Tag Archives: AAG

Geothink Programme Guide for the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2017 Annual Meeting

By Suthee Sangiambut

The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers will be in Boston, MA from 5 April to 9 April 2017

The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers will be in Boston, MA from 5 April to 9 April 2017

Geothink once again has a strong presence at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, this time to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Make sure not to miss two very special sessions: The Dark Side of Open Data Part One and Part Two, organized by our very own Geothink co-applicants.
See below for a compiled list of Geothink co-applicant and student presentations, discussions, and panel appearances. You can also search the programme here.

Remember to tweet at us (@geothinkca) and use #geothink and #AAG2017 conference tags.

Wednesday 5 April 08:00 – 09:40
1117 Information geographies: Social dimensions of Web 2.0 cartographies
Location: Room 206, Hynes, Second Level

08:00 Laura Garcia is presenting Are individuals responsible for their own privacy in the geoweb

Wednesday 5 April 08:00 – 09:40
1123 Emerging Field Methods for Environmental Perceptions and Behavior
Location: Room 303, Hynes, Third Level

08:00 Edward Millar is chairing the session and presenting on The Cottage Effect: Investigating Spatial Bias in Citizen Science Using a Comparative Analysis

Wednesday 5 April 12:40 – 14:20
1457 The Dark Side of Open Data – Part One
Location: Gardner A, Sheraton, Third Floor

Pamela Robinson, Peter Johnson, and Teresa Scassa are organizers. Peter Johnson is chairing the session.
12:40 Suthee Sangiambut and Laura Garcia are Interrogating the open in open data from interdisciplinary perspectives
13:00 Renee Sieber is unveiling Façades of Openness in Government
13:20 Elizabeth Judge and Tenille Brown are presenting “Tort, Open Data, and the Geoweb: A Framework for Assessing Negligence”
13:40 March Burchfield is detailing When a mandate for transparency and open data culture is not quite ready for prime time
14:00 Jon Corbett and Shelley Cook explain How open is your redlining policy? Exploring geospatial data sharing tools to improve homeless service provision in British Columbia, Canada.


Wednesday 5 April 14:40 – 16:20
1557 The Dark Side of Open Data – Part Two
Location: Gardner A, Sheraton, Third Floor

Pamela Robinson, Peter Johnson, and Teresa Scassa are organizers. Renee Sieber is chairing the session.
15:00 Peter Johnson presents on Municipal Open Data: A Slow Death?
15:20 Teresa Scassa presents Government use of georeferenced social media data and analytics: challenges for transparent and open government
15:40 Keira Webster and Pamela Robinson present Fostering the ‘Time is Now’ Mentality: the Role of Open Data in Urban Climate Resilience
16:00 Pamela Robinson presents Unlocking the Civic Potential of Open Data: Whose job is it?


Wednesday 5 April 16:40 – 18:20
1633 Spatial Decision Support Across Disciplines: Scholarship, Pedagogy and Practice
Location: Room 313, Hynes, Third Level

Rob Feick is a panellist

Thursday 6 April 15:20 – 17:00
2591 Urban-economic perspectives on technology
Location: Nantucket, Marriott, Fourth Floor

Renee Sieber is a discussant

Friday 7 April 13:20 – 15:00
3441 Big data and data privacy
Location: Liberty C, Sheraton, Second Floor

14:20 Rob Feick will speak on The spatial disconnect problem

Saturday 8 April 13:20 – 15:00
4469 Symposium on Human Dynamics in Smart and Connected Communities: Whither ‘human dynamics’ within geography?
Location: Regis, Marriott, Third Floor

Renee Sieber is a discussant

Saturday 8 April 15:20 – 17:00
4586 Trees in the City 3: Social and Ecological Influences in the Urban Forest
Location: Salon I, Marriott, Fourth Floor

16:20 James Steenberg is presenting Counter-intuitive Relationships Between Housing Renovation, Socioeconomic Status, and Urban Forest Ecosystems

Saturday 8 April 17:20 – 19:00
4638 Digital \\ Human \\ Labour 5: Panel
Location: Independence East, Sheraton, Second Floor

Renee Sieber is a discussant

Sunday 9 April 16:00 – 17:40
5583 Learning and Applying Tools in Geography: Interdisciplinary Applications of GIS
Location: Exeter, Marriott, Third Floor

Renee Sieber and Jon Corbett are panellists

Geothink at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers

By Drew Bush

From March 29 to April 2, 2016, Geothink’s students, co-applicants, and collaborators presented their research and met with colleagues at the now concluded 2016 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. Over the week, Geothinkers gave 11 presentations, organized six sessions, chaired five sessions, and were panellists on four sessions. See who attended here.

