Catch Floatingsheep at AAG 2014 in Tampa

The Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers is upon us! Find below a close-to-comprehensive schedule of where you can find your favorite Ovis geographers during the conference, as well as some places you can find other interesting stuff, too!

Tuesday, April 8

The conference kicks off with three successive sessions organized by Matt and Mark, in which they'll also be presenting.

1156 Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities I: Practicing Data Shadows
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Grand Salon E, Marriott, Second Floor

1256 Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities II: Coding Data Shadows
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Grand Salon E, Marriott, Second Floor

1456 Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities III: Tracking Data Shadows
12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in Grand Salon E, Marriott, Second Floor

Running concurrent with those sessions will be a couple of other sheep-related sessions that Monica has a hand in. First is a panel on 'tribes' organized by Renee Sieber, which Monica will be participating in. After that is a paper session organized by Monica and Joe Eckert, in which Ate will be presenting a paper.

1122 Battle of the Tribes: geoweb, GIS, GI Science, cyberGIS, neogeography
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 22, TCC, First Floor

1216 Alternative Computation and Unconventional Spaces
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 16, TCC, First Floor

Ironsheep 2014 will be held from 5-9pm on Monday evening at the Tampa Bay Wave. Check here for more details.

Wednesday, April 9

Matt and Matt 'the' Wilson also have organized a star-studded panel session on the future of GIScience education featuring Sarah Elwood, Nadine Schuurmann and Mike Goodchild, among others.

2154 Visioning GIScience Education
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Grand Salon C, Marriott, Second Floor

There's also the alt.conference on Big Data co-organized by friends-of-sheep Joe Eckert, Jim Thatcher and Andy Shears. Various floating sheeple will be participating in these sessions at different times and in different capacities.

2210 alt.conference on Big Data: Opening Panel
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

2410 alt.conference on Big Data: Lightning Panels
12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

2510 alt.conference on Big Data: Tech Demos
2:40 PM - 4:20 PM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

2610 alt.conference on Big Data: Lightning Talk Discussion
4:40 PM - 6:20 PM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

The Annual Kentucky-Arizona Wildcat Party, where you can often find the floating sheeple, will be held on Wednesday night at the Double Decker (1721 E. 7th St.), starting at 8pm.

Thursday, April 10

On Thursday, Taylor has organized two sessions on the smart city with Alan Wiig from Temple University. Taylor will be presenting in these sessions, along with Matt Wilson and Rob Kitchin.

3130 Thinking the 'smart city': power, politics and networked urbanism I
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 30A, TCC, Fourth Floor

3230 Thinking the 'smart city': power, politics and networked urbanism II
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 30A, TCC, Fourth Floor

Friday, April 11

Monica will be presenting her research in the Nystrom Award session, part of the competition for the best paper from a recent dissertation in geography.

4111 J. Warren Nystrom Award Session 1
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 11, TCC, First Floor

Jen Jack Gieseking and Luke Bergmann have also organized a trio of sessions around digital geographies. While none of the sheeple will be direct participants, some UK Geographers will be participating, just for good measure.

4132 Digital Geographies, Geographies of Digitalia: Interventions into Digital Thought and Practice
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 32, TCC, Fourth Floor

4232 Digital Geographies, Geographies of Digitalia: The Digital in Place
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 32, TCC, Fourth Floor

4432 Digital Geographies, Geographies of Digitalia: Discursive Productions of Digital Space
12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in Room 32, TCC, Fourth Floor

We hope to see you all in Tampa!

IRONSHEEP 2014: Wow. So Sheep. Such Maps.

We are happy to announce that we will be holding our third annual IronSheep geo-hackathon at this year's annual AAG conference in Tampa, Florida.

The event seeks to mimic the format of the “Iron Chef” television series and challenges participants (grouped into teams with members from diverse backgrounds and skill sets) to produce meaningful analysis and fun, evocative map mash-ups from the same sets of user-generated, geo-coded data within a four hour time frame. The goal is to provide a semi-structured environment where participants can socialize and work on a fun, yet socially meaningful project. Participants will be drawn from academic, industry and artistic communities from around the world.

