Details for IronSheep 2013 - TOMORROW!! - Wednesday April 10

IronSheep Map Hack Fest 2013 (aka Escape from L.A.)is all set and ready to go!  Unfortunately given space constraints of the venue, only folks who pre-registered will be able to participate. If you can't remember if you registered email Matt.

There will be lots prizes including Makey Makey Kits, Hip Flasks with Maps on Them, Maps with Hip Flasks on them, sheep stickers, tattoos and of course the much sought after trophies.

Date: Wednesday April 10, 2013
Time: 5 pm to 9 pm
Location: LARTA (an non-profit innovation hub working with the Southern California tech community) located at 606 S. Olive Street, Suite 650, Los Angeles (a 10 minute walk from the AAG hotels)

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Bring: your laptop, software, friends, lovers, geographers, programmers, geo-geeks, ewes, rams and lambs
Don't bring: wolves, Chupacabra or mint sauce as we learned last year they are hazardous (or offensive) to sheep.

We will provide food, beverages, data, internet, prizes and sparkling commentary.

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

#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.

What percentage of edits to English-language Wikipedia articles are from local people?

As part of our on-going efforts to explore the geographies of participation in Wikipedia, we have calculated the percentage of local edits to articles about places. In other words, this map illustrates the percentage of edits about any country that come from people with strong associations to that country.

For more on the method that we employed, have a read through the post on "who edits Wikipedia" - in which the data collection efforts have been explained in much detail. The data are undoubtedly somewhat imprecise, but we are confident that they offer us the best overview of the geography of authorship that can be obtained with publicly-available data.

So what do these results tell us?

Unsurprisingly, they show that in predominantly English-speaking countries most edits tend to be local. That is, we see that most Wikipedia articles (85%) about the US tend to be written from America, and most articles about the UK are likewise written from the UK (78%). The Philippines (68%) and India (65%) score well in this regard, likely because of role that English plays as an official language in both countries. But why then do we see relatively low numbers is other countries that also have English as an official language, such as Nigeria (16%) or Kenya (9%)?

We also, interestingly, see relatively high local edit percentages from a handful of countries that don't count English as an official language: Finland (50%), Norway (56%), Romania (54%), and Bulgaria (53%).

Then we also observe large parts of the world in which very few English-language descriptions about local places are created about local people. Almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa falls into this category. The key question is whether these data actually tell us anything meaningful. For instance, just because most edits about the United States likely come from the United States does not necessarily mean that those articles are representative, include a diversity of viewpoints, or fail to exclude people, places, and processes.

But the data nonetheless, in a very broad way, do tell a story about voice and representation. Some parts of the world are represented on one of the world's most-used websites predominantly by local people, while others are almost exclusively created by foreigners, something to bear in mind next time you read a Wikipedia article.

IronSheep 2013

Inspired by the Iron Chef television series, we are holding our second annual IronSheep geo-hackathon.  This year we'll be in Los Angeles, California during the annual AAG conference.

Please click here to register.  Given space constraints of the venue, only folks who register will be able to participate.

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 in a fun yet socially meaningful project. Participants will be drawn from academic, industry and artistic communities from around the world.

There will be prizes, there will be trophies, there will be gratuitous sheep.

Date: Wednesday April 10, 2013
Time: 5 pm to 9 pm
Location: LARTA (an non-profit innovation hub working with the Southern California tech community) located at 606 S. Olive Street, Suite 650, Los Angeles (a 10 minute walk from the AAG hotels)
Bring: your laptop, software, friends, lovers, geographers, programmers, geo-geeks, ewes, rams and lambs
Don't bring: wolves, Chupacabra or mint sauce as we 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

Location! The Importance of Geo-Data: Mark and Monica at SXSW

For any of our fans who might be in Austin this weekend for SXSW, be sure to check out the panel that Mark and Monica organized this Tuesday. You can check out more info about their panel (along with some visual evidence that they're having fun) below...

What: Location! The Importance of Geo-Data
Where: Sheraton Austin, Capitol ABCD
When: Tuesday, March 12, 11am-noon
Who: Mark and Monica will be joined by Catherine D'Ignazio of MIT and Devin Gaffney of the Oxford Internet Institute. 

The proliferation of location-aware devices and geo-tagged data raises important questions: what will happen as more and more of the content we create online is automatically tagged with locational data? What can we learn from this profusion of geographic information? With this data we can find restaurants, friends and sex partners (a la Grindr.com), visualize inequalities in media attention, develop epidemiological models to predict the spread of diseases, find dissident safe houses in times of political upheaval and coordinate crisis response. But who is contributing data and who is not on the map? How are our social relationships being transformed? What about privacy? What about civic participation? Serious questions are mounting - this panel aims to raise several of them, and explore the transformative power this shift may bring.

The Urban Geographies of Tweets in Africa

This is a quick post containing a few visualisations of information densities in a selection of African cities.

Below, you can find maps of all geocoded tweets published in November 2012 in Accra, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos, Tunis, Nairobi, Kigali, Mogadishu, and Addis Ababa.

Look for the information presences and absences; groups of people who are and aren't participating in each city. But also look at the significant differences between cities. Cities like Nairobi, Cairo, and Cape Town are swimming in thick clouds of information, whereas in Mogadishu and Addis Ababa we barely find any digital geospatial information at all. 

