I put some open geospatial datasets on GitHub

I spent some time collecting open geospatial datasets to be used in an educational context. All original datasets are freely available online with open data licenses (see the dataset attribution for details). All the datasets in this repository have been selected, cleaned, harmonised, and repackaged in open formats (GeoJSON and GeoTiff) for GIS exercises in a higher-education context. This … Continue reading I put some open geospatial datasets on GitHub →

[R tool] Google Places API

While doing research on points of interest, I coded a new R tool to retrieve research data from Google Maps. Google Maps is a great source of points of interest data, but it heavily limits the number of results. This R script recursively generates sub-queries, until all POIs have been retrieved. The results are generated … Continue reading [R tool] Google Places API →

[R tool] Google Trends comparator for 5+ terms

As part of our research on the geography of search engines, we coded a new R tool, including ideas from my colleague Simon Scheider (Universiteit Utrecht). Google Trends is a great source of "big data" about search behaviour at a large scale, but it limits the number of query terms to 5. Because of the … Continue reading [R tool] Google Trends comparator for 5+ terms →