Interested?  We have a larger venue (thanks to Tampa Bay Wave) this year than in years past and so encourage all to come.  We do ask, however, that you pre-register so we have an idea of attendance.

There will be prizes, there will be trophies, there will be gratuitous sheep and use of the doge meme.

Date: Tuesday April 8, 2014

Time: 5 pm to 9 pm

Location: Tampa Bay Wave (Directions from the Tampa Convention Center)

Bring: your laptop, software, friends, lovers, geographers, programmers, geo-geeks, ewes, rams and lambs

Don't bring: wolves, Chupacabra or mint sauce as we have learned last year they are hazardous (or offensive) to sheep.

We will provide food, beverages, data, internet, prizes and sparkling commentary. And perhaps even present one of the floating sheep collective as a sheep. But don't count on that last point.

How to Win--suggestions from the first season of Iron Sheep

One more CFP for AAG 2013

And here is one more call for papers for the Association of American Geographers meeting in Tampa, FL.  

Alternative Computation and Unconventional Spaces

Newly emergent features of the computational turn (e.g., Berry 2011)
posit new challenges for geographers practicing computer-mediated
research.  While geographers maintain a strong relationship with
geographic information systems, new technologies, hardware, and
practices suggest exciting new avenues for computational research.
Geographic “big data” demand new, computationally intensive approaches
to geospatial analysis.  Textual artifacts from social media sources
augment traditional geospatial inquiry, but also serve as data for
non-GIS computational work such as natural language processing, topic
modeling, or social media analysis.  These provocative treatments
suggest ways in which information can be geographic, yet not
necessarily require explicit Cartesian expression. Results of such
analyses have determined uneven distributions of data, and limits to
the representational abilities of GIS.


We’re excited to push beyond traditional GIS techniques to explore
other ways in which our digital beings are expressed through space and
place.  This session welcomes both empirical and theoretical work that
advances computer-mediated research in novel ways.


We welcome papers on the following topics (or any closely related):


1)  Digital humanities-inspired inquiry for Geography

2)  Alternative methodologies for the digitally underrepresented

3)  Novel geospatial and other computer-mediated approaches to “big
data” analyses

4)  Non-Cartesian geographic information and its analyses

5)  Computer-mediated research located in underrepresented spaces
(rural areas, impoverished places, etc.)

6)  Geographic natural language processing, topic modeling, or other
textual analysis

7)  Relational spaces of Social Network Analysis


Please send related abstracts to Joe Eckert (jeckert1@uw.edu) and
Monica Stephens (monica.stephens@humboldt.edu).

CFPs for AAG 2014 Meeting in Tampa

Though the deadline for abstracts for the 2014 Meetings of the Association of American Geographers isn't until December this year, we thought we'd get a jump on things and get our sessions organized early. Below are CFPs for two Floatingsheep-organized sessions, one by Mark and Matt on data shadows and another by Taylor on smart cities.

1) CFP: Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities  

Most parts of our urban areas have become both digitally connected and represented by digitalized information. Digital layers of geographic information (commonly referred to as "augmented reality" by computer scientists) can take myriad forms. The most visible of which are probably the digital maps that many people use to navigate through cities. Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Apple, OpenStreetMap, Baidu, and many other companies and organisations all host publicly accessible platforms that partially reflect parts of our world. These services also become the platform for an almost unimaginable amount of additional content that both reflects the materiality of cities and augments it with additional content. This additional volunteered (and emitted) geographic information is comprised of photographs, blogs, tweets, social media checkins, webcams, videos, and encyclopedia articles. These layers of digital representations are then further reproduced and repurposed in the ways that they annotate the urban environment

The ambition of this session is to interrogate the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced digital information and the code through which it is regulated. By asking what these augmented realities are, where they are and where they are not, and how they are brought into being, we can both unpack the language we use to speak about digital augmentations and explore the ways in which digital extensions of place are becoming increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies.

This session seeks two kinds of papers. First it aims to provide space for papers that explore the ways in which we should imagine, describe, critique, and even name, the digital and informational augmentations of our lives. Second, the session seeks papers that critically examine information geographies and augmented realities in specific contexts. How do informational augmentations impact on how we bring our worlds into being? What and where do they exclude? What narratives and discourses do they allow, and what do they conceal? How are they governed, regulated, and challenged?

