I am always on the hunt for nice mixed methods use of GIS – and this strikes me as one which is very good indeed. Essentially through the data mining of Getty Images photographs, the density of particular cultural events can be plotted. You can read the full article on the NY Times website.
Two prizes came from the UCL camp at this years GISRUK. The previously mentioned mashup, and also the prize for the best young research paper by my student Adnan - titled: “Moving to real time segmentation: efficient computation of geodemographic classification -
M Adnan, A D Singleton, C Brunsdon and P A Longley”.
Today was a jolly nice day with Ollie and I winning the Ordnance Survey Geospatial Mashup Challenge at GISRUK 2009. There were some really good entries and I was quite surprised with the result. One site which really impressed me was: “User Adaptive Trip Planner -Ramya Venkateswaran, Pia Bereuter, University of Zurich – hopefully this will be online soon”.
Our winning site is was titled “Contextualising Educational Careers for Widening Participation in Higher Education”, however is really a nice educational atlas. This should be online soon with luck, but here are a few slides to view for now:
I just presented this paper at GIS Research UK (GISRUK) in Durham sparking an interesting debate about ethics and use of transactional data. This is my first attempt at Keynote on OSX / Macbook – which after an initial failure at getting technology connected I am very impressed by overall.
I have just published a new working paper:
Abstract:
Computer mediated communication and the Internet has fundamentally changed how consumers and producers connect and interact across both real space, and has also opened up new opportunities in virtual spaces. This paper describes how technologies capable of locating and sorting networked communities of geographically disparate individuals within virtual communities present a sea change in the conception, representation and analysis of socioeconomic distributions through geodemographic analysis. We argue that through virtual communities, social networks between individuals may subsume the role of neighbourhood areas as the most appropriate units of analysis, and as such, geodemographics needs to be repositioned in order to accommodate social similarities in virtual, as well as geographical, space. We end the paper by proposing a new model for geodemographics which spans both real and virtual geographies.
Download the full paper from the CASA website.
I just came across this http://pewsocialtrends.org/maps/migration/ which is a nice set of visualisations of migration flows in the US. Could be replicated nicely for the UK and for lots of other contexts.
Anybody who I have come in contact with over the past two weeks has probably been subjected to me showing them an old 1904 map of Manchester and Salford housing conditions. This has really nice cartography and is accompanied by a book featuring rich text and pictorial descriptions of the people and living conditions.
As an experiment in getting old maps onto the web, my researcher Ollie and I have been playing with a couple of tools, the output of which we present in our beta site:
http://www.publicprofiler.org/manchester/
Although not available at all zooms, we have also added an OAC layer -
there is interesting correspondence between the 1904 aggregate groups
and those visible in 2001 – to view this, add both layers and click
the switch layer button.
For those who are interested in the method of creation, this was as follows:
1) Scanning old map at a very high DPI (this is a painful process when your map is stuck in a book and exceeds your A3 scanner size)
2) Rubber sheeting and tile creation with MapCruncher (http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/mapcruncher/)
3) Taking the MS format tiles and building a new interface with OpenLayers (http://openlayers.org/)
4) Adding some JavaScript functions to enable layer fading, layer order swapping, key fading and automatic swapping of key based on visible layers
The reference for those who are interested is: Marr, T.R. (1904) Housing Conditions in Manchester and Salford. Manchester, Manchester University Press.
[slideshare id=1015634 bristol-profiling-of-the-public-1234339301428025-1]
Measuring Segregation: Methods, tools and data, a two day workshop. University of Bristol, Bristol – 11/2/09
Everybody likes free data! The Free the Postcode project aims to collect geo-locations using GPS for every UK postcode.
This is now much simpler using an iPhone application:
[slideshare id=902044 public-engagement-the-london-profiler-public-profiler-and-the-esociety-classification-1231446832083661-1]
Public Engagement: The London Profiler, Public Profiler and the E-Society Classification, University College London, London – 8/1/09