, finally, the grand opening ceremony in the Aula of the University of Oslo. Research application workshop The day began with a research application workshop held by Thomas de Ridder (UiB) with good support from Siv Haugan and Anette Askedal from the Research Council of Norway (RCN). They gave an overview of different funding opportunities from both RCN and the EU and gave tips on how to write a competitive grant. ...

April 9, 2026 · 5 min · 1000 words · ARJ
Empty presentation slide with a bullet list

No bullets, please!

This post has a simple mission: stop making template-based “title + bullet point”-style slides for your presentation. Yes, most presentation software suggests this as a default, but that doesn’t make it any better. Instead, think about your slides as complementary to what you are saying. Auditory–visual perception Human perception is inherently multimodal, meaning that we continuously experience the world with all our senses. In a presentation, that means the audience is processing your voice, your slides, your gestures, and the room itself as part of one combined experience. ...

April 3, 2026 · 3 min · 586 words · ARJ

More MishMash bubble animations

Some weeks ago, I wrote about how I made blinking MishMash bubbles. Today, I wanted to see if I could create more variations on this and make a longer animation. This was inspired by the dynamic RITMO emblem, which reconfigures itself once in a while: That is a video, though, and was made manually back in 2018. Now, I would like to know if I can get agential help creating dynamic GIFs from SVG files. ...

March 29, 2026 · 4 min · 645 words · ARJ