Please submit abstracts of less than 250 words to MarkGraham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk) and Matthew Zook (zook@uky.edu) before October 31, 2013.  We will review abstracts in order to form cohesive sessions.

2) CFP: Thinking the ‘smart city’: power, politics and networked urbanism

The fact that cities are increasingly being augmented by digital hardware and software, producing massive amounts of data about urban processes, has been well documented in recent years. Discourses around so-called ‘smart cities’ and tend to position them as either a panacea, an entirely new conceptual and material breakthrough, or as a kind of dystopian imposition of technological rationality onto cities, leaving the precise nature of this social and spatial reorganization unclear. This session will engage these issues through empirically-focused, but conceptually-rich, research on how digital information and communication technologies do not simply connect cities to distanciated networks, but also drive new forms of urban development and new methods of civic exchange and political contention between municipalities and their residents. 

This session seeks papers that document and analyze how these new socio-technical systems are reconfiguring the relationships of urban governance, and how these systems remain embedded in longstanding social structures at both local and global scales. We are also interested in how geographers might offer a unique perspective on the processes and outcomes of smart urbanism, especially given the dominance of computer scientists and management consultants in the making of these projects. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

-- Policy mobilities and the ‘smart city’ model
-- Politics of urban data
-- Smart cities and technocratic planning
-- Smart cities as new urban entrepreneurial assemblages
-- Virtual spaces in the networked city
-- Role of transnational corporations in promoting smart city developments
-- Smart cities and urban environmental sustainability
-- Smart cities in the Global South
-- Cybernetics and the intellectual history of smart urbanism

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Alan Wiig (alanwiig@temple.edu) and Taylor Shelton (jshelton@clarku.edu) by October 15th to ensure sufficient time for review.

The Maps of IronSheep 2013

It's been about a month and a half since our IronSheep maphacking event at the AAGs in Los Angeles, but with the end of semester, the Geography of Hate map and a number of other goings on around Floatingsheep HQ, we've been negligent in posting the results. It was another great year, with about 35 participants divided up into seven teams (see below). But we'd like to give a special thanks to Rohit Shukla and Mike Rudis at LARTA for being such fantastic hosts, as well as John Yaist and Tim Flewelling at Esri for providing the resources for some pretty sweet prizes.

For reasons of propriety/reputation (you'll know why when you seem some of the results), we're not releasing the names of who belong to which team….but you know who you are! The rules of the event and the list of data made available is at the bottom of the post in case you are interested in the details.

For the actual maps used in the presentations (albeit cleaned up a bit as we try to run a PG-13 blog) see the powerpoint at slideshare embedded below.

Maps from IRONSHEEP 2013 from matthewzook

IRONSHEEP 2013 TEAMS w/ MAPS

Team Bo Peep: Justin Bieber and p0rn

Team Ewe: Gangs and Gangnam

Team Feta: A Field Guide to Tweeter Types

Team Ram: Using Argentine Racing Sheep as a Peri-Urban Transport System

Team Wool: Hipsters and Lattes

Team Mutton: Exploring the Spacio-cultural dimensions of Furries

IRONSHEEP 2013 PHOTOS

IRONSHEEP 2013 DATA

1. We collected all geocoded Tweets in LA county from June 2012 to April 2013 using the DOLLY system.
2. Keyword topics included a range of cultural, political and activity based indicators within the tweet text.  
• The full list of terms included "Beer", "wine", "marijuana", "beer pong", "Zombies", "hipster", "traffic", "accident", "surf* AND !web", "beach", "AK47 OR AK-47 OR "AK 47", "AR15 OR AR-15 OR "AR 15", "shooting*", "happy", "sad", "scared", "ghetto", "danger", "korean taco", "foodtruck OR "food truck", "sushi", "burrito", "latte", "hollywood", "celebrity", "actor* OR actress*", "movie star", "screenwriter OR "screen writer", "broken dream", "beiber", "Lindsay Lohan", "Matthew McConaughey", "hippie*", "yoga", "vegan", "organic", "earthquake", "porn or p0rn", "sunny", "the 405", "gangs", "bloods", "crips", "bloods AND !crips", "crips AND !bloods", 
3. Everyone got the same data and was allowed one special data pull as their “secret sauce”.

