Andrea Ballatore: Beyond GIS? The future of Cultural Geo-Analytics

Andrea Ballatore
Lecturer in Social and Cultural Informatics
Department of Digital Humanities,
King’s College London
https://aballatore.space
@a_ballatore
andrea.ballatore@kcl.ac.uk
Beyond GIS? The future of
Cultural Geo-Analytics
Keynote speech • 19th International Symposium on
Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems (W2GIS 2022)

W2GIS 2011 • PhD student
Katsumi Tanaka, Peter Fröhlich, Kyoung-Sook Kim •
Kyoto, Japan, March 3-4, 2011
2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami!
https://aballatore.space/2018/01/02/the-earth-trembles/
Computer Science

W2GIS 2011 • PhD student
Katsumi Tanaka, Peter Fröhlich, Kyoung-Sook Kim •
Kyoto, Japan, March 3-4, 2011
W2GIS 2022 • Keynote speaker
Johannes Blum, Farid Karimipour, Sabine Storandt •
University of Konstanz, Germany
2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami!
https://aballatore.space/2018/01/02/the-earth-trembles/
Computer Science
Geography
Digital Humanities

1. Transcending GIS?
2. Cultural analytics
in space and place
3. Does place exist?
4. My projects in cultural geo-
analytics
Outline

Part 1
Transcending GIS?

6
Is GIScience disappearing? !"
“spatial data science”
“geographic data science”
“spatial analytics”
“The geospatial industry is one of the
fastest growing sectors globally. A
recent report from Research and
Markets projected that it will grow from
$239.1 billion last year to more than
$502 billion in 2024” (DirectionsMag, 2022)
https://gisgeography.com
https://isappscience.org/

7
An ancillary science of space? #!
Working with a
domain discipline
E.g., urban planning, urban
geography, public health, museum
studies, industrial ecology, cognitive
psychology, tourism studies, music
https://medium.com/@brought_on
(They’re all wrong,
it’s PostGIS)

8
GIScientist or
GIS technician?
Who is in charge intellectually in your project? !
1997!

9
From multi- to trans-disciplinarity ➡
TODO
https://aballatore.space/2019/02/18/10-tips-for-interdisciplinary-research-careers

10
My tips for inter-trans-disciplinarity ✅
1. Interdisciplinarity of what?
2. Choose a core discipline!
3. Tell a good story about
your research
4. Choose your projects
carefully
5. Choose your collaborators
carefully
6. Write to a target audience
7. Think of the job market
8. Frame your
interdisciplinarity explicitly
9. Balance mono-disciplinary
and interdisciplinary
publications
10. Talk to disciplinary experts

11
My tips for inter-trans-disciplinarity ✅
1. Interdisciplinarity of what?
2. Choose a core discipline!
3. Tell a good story about
your research
4. Choose your projects
carefully
5. Choose your collaborators
carefully
6. Write to a target audience
7. Think of the job market
8. Frame your
interdisciplinarity explicitly
9. Balance mono-disciplinary
and interdisciplinary
publications
10. Talk to disciplinary experts
We should not just help nor try to
replace, but transform and transcend!

Part 2
Cultural analytics
in space and place

13
The spatial turn in the humanities !
“Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly
used reason that everything happens in space, but
because where things happen is critical to knowing
how and why they happen.”
Warf, B., & Arias, S. (Eds.). (2009). The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary
perspectives.
https://gistbok.ucgis.org/topic-keywords/spatial-turn-humanities

14
Culture in space and place? A constellation of niches

15
Culture as the amalgam of human activity"
“Culture is … the constituted amalgam of human
activity … culture can include a range, perhaps
even an endless range, of things. It includes
aspects of society, politics, and the economy.
Cultural geography … asks why cultural activities
happen in particular ways in particular [spatial]
contexts.
[T]he product of the intersection between context
and culture is place.”
(Anderson, 2018, p. 6, emphasis mine)

16
Culture as the arts!" # $
producers • consumers •
objects • cultural and creative
industries • place making
Where and why?

17
Cultural
Geo-Analytics
Methods
GIS • GeoAI
ML • GeoViz
Geoparsing
[Mixed]
Questions
culture + place
+ arts
+ media
Data sources
UGC
Social media
[Qualitative]
istockphoto.com
CGA

Part 3
Does place exist?
Place in Cultural Geo-Analytics

19
Slicing the world
“[any categorization relies on a]
degree of human-contributed
arbitrariness on a number of
different levels, and it is in general
marked by differences in the ways
different languages and cultures
structure or slice their worlds”
(Smith and Mark, 1998)
“Place” originates from the attribution of
human meanings to regions of physical space.
Babylonian Map of the World,
Imago Mundi (c. 600 BCE)

20
Is “place” actually useful?
Place as a core concept

21
Is “place” actually useful? It is.
But we have to define it properly.
“The main result of the article is a demonstration that
the notion of place fits existing concepts of spatial
information, when these are adequately exploited and
combined. … The challenge is not to find data models
for places”
Ross Purves, Werner Kuhn et al. (2019). Places in information science
• Field
• Object
• Network
Place as a core concept

22
The best-selling model: Place as an object
Egg-yolk model for
indeterminate regions
(Cohn and Gotts, 1996)
Rome as an object
on Google Maps
?
spatial
extension
names
physical
attributes
social
roles
affordances
identity

23
Place boundaries as a
probabilistic field
Cognition and social
agreements
“Where is downtown
Santa Barbara?”
Montello et al. (2003). Where’s Downtown?: Behavioral
Methods for Determining Referents of Vague Spatial
Queries.

