To all you Geohipsters out there

Have you heard of the Geohipster blog? It’s the self-described place for people who ‘grow their own organic vertices, use gluten-free topology or only geocode by hand, in small batches’. And I give at a big recommendation, put it into your feed reader. And relax, you don’t need to be a fixie aficionado/-a in order to appreciate the Geohipster movement. Atanas … Continue reading To all you Geohipsters out there

Geocoding Twitter users – The #SwissGIS map

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with some Twitter-oriented hacks together with my friend Tom. A very preliminary result of these activities is what I call the #SwissGIS map. Some, just a little, history: Over the last few years, I have been collecting Switzerland-based Twitter users that talk about topics around GIS, cartography, webmapping and geomatics on a list called SwissGIS. Find … Continue reading Geocoding Twitter users – The #SwissGIS map

First two publications of 2014

I’ve mentioned it before, but now the official links have arrived for my latest work in user-generated content research: Together with Arzu Çöltekin and Gennady Andrienko I have published a paper titled Towards (re)constructing narratives from georeferenced photographs through visual analytics in The Cartographic Journal. You can find this official version here. Similarly, the article Uneven geographies of user-generated … Continue reading First two publications of 2014

Catch-up

The Future of GIS according to Esri I’ve been a bit busy recently with, for example, attending the Esri Partner Conference and Developer Summit. If you are interested in the latest news from the GIS world, you can read a review by a colleague and me over on the Ernst Basler + Partners’ geo-blog. Attending the … Continue reading Catch-up

What Google Autocomplete tells us about countries

Together with my collaborators in the “Information Geographies” project at the Oxford Internet Institute, I have published a blogpost that analyses Google Autocomplete. This is seemingly a popular pastime these days, but unlike the maps I have seen so far, we don’t just map the most prominent term for each country but actually visualise multiple categories, often in one map.

Why does it matter?

Autocomplete is Google’s ‘type-ahead’ suggestion algorithm: As soon as you enter a word or two into the Google Search field, the algorithm will try to guess the completion of your query and offers you a list of likely queries. This functionality is baked into Google’s interface and cannot be turned off by the user.

It’s unclear if and how much such algorithms affect our perception of the subjects that we are querying for. But we can certainly say that they reduce serendipity and can help reinforcing filter bubbles.

 

Google-Autocomplete-countries-Oxford-Internet-Institute-Ralph-Straumann

 

Data acquisition and cartographic technique

The data that went into these maps Continue reading “What Google Autocomplete tells us about countries”

The online perspective: Africa on Wikipedia

My friends and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute, Mark Graham and Stefano de Sabbata, are compiling a collection of maps and visualizations at geography.oii.ox.ac.uk that give insight into the contemporary geographies of knowledge:

  • Which places are connected with the online world? Which places are participants in the so-called participatory Web?
  • Which places are represented in online gazetteers, in online photo repositories, in social networks?
  • What places are reported on in traditional newspapers, in online events databases?
  • And, most importantly and in completion to all above questions: Which places aren’t?

Continue reading “The online perspective: Africa on Wikipedia”

Flickr as a vehicle of narrative: photos contextualised in space and time

After my project proposal had been accepted, I have attended a workshop at ETH Zurich, titled “Cartography & Narratives” organised by Barbara Piatte, Sébastien Caquard and Anne-Kathrin Reuschel in last summer. The goal of the workshop was to explore “mapping as a conceptual framework to improve our understating of narratives”. Narratives are “an expression in discourse of … Continue reading Flickr as a vehicle of narrative: photos contextualised in space and time

Eric Fischer: Mapmaker, artist and programmer

The Atlantic Cities has a nice portrait of Eric Fischer: Mapmaker, artist, or programmer?. If you have been following information visualization and geovisualization news online over the recent years, I bet you have come across Fischer’s work. A few examples: “Ultimately, almost everything I have been making tries to take the dim, distant glimpse of … Continue reading Eric Fischer: Mapmaker, artist and programmer

Journalists’ Twitter network

[Deutsch weiter unten] Recently, I’ve been looking into analysis and visualization of Twitter networks. So, David Bauer posting a list of 300+ German-speaking, Twitter-using journalists came just right. Scroll down to see the resulting network. By they way, you can find more information on the technical background of the production of these Twitter network visualizations in this post. [German] … Continue reading Journalists’ Twitter network