Birkbeck College, University of London | Department for Geography, Environment and Development - Academia.edu

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Birkbeck College, University of London
Department for Geography, Environment and Development
All Departments
179 Papers
50 Researchers
A critical review the article ‘The Big Society is a Big Fat Lie’. (Toynbee 2010)
by
Jed Keenan
Public Policy
The 'Big Society': The challenges and opportunities this altered policy environment presents for delivering community-based projects
This essay develops the argument that 'promoting employment, enterprise, and better government' is not just for 'poor neighbourhoods' but actually about increasing the volume of quality competition for employers, customers, and public...
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This essay develops the argument that 'promoting employment, enterprise, and better government' is not just for 'poor neighbourhoods' but actually about increasing the volume of quality competition for employers, customers, and public office in rich neighbourhoods. I will analyse the Big Society agenda as a mechanism for maintaining and sustaining power that is no different, other than less individualistic, than the privatisation and disposal of public assets of the previous Conservative administrations. I will explore the key part of this mechanism, the community right to challenge, covering its purpose, the opportunity it presents, and the challenge set for third sector organisations such as those that are governed by the 'politics heavy' (Shale 2011) sections of the memberships of political parties generally, but more specifically the Conservatives. I will finish by addressing what Margaret Ledwith states is a requirement for community workers to have because of the 'complex systems of interrelationships interwoven across social difference, diverse histories and cultures, and determined in the present by political and social trends' which is an 'incisive analysis of the changing wider political context and the historical issues that have shaped the present' . I will do this last part because to fully understand the 'challenges and opportunities [of] this altered policy environment' there is the requirement of coming to a conclusive set of active responses.
by
Jed Keenan
A research proposal identifying uncorrelated outliers in the relationship between the offer of extracurricular activities by higher education institutions and the expectations and traditions of their staff and students etc.
A research proposal identifying uncorrelated outliers in the relationship between the offer of extracurricular activities by higher education institutions and the expectations and traditions of their staff and students etc A research...
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A research proposal identifying uncorrelated outliers in the relationship between the offer of extracurricular activities by higher education institutions and the expectations and traditions of their staff and students etc A research proposal that firstly, identifies uncorrelated outliers in the relationship between the offer of extracurricular activities by higher education institutions and the expectations and traditions of their staff and students, and then secondly, further understands the facilities that have permitted or encouraged those whose expectations exceed their traditions.
by
Jed Keenan
Khoisan wind: hunting and healing
In this paper I draw on my findings and those of historical and recent Khoisan ethnography to attempt to explain how these southern African 'Khoi' and San peoples relate to wind and how the environmental phenomenon has informed their...
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In this paper I draw on my findings and those of historical and recent Khoisan ethnography to attempt to explain how these southern African 'Khoi' and San peoples relate to wind and how the environmental phenomenon has informed their epistemology and ontology. I begin by fleshing out the knowledge and experience of wind among these past and recent hunter-gatherers and, pointing to continuity in wind relationships and the ideas that stem from them, I go on to demonstrate how wind weaves into Khoisan understandings of the body and illness. Despite extensive interest in Bushman healing, anthropologists have overwhelmingly concentrated on the 'trance' healing dance. My findings suggest this partiality has obscured the wider healing context in which the dance operates. Exploring the wider context, including massage, 'medicinal cuts', and witchcraft, reveals that the 'potency' conceived as central to the healing dance is, in certain contexts, equivalent to overlapping ideas of wind, arrows, and smell. Examination of the ethnography reveals that a number of the associations I make between wind and potency have been partially recognized in specific Khoisan contexts but, because comparative studies of Khoisan are difficult and unpopular, these similarities have gone largely unnoticed.
by
Chris Low
Archaeology
Anthropology
Birds and Khoesān: Linking Spirits and Healing with Day-to-Day Life
Reminiscent of other recent ethno-ornithologies, the following account considers bird naming, birds in folklore and birds as portentous messengers . Less typically, however, I locate these themes within a more fundamental interest in how...
more
Reminiscent of other recent ethno-ornithologies, the following account considers bird naming, birds in folklore and birds as portentous messengers . Less typically, however, I locate these themes within a more fundamental interest in how bird encounter moves into meaning and use. The movement begins with KhoeSān recognizing certain powerful characteristics or associations in particular birds. These powerful characteristics are then worked into everyday contexts of KhoeSān life, ranging from village gossip to hunting plans to the use of potent bird parts in healing. My focus is on how living in particular ways in particular environments lends itself to certain forms of knowledge and praxis. I reflect on ways of being in 'nature' and understanding the nature of potency in KhoeSān life.
by
Chris Low
Land reform
Poverty Aleviation
Khoisan Healing: Understandings, Ideas and Practices
by
Chris Low
Different Histories of Buchu: Euro-American Appropriation of San and Khoekhoe Knowledge of Buchu Plants
Buchu is a fragrant smelling South African fynbos shrub widely known and marketed as a traditional remedy of southern Africa's Khoisan herders and hunter-gatherers. It is also an important flavouring agent in commercial food manufacture....
