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!

#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.