IRONSHEEP 2013 RULES

• Sheep come in herds, so work in your group.
• Come up with an entertaining or interesting question, And answer it with a geo-visualization.
• Ask a question that will help us save the world. And answer it with a geo-visualization.
• Bonus point for the gratuitous use of sheep.
• A series of visualizations would be great.
• 60 second lightning presentation of your visualizations.
• Prizes will be award by voting

Tweeting the AAGs

Now that we've all had a couple of weeks after the AAGs to relax and make fun of certain unnamed party-animals, we thought we would reflect on how the conference itself was reflected in the Twittersphere. With comments abound that there was more conference-related Twitter activity than ever before, we wanted to see if we couldn't uncover some more specific trends.

Thanks to an enterprising geographer, we have an archive of all 3,154 tweets with the official conference hashtag, #AAG2013. We know from this database that those tweets came from a total of 697 users, of which the top 10 users contributed about 23% of the total number of tweets.

But cross-referencing the Eventifier database with DOLLY's archive of geotagged tweets with the conference hashtag, we can try to understand how and where some geographers tweet and whether geographers fit the overall profile of Twitter users in terms of geotagging. Do geographers geotag their tweets at a higher rate than the average user because of their heightened awareness of spatial issues? Or do they intentionally avoid geotagging their tweets due to sensitivity to location privacy?

According to DOLLY, there were just 137 geotagged tweets with #AAG2013, coming from just 41 users. So, rather than adhering to the oft-cited rule of ~1.5% of all tweets being geotagged, geographers in Los Angeles for the AAGs actually geotagged more than 4% of their conference-related tweets. Of the 137, 127 actually have exact lat/lon coordinates, so we're able to do some mapping at the urban scale in order to see where geographers were tweeting about the conference.

And because only 8 tweets came before the AAG started on April 9, and only 5 came after it ended on April 13, and these are roughly congruent with the 16 tweets outside of Los Angeles County, we'll focus on the 113 of 127 tweets with exact coordinates which were located in downtown LA. In other words, because most of the AAG-related tweeting happened during the conference and in its general proximity, it isn't too interesting to focus on the other locations from which the hashtag was being used.

AAG-related Tweeting Activity in Downtown Los Angeles

As is evident from this map, the vast majority of the tweets referencing #AAG2013 came from the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the primary site of the conference. The second highest concentration of tweeting activity came from the Millenium Biltmore Hotel and LARTA, the secondary conference site and location of our IronSheep event, respectively, which were just half-a-block or so apart, and immediately adjacent to Pershing Square. But given the lack of free conference Wi-Fi and general lack of cell phone service in the Biltmore, it's even less surprising that it had quite a bit less geotagged tweeting activity. Other small pockets of tweeting activity around the downtown seem to be located in the general vicinity of bars that were known to be frequented by geographers, such as the Library Bar, which hosted multiple conference related parties over the course of the week.

As is the case with many of our maps, there's nothing too surprising here. Of course it makes sense that people tweet about the conference from the location of the conference. But we'd still be careful about reading too much into these results. More specifically, we shouldn't get the impression that geographers go to the AAGs primarily to sit in stuffy hotel rooms giving paper presentations rather than gallivant around town with old friends, instead, it seems more plausible that geographers are simply having too great of a time at various drinking establishments to tweet about it, or too smart to use the official conference hashtag when doing so!

Tracking personal activity at AAG: A cautionary tale of big data and lack of sleep

At FloatingSheep we are always seeking to push the envelop in terms of user-generated data, and so when it came to our attention that someone we know was sporting a Nike Fuelband, we couldn't resist taking a quick look at the data. For those of you unfamiliar with the Fuelband, it is a bracelet one wears to capture activity and exercise and "precisely" measure caloric consumption. Even better, it awards "points" so that you and your cyborg friends can compete for bragging rights. To be honest, we don't quite understand the appeal, but have little doubt everyone will be sporting these things in the near future as we bow down to our digital overlords happily greet each new consumer product as it arrives.

