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Speakers: Jennie Williams and Jon Reades
Abstract: Much has been written about the rise of ‘big data’ and its potential impacts on the discipline of Geography; however, the attention of quantitative geographers has naturally tended to focus on the opportunities afforded by what is, in essence, big coordinate data. A few geographers have invited us to look ‘beyond the geotag’ (Crampton et al. 2013) to ways of ‘making big data small’ (Poorthuis & Zook 2017), but these hybrid approaches rely on the careful curation of source data and don’t readily scale to the explosion in available textual content in ‘born digital’ archives.
In this seminar we will attempt to achieve two things: to begin to sketch out a ‘geography of geography’ (Livingstone 1995) using 45,000 dissertations submitted over more 30 years to the British Library; and to provoke debate on the potential contribution of computer to archival research in our discipline using a demonstration of ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2013) built on top of Natural Language Processing techniques.
Accessing this event
Please contact the event organiser for a link to this presentation. You will be able to view it until the Q&A session at 16:00 on Wednesday 13 May 2020.
About the speakers
Jennie Williams is a PhD student in the Department of Geography.
Dr Jon Reades joined the Department of Geography in 2013 as Lecturer in Quantitative Human Geography.
Previously, Jon had been a Research Associate for two years at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, following the completion of his MPhil/PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning. He also holds a BA (1997) in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
In the intervening years, Jon worked for a database mining and marketing start-up, based in New York and London, in a range of capacities: graphic designer, web application developer, and project manager. This work stimulated his interest in 'big data' and its potential as a platform for examining and acting upon 'smart cities'.
In his research, Jon has collaborated with public and private sector organisations, such as Transport for London, Telecom Italia, AT&T, British Telecom, and IBM's Smarter Cities lab near Dublin.