[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 →

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 →