“This year’s AAG provided a great opportunity to get geographically diverse Geothinkers together,” Victoria Fast, a recently graduated doctoral student in Ryerson University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, wrote in an e-mail to Geothink.ca. “I can’t think of a better place for a meeting about a special journal issue on open data; there are so many fresh, uncensored ideas flying around the conference, both inside and outside of sessions.”

Of particular note for Fast was Panel Session 1475 Gender & GIScience (see her Geothink.ca guest post here). Panelists in the session included Geothink Head Renee Sieber, associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment; And, Geothink collaborator Sarah Elwood, a professor in University of Washington’s Department of Geography.

Others agreed.

“A panel on gender and GIScience was refreshing and enlightening,” Geothink Co-Applicant Scott Bell, a professor of Geography and Planning at University of Saskatchewan, wrote to Geothink.ca.

“My presentation was in a day long symposium on human dynamism,” he added. “It summarized a recently published Geothink aligned paper on human mobility tracking and active transportation (published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science). It seemed to go over pretty well, I’m glad I was in the day-long event as the room was packed most of the day.”

For others, the high cost of the location meant they couldn’t stay for a full week or attend every single session. Still they reported good turnout by members of the Geothink team.

“This year we did not organize a specific panel or panels, or specific sessions to showcase Geothink work,” wrote Geothink Co-Applicant Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in Information Law and professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. “This meant that our presentations were dispersed across a variety of different sessions, on different days of the week.”

Many Geothinkers were also intimately involved in running parts of the conference.

“This was a standout AAG for me,” wrote Geothink researcher Alexander Aylett, a professor and researcher at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, who ran three sessions (Find an overview of what Aylette’s sessions did at www.smartgreencities.org). In collaboration with Andrés Lluque-Ayla from Durham University we ran a full day of sessions on the overlap between “Smart” and “Sustainable” cities.   We had some excellent presentations—including one from fellow Geothinker Pamela Robinson—and a strong turn out throughout the whole day. (Even at 8 AM, which was a shock to me!).”

For some students, it was the first time they had attended the meeting or presented their own research.

“This was my first time at the AAG,” said Geothink Newsletter Editor, Suthee Sangiambut, a maser’s student in McGill University’s Department of Geography with Sieber. “I was quite excited to be at the event and was able to meet all kinds of geographers, all of whom had different ideas on what geography exactly is.”

“It was great to see how global events of the past years were shaping our discussions on the Geoweb, privacy, surveillance, national identity, immigration, and more,” he added. “Those at the Disrupt Geo session were able to hear perspectives from private sector and civil society sides, which was quite refreshing and is something I would like to see more of in the future.”

The AAG annual meeting has been held every year since the association’s founding in 1904. This year’s conference included more than 9,000 attendees.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca. We also want to thank Victoria Fast for her willingness to share photos from the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting.

Please find an abstract for the presentation mentioned in this article below.

Leveraging Sensor Networks to Study Human Spatial Behavior

Abstract:
In the past decade society has entered a technological period characterized by mobile and smart computing that supports input and processing from users, services, and numerous sensors. The smartphones that most of us carry in our pockets offer the ability to integrate input from sensors monitoring various external and internal sources (e.g., accelerometer, magnetometer, microphone, GPS, wireless internet, Bluetooth). These relatively raw inputs are processed on the phones to provide us with a seemingly unlimited number of applications. Furthermore, these raw inputs can be integrated and processed in ways that can offer novel representations of human behavior, both dissagregate and aggregate. As a result, new opportunities to examine and better understand human spatial behaviour are available. An application we report here involved monitoring of a group of people over an extended period of time. Monitoring is timed at relatively tightly spaced intervals (every 2 minutes). Such a research setting lends itself to both planned and natural experiments; the later of which emerge as a result of the regular and on going nature of data collection. We will report on both a natural experiment  and planned observations resulting from 3 separate implementations of our smartphone based observations. The natural experiment that emerged in the context of our most recent month-long monitoring study of 28 participants using mobile phone-based ubiquitous sensor monitoring will be our focus, but will be contextualized with related patterns from earlier studies. The implications for public health and transportation planning are discussed.

Geothink Program Guide for the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2016 Annual Meeting

By Drew Bush

The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers will be in San Francisco, CA from March 29 to April 2.

The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers will be in San Francisco, CA from March 29 to April 2.

A large number of Geothinkers will be presenting at this year’s American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA the last week in March. You won’t want to miss two of our co-applicants and one of our students making presentations on Tuesday in the 10:00 AM session Data in action: Tracing the open data experiment. Other highlights include Renee Sieber and Sarah Elwood as panellists in Gender & GIScience.

