Monthly Archives: December 2013

Code/Space book reviews

Code spaceRob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s book ‘Code/Space’, published by MIT Press, is the focus of a book review round-table in the journal Dialogues in Human Geography.  The reviews are by Paul Adams, Aharon Kellerman, Sam Kinsley and Mark Wilson.  The authors then respond and reflect on the book in a short piece, ‘Code/space and the nature, production and enrolment of software‘.

Other reviews of the book include:

  • Taylor Shelton’s review in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1): 247-49.
  • Mike Batty’s review in Computational Culture, 1 December 2011.
  • Gwilym Eades’s review in Cartographica, 47(2): 140-1.
  • Francis Harvey’s review in IJGIS, March 2012.
  • Matthew Wilson’s review in Cultural Geographies, 19(3): 418-19.
  • Matthew Zook’s review in Regional Studies, 46(8): 1105-06.
  • Peter Adey’s review in the Journal of Transport Geography, 26: 177-76.

Big data and human geography forum

A forum on big data and human geography has just been published in Dialogues in Human Geography 3(3), November 2013.  It includes a paper by Rob Kitchin on the opportunities, challenges and risks of big data to geographic scholarship.  Here’s a full list of contributions:

Mark Graham and Taylor Shelton: Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography, pp. 255-261,

Rob Kitchin: Big data and human geography: Opportunities, challenges and risks, pp. 262-267

Evelyn Ruppert: Rethinking empirical social sciences, pp. 268-273

Michael Batty: Big data, smart cities and city planning, pp. 274-279

Michael F Goodchild: The quality of big (geo)data, pp. 280-284

Sean P Gorman: The danger of a big data episteme and the need to evolve geographic information systems, pp. 285-291

Sandra González-Bailón: Big data and the fabric of human geography, pp. 292-296

Trevor J Barnes: Big data, little history, pp. 297-302

Webinar: Data derived from Traditional Knowledge and Cybercartography

On Wednesday, 11th of December, Tracey P. Lauriault, a post doctoral researcher on the Programmable City Project led a webinar with the Canadian Federal Government GeoConnections program on the topic of legal issues with traditional knowledge and cybercartography in the Canada’s North.

The webinar discussed the results of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Funded Partnership Development Grant entitled Mapping the Legal and Policy Boundaries of Digital Cartography led by Dr. R. Fraser Taylor of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), Carleton University, and Dr. Teresa Scassa of the Faculty of Law, Centre of Law, Technology and Culture (CLTS) at the University of Ottawa, including the Canadian Internet Public Policy Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and GeoConnections.

The issues presented were:

· Traditional Knowledge (TK) and cybercartography;
· The complexities of Intellectual Property rights and TK;
· Challenges and possible solutions with regard to Western law and TK;
· The role of collaborative relationships in cybercartography in the North.

While this work was not part of the Programmable City Project, it does demonstrate the nuanced issues related to the production of data, in this case the uneasy relationship between the protection of traditional knowledge and western concepts of law, especially intellectual property law which protects creative works produced by individuals while traditional knowledge grounded in communities that are collectively owned cannot benefit from these protections.

A French version of the Webinar will be presented by Lauriault on Friday, Dec. 13.

Presentation Videos from ‘Open Data and Evidence Informed Decision Making’ seminar

Here are the videos of the seminars and links to the slides, as only presenters are seen in the videos.

1. An Open Data Story (Slides, Bio), by Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, Programmable City Project, NUIM

Open Data Event Talk One from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

2. Open Government Data: The Fingal Story (Slides, Bio), by Dominic Byrne, Head of Information Technology with Fingal County Council.

Open Data Event Talk Two from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

3. Experiences as a producer, consumer and observer of open data (Slides, Bio), By Dr Peter Mooney, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funded Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, NUIM

Open Data Event Talk Three from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

Thanks to Alam Moore and to James White, both Programmable City PhD candidates for editing and posting the videos.