Tooting Our Own Horn and Other Updates

Loyal followers of the blog have surely noticed a sharp decline in the number of blog posts in recent months, for which we are truly sorry and attempting to remedy the situation. We do, however, have some pretty good excuses for why we've been turning a blind eye to your plight.

We've been busy.

But with another academic year in the books, we hope to ramp up activity on the blog and give you all plenty of maps to keep you feeling cool throughout the summer. But first, we thought we'd fill you in on some of the happenings that have kept us away from the blogosphere this year...

In addition to spending the year in Estonia on a Fulbright, our fearless leader Matt has been busy getting promoted to full Professor at the University of Kentucky. Matt has also been named co-editor of Big Data and Society, a new journal that will surely have some Floatingsheep research within its (wholly digital) pages before too long. Ate was also recently announced as an assistant editor for the journal!

Not to be outdone by Matt's promotional prowess, Mark also a received a promotion to Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the OII, and became a Research Fellow at Oxford's Green Templeton College; and Monica has decided to take up a new post as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo this fall.

Mark has also recently been awarded a five-year ERC grant to put together a team of three full-time researchers to study 'knowledge economies' in Sub-Saharan Africa. He's building a website for the project at the moment, but you can read more about it in the meantime here.  

The only ones of us left plodding through graduate school, both Ate and Taylor have reached ABD status in recent months, with only the dread of a dissertation ahead of them. They have, however, found the time to buy a house and move back to the Bluegrass from Massachusetts, respectively.

And while there have been too many publications and presentations to list (toot! toot!), we're also pleased to announce that Mark and Matt's paper on the geolinguistic contours of the web has been named the winner of the Ashby Prize, awarded annually to the best paper published in the journal Environment and Planning A.

We hope you'll all forgive us neglected the blog recently due to these happenings. We promise to do (at least a little) better.

Recent News and Kudos for the FloatingSheep Collective

From time to time we like to toot our own horn (OK, we actually do it fairly often), so here's a selection of the recent accomplishments, activities and plans of the collective...

Mark Graham:
Mark recently received two awards to study participation, voice and representation in Wikipedia in East Africa and MENA (Middle East North Africa). The funders are the IDRC and the Fell Fund. He also received an award to study changes brought about by new Internet connectivity in Kenya and Rwanda. This project is funded by an ESRC-DFID joint award. Preliminary research was funded by the British Academy and the Fell Fund. He is also hiring a 28 month research assistant or postdoc to be based in Oxford and/or East Africa, and would encourage anyone with experience and interest in this area to apply. Finally, he received a grant from the Royal Geographic Society to present a paper on Africa's 'Silicon Savannah' at the Third Global Conference on Economic Geography in Seoul, South Korea.

Taylor Shelton:
After (finally) finishing his M.A. thesis on university research parks and urban development in Lexington, Taylor will be leaving Kentucky in August to join the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, MA. This is all part of the FloatingSheep collective's master plan to colonize the discipline of Geography. Baa.....!

Monica Stephens:
Monica was accepted to the Vespucci Institute for Volunteered Geographic Information in Fiesole, Italy that took place from June 6th to 10th. Her group won the first Peter A. Burrough Award for their project on MyPLACE (People, Location And Community Empowerment). Funding for her travel expenses to the Vespucci Institute were provided by the IGERT program at the University of Buffalo. In addition, Monica's Methodologies in Cyber-Cartography paper was accepted to the International Cartographic Conference in Paris, France. Travel award from the U.S. National Committee to the International Cartographic Association. She was awarded a travel grant from the Graduate and Professional Student Council from the University of Arizona and received additional travel funding from the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona.

Matt Zook:
Matt was invited to participate in a Panel on IT/social media and disaster resilience for a meeting of The National Academies Committee on Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters Meeting in Irvine, CA at the end of May. He will also be presenting at the Third Global Conference on Economic Geography in Seoul, South Korea at the end of June.

...stay tuned, next week we've got zombies...