Below we’ve compiled the schedule for all of Geothink’s co-applicants, collaborators and students who will be presenters, panelists, organizers, and chairs during the conference. Find a PDF of this program here. We hope you find this useful for finding the right sessions to join. You can also find the full searchable preliminary AAG program here.

If you’re not able to make the conference, you can follow along on Twitter and use our list of Twitter handles below to join the conversation with our participants.

Join the Conversation on Twitter:
Alex Aylett: @openalex_                   Peter Johnson: @peterajohnson
Tenille Brown: @TenilleEBrown      Pamela Robinson: @pjrplan
Jonathan Corbett: @joncorbett      Teresa Scassa: @teresascassa
Sarah Elwood: @SarahElwood1      Renee Sieber: @RE_Sieber
Victoria Fast: @VVFast                      Suthee Sangiambut: @notgregorypeck
Sara Harrison: @Sara_Harrison79  Scott Bell: @scottyBgeo
Stéphane Roche: @Geodoc31

And remember to use the conference hashtag #AAG2016 and our hashtag #Geothink or handle @geothinkca when you Tweet.

Come to our Sessions at AAG 2015:

Tuesday, March 29

Wednesday, March 30

Thursday, March 31

Friday, April 1

Saturday, April 2

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Image Source: Zheng Zeng, Creative Commons 4.0

Our Take: Geothink at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2015

By Drew Bush

Andrea Minano at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

Andrea Minano at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

From April 21 to April 25 2015, Geothink’s students, team, and collaborators presented their research and met with colleagues in Chicago, Illinois at the now concluded 2015 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. Over the week, Geothinkers gave 16 presentations, ran a panel discussion, presented posters, organized and chaired four sessions, and gave two plenary speeches. See who attended here.

“The AAG is always an excellent conference but this year I think was the best one I’ve attended,” Harrison Smith, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, wrote in an e-mail to Geothink.ca. “The Geothink community was in full force and we gave some excellent presentations that definitely put us on the map.”

Of his own work, Harrison reported positive results as well. Find his abstract here and below.

“I received some very excellent questions and positive feedback from the audience,” he added. “I have also been given the opportunity to further develop my paper into a journal article for peer-review by the invitation of a member of the audience, and so I will continue to develop this research for Geothink and the larger academic community.”

Others held a similar opinion of the conference that attracted over 4,500 presentations, posters, workshops, and field trips by leading scholars, experts, and researchers in the field.

“Fabulous,” Claus Rinner, an associate professor at Ryerson University, wrote of this year’s conference. He noted that a poster he presented with his graduate student Victoria Fast “was quite an important piece for me, as it juxtaposed two of our very recent ‘results’ with those of a former student, all meant to better frame future VGI and Geoweb research.”

Geothink collaborator Muki Haklay, professor at University College London, also hosted the session entitled Beyond motivation? Understanding enthusiasm in citizen science and volunteered geographic information and two more sessions on OpenStreetMap Studies. He wrote extensively about these sessions and the conference on his own personal blog as well.

“As you can tell from all the blogging that I’ve done, it went really well,” he wrote in an e-mail to Geothink.ca. “The Public Participation GIS and Citizen Science sessions that I’ve attended, and the OpenStreetMap Studies sessions were all very interesting and stimulating, and helped to progress the thinking in these areas.”

Geothink held its pre-conference workshop on Monday, April 20 entitled “Citizen-Government Relations for a Digitally-Enabled and Location-Aware World.” Presentations included those by Scott Bell,  Piotr Jankowski, Renee Sieber and one by Ashley Zhang, Rob Feick and Stephane Roche among others.

“I was fascinated by Professor [Teresa] Scassa’s research on the legal issues when we open up transit data,” Sieber wrote to Geothink.ca about a workshop she said exposed everyone “to the sheer diversity of Geothink, from apps that enable the sharing economy, to privacy implications of transit data, to the participatory potential of civic hackathons, to graphical user interfaces for the intellectually disabled, to the frontier of urban citizen science.”

Discussions included plans for two forthcoming books, the first an empirical book devoted to findings and the second a compilation of essays on the future of the Geospatial web and open data. Find out more about the presentations and plans in the most recent edition of the newsletter.

For some, giving a presentation at the AAG itself led to important reunions with colleagues while also providing opportunities for new experiences.

“While in Chicago, I re-connected with fellow Geothink partners, engaged with a series of scholars who have influenced my research, attended my first mapathon, and met those working in the geospatial industry,” Andrea Minano, a masters candidate at Waterloo University, wrote. “Overall, this experience exceeded my expectations and I am thankful for the opportunity to network with such a vast range of individuals working in the field of geography.”

The AAG annual meeting has been held every year since the association’s founding in 1904.