24
Place as a network
Commuting patterns
https://geographical.co.uk
Relations • Flows • Dynamics
Gravity model
(Haynes et al, 1985)
Graph database (Neo4j, 2019)

25
Place can be represented in GIS
Source: ONS, 2019
(if we define it well enough)

Part 4
Some
projects
5. Googling places
2. Museum
analytics
1. Littering place
4. Food
environments
3. Recommending
walks

27
1. Littering place
Place references in 20,821 film plots from Wikipedia
with Stefano Cucurachi et al. (U. Leiden)
Places as recurring
patterns of collective
behaviour

28
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2021/06/how-a-dutch-man-
collecting-400000-pieces-of-litter-ended-up-on-a-scientific-paper

29
1. Littering place

30
1. Littering place
Understanding spatial
behaviour to change it

31
2. Museum analytics
0
100
200
0 400 800 1,200
Pop. (thou.)
Museums
Pop.
(thou.)
0
50
100
150
0 20 40 60 80
Museums
No.
LADs
0 10 25 80
0
200
450
1,200
Museums and
resident population
(Local Authority
Districts)
0 100 km
with Fiona Candlin,
Alex Poulovassilis et al.
From local geographies…

32
2. Museum analytics with Fiona Candlin,
Museum annual growth rate
133
225
114
34
107
58
318
262
236
122
111
104
2.8
3.6
1.3
1.3
1.5
3.1
5.9
2.9
4.2
3.9
1.9
1.9
59
74
52
27
83
18
99
131
115
54
74
72
1.2
1.2
0.6
1
1.1
1
1.8
1.4
2.1
1.7
1.3
1.3
29
29
41
30
50
6
49
82
58
26
44
48
0.6
0.5
0.5
1.1
0.7
0.3
0.9
0.9
1
0.8
0.8
0.9
11
2
0.1
50
54
54
29
72
33
133
91
59
64
62
78
1
0.9
0.6
1.1
1
1.8
2.5
1
1.1
2
1.1
1.4
169
252
158
57
157
45
325
365
348
124
162
140
3.5
4.1
1.8
2.2
2.2
2.4
6
4
6.3
4
2.8
2.6
1
13
10
3
11
1
21
14
3
5
5
4
0.2
0.1
0.1
0.2
0.1
0.4
0.2
0.1
0.2
0.1
0.1
Wales
Scotland
Northern Ireland
Yorkshire and The H.
West Midlands
South West
South East
North West
North East
London
East of England
East Midlands
small
(per 100k)
0
1
2
3
Divergence
from
regional
average
(z-score)
English
Regions
Nations
medium
(per 100k)
large
(per 100k)
huge
(per 100k)
g
o
v
e
r
n
m
.
(
p
e
r
1
0
0
k
)
(
p
e
r
1
0
0
k
)
(
p
e
r
1
0
0
k
)
i
n
d
e
p
e
n
d
.
u
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
Size Governance
Regional geography
…to regional geographies…

33
2. Museum analytics
0
100
200
0 400 800 1,200
Pop. (thou.)
Museums
Pop.
(thou.)
0
50
100
150
0 20 40 60 80
Museums
No.
LADs
0 10 25 80
0
200
450
1,200
Museums and
resident population
(Local Authority
Districts)
0 100 km
with Fiona Candlin,
…to global (problematic) geographies

34
3. Learning and recommending
leisure walks
Funded by
with Stefano Cavazzi

35
3. Learning and recommending
leisure walks
Funded by
with Stefano Cavazzi

36
4. Digital food environments
with Steve Cummins, Laura Cornelsen
and Alexandra Kalbus (LSHTM)
istockphoto.com

37
with Simon Scheider and
Bas Spierings (Uni. of Utrecht)
How is place
mediated online?
Why do we search
for places?
5. Searching for places

38
with Simon Scheider and
Bas Spierings (Uni. of Utrecht)
Search makes place
”Practices, algorithms,
and rules of search govern
the content, ideas, places,
and commercial
opportunities to which
users are exposed”
(Shaw et al. 2014)
5. The culture of search

39
5. Googling places
2. Museum
analytics
1. Littering place
4. Food
environments
3. Recommending
walks
Cultural
Geo
Analytics
culture
+
digital
+
place
+
media
+
computation

Andrea Ballatore
Lecturer in Social and Cultural
Informatics
Department of Digital Humanities,
King’s College London
https://aballatore.space
@a_ballatore
andrea.ballatore@kcl.ac.uk
Thanks!

Andrea Ballatore: Beyond GIS? The future of Cultural Geo-Analytics

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