Dr Andrea Ballatore
During the Christmas break, I indulged in some aimless dialogue with Dall E 2 and Midjourney, two of the most popular and impressive deep-learning generators of images based on text prompt. Demos of both systems are freely accessible. The prompts I used are mostly about cartography and maps, but also entirely random and silly stuff … Continue reading I’ve made some maps using AI
I generally try not to write about things I dislike, but this time I will make an exception. This post acts as an outlet to vent my immense frustration with the infamous Microsoft OS on a less transient medium than Twitter. Important qualifications to my rant: No operating system is perfect. Mac, Linux, iOS, and … Continue reading Windows and its discontents
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)
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
See also my list of open access resources for GIScience. Open access is coming. The radical European Plan S is just the latest of major pushes to reform the current expensive and irrational model. Since the second half of the 20th century, academic authors have usually published without fees, while a handful of private publishers reap handsome … Continue reading Moving to open access in GIScience
Have you heard of hyperlocal, cloud computing, and the gig economy? Arguably, these are buzzwords used to describe things that have existed for a long time in a new, exciting way (e.g. services aimed at local markets, outsourcing computational tasks to data centres, and poorly paid, insecure jobs). Wikipedia has a nice, up-to-date list of … Continue reading GIS is bigger than Big Data: The battle of the buzzwords
Some good quotes from Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (David Graeber, 2018): Most universities in the United Kingdom now have public relations offices with staffs several times larger than would be typical for, say, a bank or an auto manufacturer of roughly the same size. Does Oxford really need to employ a dozen-plus PR specialists to … Continue reading Bullshit (academic) jobs
Le Monde recently published a fascinating cultural analysis of Red Dead Redemption 2, a massive AAA video game production set in the US in the late 19th century. This piece reminded me that some (artistically mature) video games enable the exploration of places and their social relations, combining the powers of cinema, role-playing games, and … Continue reading The geography of video games
Data Science in Place 