TL;DR: In the UK, it is mostly legal to scrape data for non-commercial research. Great for doing research from home. Much research data nowadays is sourced directly from the Web, either from traditional websites or from social media platforms. Economists, sociologists, and geographers often rely on web scraping to collect large datasets about the behaviour … Continue reading Web scraping is legal (for UK researchers)
Category: blog
[CfP] GIScience 2021 workshop: Three cultures
Because of Covid, GIScience 2020 has been postponed to 2021. We will communicate the new deadline for this workshop as soon as possible. GIScience 2020 2021 Workshop The social, the science and the humanities: Bridging three cultures of geographic information in the pandemic Workshop date & location: September 15, 2020 -- Poznań, Poland Submission deadline: … Continue reading [CfP] GIScience 2021 workshop: Three cultures
Mapping Museums 1960–2020: A report on the data
Despite the Covid crisis, which is having a huge impact on the museum sector too, academic life somehow goes on. I'm pleased to share this new report [pdf] about the findings of the Mapping Museums project. This report is the result of a lot of hard work to tease out key trends from data about … Continue reading Mapping Museums 1960–2020: A report on the data
Urban Consumption Patterns: OpenStreetMap and the Social Sciences
Here is a new conference paper with my colleagues Hamidreza Rabiei Dastjerdi and Gavin McArdle on the use of crowdsourced geospatial data for social science research at GISTAM 2020. Abstract. Citizen consumption refers to the goods and services which citizens utilise. This includes time spent on leisure and cultural activities as well as the consumption … Continue reading Urban Consumption Patterns: OpenStreetMap and the Social Sciences
Presenting your research for the first time: A few tips for students
Having seen many student presentations in recent years, I collected a few tips that might be useful to people who are about to give their first research talk to an audience. Presenting scientific work has elements of storytelling and rhetoric. Your presentation must appear like a coherent story with an opening, where you set the scene and you explain the background, a development, … Continue reading Presenting your research for the first time: A few tips for students
Dear Uncle Enver
These are notes from a short trip to Tirana in 2019, where it rained non-stop for the entire duration of my stay. While visiting Tirana, the traces of its communist past are inescapable. Enver Hoxha (pronounced "oja") established a communist regime in 1944 and exerted absolute power until his death in 1985, shaping the whole … Continue reading Dear Uncle Enver
UBEL Scholarships 2020 – Human Geography
UBEL funding is now open: https://ubel-dtp.ac.uk/eligibility/pathways/human-geography. A few notes for applicants: Check eligibility: "ESRC studentships are open to all UK applicants. Applicants are also eligible for a studentship if they have been an ordinary resident in the UK for three years prior to the start of the studentship grant. For instance, if the applicant applies … Continue reading UBEL Scholarships 2020 – Human Geography
Hi kifak ça va?
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?
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
Data Science in Place 