If you're interested in why these geographies of information might matter, then check out any the articles at the end of this post. Otherwise, enjoy the maps - and please share any insights you have about any of these cities (or let us know if there are other cities that you'd like to see mapped).

Relevant articles:

Graham, M. 2013. Virtual Geographies and Urban Environments: Big data and the ephemeral, augmented city. In Global City Challenges: debating a concept, improving the practice. eds. M. Acuto and W. Steele. London: Palgrave. (in press).

Graham, M and M. Zook. 2013. Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web. Environment and Planning A 45(1) 77-99.

Graham, M., M. Zook., and A. Boulton. 2012. Augmented Reality in the Urban Environment: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00539.x  

The Maps of Sheepallenge

In our first annual Sheepallenge competition, teams from around the world (well, parts of it anyways) competed to produce the best visualization using a dataset relating to the seven deadly sins. We've included some of our favorite submissions below, but please feel free to comment and let us know which are your favorites.

In the Animated/Interactive category:
Interactive map of Political Sex Scandals: you must click on the link to get the full scandalous effect
(Montserrat Compa, Jasmine D'Angelo, M. Eiben and​ R. Gustas of Humboldt State University)

Coffee vs. Beer: an animated time-map of Coffee and Beer consumption. (Nathan Barth and Stephen Mangum of Humboldt State University)

We had two Seven Sins Choropleth maps:
http://users.humboldt.edu/eibenm/sheepallenge.html
(Matthew Eiben, Humboldt State University)
http://tiles.mapbox.com/gfs1119/ 
(Gwendolyn Schaefer and Jordan Miller, University of Kentucky)

Animated wrath of god: Zoom and pan through natural disasters caused by sinners (Jeremy Battles, Humboldt State University)

In the Static map category:
Anti-Cartograms: Teriitutea QUESNOT of Université Laval

"Rather than highlighting devilish states, I preferred to adopt a reverse logic by building anticartograms.  These anticartograms are based on the mathematical inverse function (1/x) : the area of each US State is consequently inversely proportionnal to the number of Tweets included in each state.  Moreover, we know that the seven heavenly virtues are not exactly the opposite of the seven deadly sins. Thus, the title of each anticartogram correspond to my own interpretation of each "antideadly sin" (e.g. « Twitter Buddhists » for the anticartogram of the « envy » deadly sin)."

The Bacon Map: Miles Ross, Letha Gimble, and Lars Erickson (Humboldt State University)

"If you want to run far far away from your grassroots vegan friends and join the bacon eating bandwagon you might try moving to a bigger city.  The results from this map revealed that Seattle was the most infatuated with this lardaceous meat, seen by the overwhelming sized bacon strip that has taken over the Pacific Northwest in the map.  Chicago, New York, Boston, Wichita are only a couple of the bigger cities feeding into this fattening fad."

Sinners Across The USA: Tanja Hopmans and Sean Jansen (Humboldt State University)

"Proportional text was created using geotagged Twitter data with tweeted keywords associated with each of the seven sins.  The text represents the maximum number of tweets of the sin, normalized by country, the size of the text represents the number of tweets associated with each sin."

Crunk n' Bible Studies: Boyd Shearer, outrageGIS.com

The goal was to determine the mood of county’s population, whether they were tweeting more about getting drunk or going to bible study. Two groups of geocoded tweets were sampled from DOLLY for the time period June 21 to November 29, 2012. Roughly 8,000 tweets were collected for each population. The “crunk” population was created from tweets that said, “Let’s get drunk,” “Let’s get fucked up,” and “Let’s get crunk.” Minor variations were also added to this population, e.g., “Let’s get crazy fucked up!” The second population was created from tweets that said, “bible study.” Assuming authors meant what they tweeted, a rather unscientific sampling of each population determined an error rate in the sentiment analysis. Approximately 4 out of 100 tweets in the “crunk” population were of a mocking or derisive tone about getting drunk, while 2 out 100 tweets in the “bible study” population were not about studying the bible as illustrated in the following tweet, “Just got asked to go to bible study....no.”

Rich Kids of Instagram: Ryan Cooper and Sonya Prasertong, University of Kentucky

"Our visualization was inspired by the website richkidsofinstagram.tumblr.com, where photos that affluent teens/young adults post on Instagram (as well as their captions) are posted. These photos and captions are often an absurd/over-the-top flaunting of their wealth, posted to inspire envy amongst us lay people. The website is a catalog of these photos, and highlights this strange phenomenon of conspicuous hyperconsumptions represented through social media. By mashing the number of RKOI-based Tweets against median household income we can begin to query deeper questions of income disparities, material consumption practices, and what it really means to #getonmylevel.”

Each of the authors above have won a t-shirt award and a certificate suitable for framing. 

Honorable Mentions
The Good, The Bad and The American: Robert Gustas and Jessica Beck, Humboldt State University

Tweets of Chastity and Lust: James Knoer

In Greed we Trust: Catherine Hoyle, Humboldt State University

Lazy Humidity: Mark and David Cross, University of Kentucky

Seattle, Capital of Greed?: Lila Garcia, University of Washington

Sins Vs. Shows: Derek Ichen, Humboldt State University

The Evil of WalMart and Jersey Shore: Stuart Denoon-Stevens, Cape Town, South Africa

PDF Brochure available here

Congratulations to everybody who participated. The maps we received were fantastic beyond our wildest sheep-filled dreams!