These are scattered notes from a recent trip to Lebanon. Beirut and the war. The capital city of Lebanon used to be an influential cultural and financial centre of the Middle East. After narrowly avoiding a civil war in 1958, the so-called 1960s "golden age" saw Lebanon flourish as an affluent, multi-lingual, secular, and open … Continue reading Hi kifak ça va?
Blog
Assessing the Usability of Participatory GIS
In this new article, my colleagues of the SeaSketch team, Werner Kuhn, and I developed a questionnaire to evaluate the usability of participatory GIS [read the full paper in PDF]. The article was nominated as Best Full Paper at AGILE 2019. All the data and resources are freely available on GitHub. Abstract: Since its emergence in the 1990s, … Continue reading Assessing the Usability of Participatory GIS
Tracing Search Geographies with Google Trends: 6 lessons learnt
In a new article that will be presented at AGILE later this year, my colleagues Simon Scheider, Bas Spierings, and I explore the potential of Google Trends to understand how the search interest in geographic areas changes in space and time, looking at the Amsterdam metropolitan region as a case study [read the full paper … Continue reading Tracing Search Geographies with Google Trends: 6 lessons learnt
Where are celebrities from? New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos
In a new paper with my esteemed colleague Eric Kaufmann, we used a crowdsourced dataset from Ethnicelebs.com to study, among other things, when and where American celebrities from diverse backgrounds anglicise their names to adhere to a WASP ideal. For example, action-movie actor of Catholic Lithuanian heritage Charles Dennis Buchinsky changed his surname to Bronson not … Continue reading Where are celebrities from? New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos
A Context Frame for Interactive Maps
Demo: https://andrea-ballatore.github.io/map-context-frame Digital maps are ubiquitous, supporting countless online activities. Most interactive mapping platforms support three user operations to move across space: zooming in, zooming out, and panning. While using interactive maps, it is common for users to land in an unfamiliar area at high zoom levels. To understand the location of the area, users … Continue reading A Context Frame for Interactive Maps
An Arts Scholar Learns about Administrative Geography and Datasets
New interdisciplinary blog post on the Mapping Museums blog by Fiona Candlin and me: The first task was deciding which boundaries we should use to search and map the museums listed in our dataset. The Museum Development Network and Arts Council use regions as the basis for organising support and funding. The Office of National Statistics also … Continue reading An Arts Scholar Learns about Administrative Geography and Datasets
10 tips for interdisciplinary research careers
Interdisciplinarity has been a hot topic in academia for several decades and is probably here to stay. Having done interdisciplinary research for almost 10 years in the UK/US academia, I feel I am in a position to offer my advice regarding the challenges and rewards of crossing the treacherous boundaries of disciplines (and departments). For a … Continue reading 10 tips for interdisciplinary research careers
