The Eilot region, near Eilat in Israel, is considered locally as a remote part of the Negev desert in Israel (it is about 3.5h drive from the population centres of Tel Aviv). It is an arid desert, with very sparse population - about 4000 people who live in communal settlements - mostly kibbutzim in an area … Continue reading Learning from the Arava Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research workshop
COST ENERGIC is a network of researchers across Europe (and beyond) that are interested in research crowdsourced geographic information, also known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The acronym stands for 'Co-Operation in Science & Technology' (COST) through 'European Network Researching Geographic Information Crowdsourcing' (ENREGIC). I have written about this programme before, through events such as twitter … Continue reading New book: European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information
The Eye on Earth Summit, which was held in Abu Dhabi last week, allowed me to immerse myself in the topics that I've been researching for a long time: geographic information, public access to environmental information, participation, citizen science, and the role of all these in policy making. My notes (day 1 morning, day 1 afternoon, … Continue reading Environmental information: between scarcity/abundance and emotions/rationality
Considering how long Reneé Sieber (McGill University) and I know each other, and working in similar areas (participatory GIS, participatory geoweb, open data, socio-technical aspects of GIS, environmental information), I'm very pleased that a collaborative paper that we developed together is finally published. The paper 'The epistemology(s) of volunteered geographic information: a critique' took some … Continue reading New paper: The epistemology(s) of volunteered geographic information: a critique
The workshop, which is part of the Programmable City project (which is funded by the European Research Council), is held in Maynooth on today and tomorrow. The papers and discussions touched multiple current aspects of technology and the city: Big Data, Open Data, crowdsourcing, and critical studies of data and software. The notes below are … Continue reading Data and the City workshop (day 1)
The last day of AAG 2015 is about citizen science and OpenStreetMap studies. The session Beyond motivation? Understanding enthusiasm in citizen science and volunteered geographic information was organised together with Hilary Geoghegan. We were interest to 'explore and debate current research and practice moving beyond motivation, to consider the associated enthusiasm, materials and meanings of participating in citizen … Continue reading AAG 2015 notes – day 4 – Citizen Science & OpenStreetMap Studies
The Association of American Geographers conference is just around the corner - between 21 and 24 April, held in Chicago. I've already marked some sessions that I think worth noting (and was involved in the organisation of several sessions, too). Here is a list of interesting sessions, following suggestion to do so by David O'Sullivan and … Continue reading AAG sessions – Critical GIScience, GeoWeb and Citizen Science
A new book has just been published about OpenStreetMap and Geographic Information Science. The book, which was edited by Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, Alexander Zipf, Peter Mooney, Marco Helbich is “OpenStreetMap in GISciene : Experiences, Research, and applications” contains 16 chapters on different aspects of OpenStreetMap in GIScience including 1) Data Management and Quality, 2) Social Context, 3) … Continue reading OpenStreetMap in GIScience – Experiences, Research, and Applications
After a very full first day, the second day opened with a breakfast that provided opportunity to meet the board of the Citizen Science Association (CSA), and to talk and welcome people who got up early (starting at 7am) for another full day of citizen science. Around the breakfast tables, new connections were emerging. Similarly … Continue reading Citizen Science 2015 (second day)
The Association of American Geographers is coordinating an effort to create an International Encyclopedia of Geography. Plans started in 2010, with an aim to see the 15 volumes project published in 2015 or 2016. Interestingly, this shows that publishers and scholars are still seeing the value in creating subject-specific encyclopedias. On the other hand, the weird … Continue reading International Encyclopedia of Geography – Quality Assurance of VGI
Po Ve Sham - Muki Haklay's personal blog 