In any case, a well-known friend of the sheep (FOTS)[1] was sporting one at the recent annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers two weeks ago and was kind enough (or suffers from some sort of twisted exhibitionism) to share the data with us so that we could share it with you (see below). This FOTS was kind enough to also add yellow ellipses during his/her sleep periods and a handy counter of the daily ration of sleep (in terms of hours).

To provide a bit of a base line, the days before the conference (which began on Tuesday) are also included.  Note, the conference was in LA (Pacific Time) but the data is presented  in Eastern time, so the activity is actually three hours later than indicated in the chart. The big takeaway here is that this FOTS had only 13 hours of sleep from Tuesday to Sunday (mostly between 4 am and 8 am) until s/he boarded a plane and collapsed on Sunday. Given the crude nature of the data, other patterns are harder to distinguish but peaks in the late evening or early morning suggest dancing or other activities.

While just looking at this chart makes us tired (as well as giving us a headache) it does allow for some preliminary observations:

• There is an important late-night component to the AAG (and academic conferences more generally) that deserves further study...sounds like a good field opportunity for auto-ethnography;
• A cost saving measure for certain conference attendees (such as this FOTS) would be simply to not get a hotel room and stay up the entire time; and
• Some people are having a lot more fun (or more precisely, activity) at the AAG than us.

We have no doubt that we'll be seeing more of this individual daily monitoring data in the months/years to come, and are placing bets on how long before it becomes smoothly integrated with GPS (the technology is already there) in order to produce spatial activity maps for everyone [2]. No more bragging about going to the gym (and then hanging out at the refreshment bar) or calling in sick so that you can go skiing. The data will know!

-------------------------

[1] But if you think you know who it is, feel free to leave a comment.  Chances are that you are right.
[2] Think Hagerstrand's space-time prism on steroids. 

#Geo/Code at #AAG2013

With this year's Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers less than a week away, we thought it time to engage in some shameless self-promotion, letting you all know about what we'll be up to at the conference so that you'll be more inclined to come to our sessions.

This year, we've helped to organize a symposium - #Geo/Code: Geoweb, Big Data and Society - to take place within the conference. Coming out of this past summer's SheepCamp, #Geo/Code is a broad look at the latest research and discussions happening around the kinds of things we've been looking at here for the last few years. All of the sessions are organized sequentially, so there is no competition between sessions scheduled at the same time, as has been the case so often in the past.

We've listed all of the sessions of #Geo/Code here for you with links to the full program, but if you still need help getting your schedule organized, we highly suggest you take a look at this year's official conference app, which is actually quite nice.


Wednesday, April 10
8-9:40am
Situating the Geoweb as Technoscience I  
Organized by Craig Dalton of Bloomsburg University and Matt Wilson of UK, and featuring papers by Wen Lin of Newcastle, Agnieszka Leszyznski of Queen's University, Sonya Prasertong of UK, and Till Straube of Goethe University, with discussion by our very own Matt Zook.

10-11:40am
Situating the Geoweb as Technoscience II
Again organized by Dalton and Wilson, featuring papers by Craig, Barbara Poore of the USGS, Keith Woodward of Wisconsin-Madison and Germaine Halegoua and Raz Schwartz, of Kansas and Rutgers, respectively, and featuring discussion by Dan Cockayne of UK.

12:40-2:20pm
Critical Interventions into Gender & the Geoweb
Organized by our own Monica Stephens and Ryan Burns of the University of Washington, panelists include Monica, Brent Hecht of the University of Minnesota, Melissa Gilbert and Michele Masucci, both from Temple University.

2:40-4:20pm
Digital Divides, Digital Domination, and Digital Divisions of Labour
Organized by Monica, Mark and Alan McConchie of UBC, featuring papers by Alan, Matthew Kelley of Washington-Tacoma, Greg Donovan of CUNY, Sarah Williams of MIT and Qiyang Xu.

5-9pm
IronSheep
Seriously, you should know about this by now...

Thursday, April 11
8-9:40am
#Geo/Code: Digital Society
Organized by Jim Thatcher of Clark University, and featuring papers by James Baginski of Ohio State, Sally Applin of the University of Kent, Slavka Antonova of the University of North Dakota, Renee Sieber of McGill and Jess Bier of Masstricht University, followed by discussion from Matt Wilson.

