Some researchers in the Computer Science department (nary a journalists to be found) are doing some interesting work trying to determine the degree to which people in different regions talk about different things.  The assumption is, obviously, that newspapers are a good proxy for what people are talking about.  Still, some smart people are wrestling with interesting ways to understand journalism.  Be sure to check out the published paper at http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/mehler/mypapers/heatmap.pdf

spatial analysis of news sources

21 December 2006

Imaging the City:

Recent technological developments mark the city as a central and perhaps special space for human-computer interaction research and practice. Visions of ubiquitous computing, the resonance of the ‘urban probe’, and the proliferation of interactive mapping services speak to the significance of the urban landscape to studies of Human-Computer Interaction. But such visions and technologies require, produce and reproduce images of urban space that influence what these systems, and our interactions with them, are and might be. Developing and employing technologies for the urban environment requires visualization techniques that both reflect and challenge how we image, and consequently imagine, the city.

• How do we represent the city in HCI, and how do these representations inform HCI research and practice?
• What kinds of technological devices, services, and platforms support imaging the city now and might be created in the near future?
• How are and might these new representations of the city and urban imaging technologies be used for social and political ends?
• What new methods are required for developing technologies that image the city in new ways?
• What can we learn from the urban experience to design stronger representations and interfaces within HCI research and practice?

Disclosure: Rrove.com plays in the community mapping space. This post aims to highlight the innovations and the usefulness that others have made in this game. We haven’t added ourselves to this list – if you want to know more about Rrove, click here.

A community mapping website, in our definition, is a service that gets its members to map and define places. Through crowd-sourcing, these sites are building a database/directory of local and nearby locations that their users can discover and visit. Why is this important? We all know that search advertising is the fastest growing industry in the Internet. Within that market, local search is the up-and-comer. In the next few years, it will be the largest segment within search!

It’s refreshing to see how others have approached community mapping. Some have focused on map creation while others do it through mobile apps. More than that, some players have mapped the community of users to map the physical community (i.e. neighborhoods). Here’s how nine websites (all free) are doing it, what makes them awesome and how you can use their services in your Internet life.

Registration for the Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference has opened.  This year, there will be no conference registration fees but registration is still required.  Preliminary conference details available on the MAPS website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/pittsburgh2007/index.html

The Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference will take place March 28-31, 2007 at the Omni William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Agenda:

The conference will include a full compliment of workshops, panels and plenary sessions. The main plenary session is entitled GPS in a Crime Analysis Context- Practitioner Consideration, Research Needs." Panel session topics will include uses of spatial data analysis and GIS in corrections, parole, and probation, geography and crime, geographic profiling, offender travel behavior, NIBRS/incident-based data and mapping, international programs, impact of Hurricane Katrina on crime, crime analysis, spatial data analysis, policing issues, managing sex offenders, travel demand modeling, and more.  The conference also includes a map competition, and provides an excellent opportunity for researches and practitioners to network with each other.