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
Category: publications
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
Moving to open access in GIScience
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
Digital Earth as a myth
This article was originally published as The myth of the Digital Earth between fragmentation and wholeness in Wi: Journal of Mobile Culture, 2014, 8(2). 1–20. I feel that an updated version is needed to keep track of how the relentless digitisation of the surface of the planet is talked about and imagined by different groups. #media … Continue reading Digital Earth as a myth
Wikimapia: An overlooked source of Volunteered Geographic Information
New paper: A. Ballatore & J. Jokar Arsanjani (2018) Placing Wikimapia: An exploratory analysis, in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. [PDF] Abstract: Wikimapia is a major privately owned volunteered geographic information (VGI) project to collect information about places. Over the past 10 years, Wikimapia has attracted hundreds of thousands of contributors and collected millions … Continue reading Wikimapia: An overlooked source of Volunteered Geographic Information
Representing uncertainty through sound
New paper with David Gordon and Alexander Boone: "Sonifying data uncertainty with sound dimensions" in Cartography and Geographic Information Science. [PDF] Abstract: The communication of data uncertainty is a crucial problem in data science, information visualization, and geographic information science (GIScience). Effective ways to communicate the uncertainty of data enables data consumers to interpret the data … Continue reading Representing uncertainty through sound