10-11:40am
Crowd Tasting the IronSheep Maps  
Organized by our fearless leader, Matt Zook, this session will be an opportunity to publicly revisit the efforts of the previous night's IronSheep event and discuss the results.

12:40-2:20pm
On criticality in mapping: GeoDesign, GIS, and Planning 
Organized by Annette Kim of MIT, panelists include Annette, Matt, Stuart Aitken of SDSU and Kofi Boone of NCSU, Matt Wilson of Kentucky and Jeffrey Hou of the University of Washington.

2:40-4:20pm
DOLLY and the Questing Beast: Adventures in Twitterspace 
Organized by Matt Zook, and featuring Ate, Mark and Monica, as well as Sean Gorman of Esri discussing the latest attempts to systematize the collection and analysis of geocoded Twitter data. 

4:40-6:20pm
Tools and Tales of Social and Spatial Network Analysis  
Organized by Monica and Joe Eckert of the University of Washington, with presentations by Ate, Monica and Joe, as well as Petr Kucera of Charles University in Prague and Andre Mondoux of Quebec University.

Friday, April 12
8-9:40am
Crowdsourcing Crisis in the GeoWeb: A Critical Look 
Organized by Sophia Liu and Barbara Poore, both of the USGS, with presentations by Sophia, as well as Cameran Ashraf of UCLA, Katrina Peterson of UCSD and Andres Monroy-Hernandez and Megan Finn of Microsoft Research.

10-11:40am
Citizen Data at a Crossroads: Future Research Directions for the Production of Geographic Information and Knowledge  
Organized by Jonathan Cinnamon and Britta Ricker of Simon Fraser Papers by Jonathan and Britta, as well as Jeroen Verplanke of the University of Twente and Rob Edsall of Carthage College, with commentary by Francis Harvey of the University of Minnesota.

12:40-2:20pm
More data, more problems? Geography and the future of 'big data' 
Organized by Taylor and Mark. Panelists include Mike Goodchild of UCSB, Mike Batty of UCL CASA, Sean Gorman of Esri, Trevor Barnes of UBC and Rob Kitchin of NUI-Maynooth.

2:40-4:20pm
Whither Small Data?: The limits of "big data" and the value of "small data" studies
Organized by Jim Thatcher and Ryan Burns, with papers by Jim, Rob Kitchin, Ralph Schroeder of the OII and Taylor on behalf of the rest of the Floatingsheep crew. Discussion by Andres Monroy.

Slides from Floatingsheep Talks at the AAG

We've posted the talks (or, more accurately, the Powerpoint slides) of the FloatingSheep collective presented at the 2012 NYC AAG below. Many of them are image rich and text poor, so please contact the presenter if you have any questions.

The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes

And, as always, you can download the full version of this paper from the journal's website if you have access, or get a prepublication version of this paper directly from us.

Gendering the GeoWeb: Analysing demographic difference in user generated geographic information

Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the Web

Please get in touch with Mark if you'd like a pre-publication version of this paper. It will be appearing in Environment and Planning A.

Volunteered Geographic Information: Does it have a future?

Gazing on the High Line Park: The production and consumption of tourist place

Debriefing Iron Sheep

IronSheep 2012: First Glimpses

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past week, but we were first in the thick of IronSheep-itude and then busy trying to catch up on everything (teaching, sleeping, family, personal hygiene, etc.) that we put on hold for the event.

But to sum things up, it was a great success! Not only was it a lot of fun but it helped push forward thinking about how to approach user-generated data and online mapping technologies more generally. Over the next weeks we'll be posting a lot of material/maps from the event, the debriefing session at the AAG and thoughts about next steps.

But first some heartfelt thanks to those who made this event possible. First a very big thank you to Pivotal Labs (especially Magda Kozak) for be so unbelievably generous and helpful in providing the space for IronSheep. It was perhaps the closest thing to map-geek heaven we're going to find in this world. Also many thanks to Sean Gorman of GeoIQ who provided key encouragement and connections (although sadly couldn't attend in the end) and Javier de la Torre of Vizzuality who made the key introductions to secure the space. Thanks to all those who attended the debriefing session at the AAG, there was a lot of good food for thought/debate coming out of that. Towards that end, see the upcoming #geowebchat scheduled for Tuesday, March 6th, with a slightly longer overview of the debate outlined by Jeremy Crampton here.