Please find abstracts for presentations mentioned in the article below.

“Smart cities should mean sharing cities”: Situating smart cities within the sharing economy
By Harrison Smith, University of Toronto
Abstract:
This paper situates smart cities within a larger global movement of the sharing economy. The sharing economy, exemplified by services such as airbnb.com and Uber, has emerged as a new niche in entrepreneurial capitalism and global consumer culture that targets highly mobile populations, and exploits web 2.0 mapping technology and location based services that have become increasingly necessary to navigating smart cities. This has not only brought forth questions of how incumbent service providers such as hotels and taxi companies will respond to such competition in the market, but also the underlying regulatory challenges for municipalities, particularly as many sharing economy enthusiasts press for libertarian self-regulation. This paper seeks to: 1) situate smart cities within a sharing economy by focusing on the cultural and affective relations between cities, global capitalism, and geo-spatial media; 2) outline the discourses of regulating the sharing economy as it presented by incumbent service providers, municipalities, and sharing economy entrepreneurs; and 3) to present preliminary findings of a comparative study of various North American cities as they have either sought to embrace, regulate, or reject the sharing economy.

Conceptualizing Volunteered Geographic Information and the Participatory Geoweb
By Victoria Fast,* Ryerson University; Claus Rinner, Ryerson University; Blake Byron Walker, Simon Fraser University
Abstract:
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) represents the contribution of local knowledge by citizens through the pathways of the participatory geospatial Web (pGeoweb). These crowdsourced data and user-generated geographic content are gaining influence on government operations, urban and regional planning, and a broad range of societal decisions. Despite this growing influence, there are few conceptualizations of VGI and the pGeoweb.

This poster summarizes our research in three directions: (1) taking a holistic systems perspective on the projects, participants, and Geoweb components employed in creating VGI; (2) examining the effectiveness of public participation on the Geoweb through the study of engagement, empowerment, and enactment processes; and (3) classifying user contributions by data formats and contents types.

Some of our results include the view of VGI as an information product that is well within the realm of GIS concepts of data input, management, analysis, and presentation. We also argue that the term “VGI”, as presently used, should be replaced by volunteered geographic “data” (and/or “content”). Even though pGeoweb projects are often bottom-up initiatives, we posit that there still is a “provider” with (sometimes covert) authority over the project. Finally, we characterize pGeoweb projects by their data/content types, including locations, categorical observations, numeric measurements, parameter settings in models, annotations, narratives, stories, media files, and opinions. Accordingly, we distinguish crowdmapping, citizen sensing, citizen reporting, map-based discourse, and geosocial media applications.

Overall, these three interrelated conceptualizations will strengthen the role of Geographers and GIScientists in the burgeoning field of VGI and pGeoweb research and development.

 

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Geothink Program Guide for the Associaton of American Geographers (AAG) 2015 Annual Meeting

This year's American Association of Geographer's (AAG) Annual Meeting is in Chicago, Illinois.

This year’s American Association of Geographer’s (AAG) Annual Meeting is in Chicago, Illinois (Photo courtesy of AAG.org).

By Drew Bush

A long line-up of Geothinkers will be presenting at this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Chicago next week. You’ll definitely not want to miss four of our team members as panelists on Civic technology: governance, equity and inclusion considerations on Thursday at 8:00 AM. Other highlights include presentations by Geothink Principal Investigator Renee Sieber and our students including Cheryl Power and Tenille Brown.

Below we’ve compiled the schedule for all of the project’s team members, collaborators and students who will be presenters, panelists and chairs during the conference. Find a PDF of our guide here. We hope you find this useful for finding the right sessions to join. You can also find the full preliminary AAG program here.

If you’re not able to make the conference, you can follow along on Twitter and use our list of Twitter handles below to join the conversation with our participants.

Join the Conversation on Twitter
Alex Aylett: @openalex_                                    Peter Johnson: @peterajohnson
Zorica Nedovic-Budic: @TurasCities               Andrea Minano: @Andrea_Minano
Tenille Brown: @TenilleEBrown                       Claus Rinner: @ClausRinner
Jonathan Corbett: @joncorbett                       Pamela Robinson: @pjrplan
Sarah Elwood: @SarahElwood1                       Teresa Scassa: @teresascassa
Victoria Fast: @VVFast                                       Renee Sieber: @RE_Sieber
Muki Haklay: @mhaklay                                    Harrison Smith: @Ambiveillance

And remember to use the conference hashtag #AAG2015 and our hashtag #Geothink or address @geothinkca when you Tweet.

Come to our Sessions at AAG 2015

Tuesday, April 21

Wednesday, April 22

Thursday, April 23

Friday, April 24

Saturday, April 25

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.