Thanks to all the floating sheeple – Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton, Monica Stephens, Candice Wallace and Ate Pourthuis – who scrounged data and organization to pull off the event.

The Floating Sheeple

Finally many thanks to all the attendees who were willing to take a chance on something as strange-sounding as IronSheep. They are featured below (in team pictures) and we look forward to hearing from them as they describe their maps.

To start out the IronSheep review, we've posted a number of photos of the event, activities and participants below.

The Rules of IronSheep

Code and Maps: Perfect together

Enter the Trophies

Watching the Presentations

Enthusiasm and Disbelief

Team Lamb Roast: Ryan Burns, Alan McConchie, Adrienne Ottenberg, Jochen Wendel (ignore Taylor in this photo)

Team Haggis: Duane Griffin, Ate Poorthuis, Derek Watkins

Team Lanolin: Iva, Sterling Quinn, Jonathan Rush, Matt Wilson

Team Ramboullet: Janine Glathar, Stéphane Roche, Jim Thatcher, Sarah Williams

Team Lamb Kebab: Craig Dalton, Jason Farman, Bill Morris, Eric Wolf

Team Lamb Chops: Muki Haklay, Sophia B Liu, Thomas Sigler, Tom Swanson

Team Mutton: Holly Jean Buck, Joe Eckert, Stefan Kaup, Lize Mogel

Floatingsheep at the AAG in NYC

With the Annual Meetings of the AAG hastily upon us (are we alone in having our internal clock totally thrown off because of the February meeting?), we wanted to save everyone the work of finding us in the hefty printed conference schedule and share what sessions we'll be participating in throughout the week. While this list includes only those sessions that four of us will be formally participating in, there are countless others on that we'll certainly be attending as well. If you see us around the conference, come say hello!

Thursday, February 23rd
5pm-8pm
Development Geographies Specialty Group Pre-Conference
Mark will be presenting a short paper entitled "Uneven Geographies of Knowledge: The Internet and the Need for Broader Participation" as one of "7 Pleas to Policymakers" at the Development Geographies Pre-conference.

Friday, February 24th
10am-11:40am
Theorizing the Geoweb II
Monica will be presenting a paper, co-authored with Antonella Rondinone, entitled "Gendering the GeoWeb: Analysing demographic difference in user generated geographic information". This session is organized by friend of the sheep Matt Wilson, and has a counterpart session immediately before, as well.

12:40pm-2:20pm
Applications of the GeoWeb: utilizing user-generated content for geographic research
Monica organized this session with Antonella, and Taylor will be presenting the paper "The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes", co-authored with Matt and Mark and forthcoming in The Professional Geographer next year.

Saturday, February 25th
8am-9:40am
Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice
Matt and Mark organized this paper session, where they'll also be presenting some of our research on language in the geoweb with the paper "Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the web". Muki Haklay of UCL and fellow friend of the sheep Jeremy Crampton from UK will also be presenting in this session.

Sunday, February 26th
5pm-9pm
IronSheep
You ought to know about this by now. We'll all be heading straight from this event to the Kentucky-Arizona Wildcat Party. If you can't make it out to IronSheep, we hope to see you at the party.

Monday, February 27th
12:40pm-2:20pm
Mapping Cyberspace and Social Networks III
Monica will be a discussant for this session featuring a variety of papers exploring methods for quantifying and mapping data from online social networks.

Tuesday, February 28th
8am-9:40am
IronSheep: an open session dedicated to lightning mapping and and understanding VGI in the "wild"
After a day of digesting IronSheep goodness, we'll reconvene in an open panel on Tuesday morning to discuss what happened and what we can learn from it.

2pm-3:40pm
Volunteered Geographic Information: Does it have a future?
Matt will be on this provocatively-named panel, organized by Sarah Elwood, Dan Sui and Michael Goodchild, looking at the big picture of research on VGI and what directions it might take in the future. Other panelists include Paul Longley of UCL and Nadine Schuurman of Simon Fraser.

**In a quasi-homage to our frequent object of study, Google, do note the special banner at the top of the blog that we have created for our collective visit to New York City.