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Buchu is a fragrant smelling South African fynbos shrub widely known and marketed as a traditional remedy of southern Africa's Khoisan herders and hunter-gatherers. It is also an important flavouring agent in commercial food manufacture. This article considers representation of buchu as a traditional remedy in relation to both extensive historical, botanical and commercial interest in the plants and recent and past Khoisan use. The Khoisan account is drawn from detailed ethnographic analysis and fieldwork carried out amongst Namibian Khoisan and northern Cape San. The paper tracks the arrival of buchu onto the European medical market and the subsequent misfit between European and American pharmaceutical representations of the 'true' buchu relative to Khoisan understandings of buchu. I propose that, like the Europeans, the Khoisan have engaged with buchu because of its distinctive odour and properties but, unlike Western appropriators of the plant, Khoisan relationships with buchu relate to smell as an agent of physical and mental transformation. The smell of buchu has been conceived by the Khoisan as a potent force with a role in healing, in perfume use and certain rituals.
by
Chris Low
Community College Journal of Research and Practice Does Literacy Skill Level Predict Performance in Community College Courses: A Replication and Extension
Previous research has found a positive relationship between students who had completed a sequence of developmental reading and writing courses and success in a reading-intensive college-level course. This study replicates and expands upon...
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Previous research has found a positive relationship between students who had completed a sequence of developmental reading and writing courses and success in a reading-intensive college-level course. This study replicates and expands upon the previous research of Goldstein and Perin (2008) by utilizing a differently diverse sample and an additional literacy-demanding course in an attempt to broaden the findings. Binary logistic regression and multiple regression analyses were performed on data gathered from a large urban community college. The purpose was to predict success and performance-from literacy, demographic, and academic variables-in two literacy-demanding courses, psychology and geography. A number of variables, including literacy skill level, positively predicted successful grades in the courses. This study found that students who had originally tested into a developmental reading and/or writing course upon entrance into a community college and had taken the sequence of developmental courses prior to taking a content course were more successful than students who had placed into a developmental course, but had not taken the developmental sequence. These findings also suggest the more literacy skills a student has gained through completion of higher levels of English courses, the more likely the student will successfully complete a content course in which those skills are required.
by
Julia K Perry
and
+1
Kim DeLauro
Higher Education
An Open-Source Web Architecture for Adaptive Location Based Services
As the volume of information available online continues to grow, there is an increasing problem with information overload. This issue is also escalating in the spatial domain as the amount of geo-tagged information expands. With such an...
more
As the volume of information available online continues to grow, there is an increasing problem with information overload. This issue is also escalating in the spatial domain as the amount of geo-tagged information expands. With such an abundance of geo-information, it is difficult for map users to find content that is relevant to them. The problem is intensified when considering Location-Based Services. These services, which are dependent upon a user's geographic location, generally operate on portable devices. These devices have a reduced screen size coupled with a limited processing power and so the need to provide personalised content is of paramount importance. Our previous work has focused on examining techniques to determine user interests in order to provide adapted and personalised map content which is suitable to display on portable devices. In this paper, in order to reduce the processing load on the user's device, a novel client server architecture is employed. The framework is designed using open-source, web-based technologies which monitor user locations and interactions with map content overtime to produce a user profile. This profile is then used to render personalised maps. By utilising the power of web-based technologies in an innovative manner, any operational issues between different mobile devices is alleviated, as the device only requires a web-browser to receive map content. This article describes the techniques, architecture and technologies used to achieve this.
by
Andrea Ballatore
and
+2
Michela Bertolotto
Ali Tahir
Location Based Services
Web Technologies
Web Personalization
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
RecoMap: an interactive and adaptive map-based recommender
With the growing availability of geo-referenced information on the Web, the problem of spatial information overload has attracted interest both in the commercial and academic world. In order to tackle this issue, personalisation...
more
With the growing availability of geo-referenced information on the Web, the problem of spatial information overload has attracted interest both in the commercial and academic world. In order to tackle this issue, personalisation techniques can be used to tailor spatial contents based upon user interests. RecoMap, the system described in this paper, deducts user interests by monitoring user interaction and context to provide personalised spatial recommendations. After an overview of existing recommendation systems within the geospatial domain, the novel approach adopted by RecoMap to produce such recommendations is described. A case study related to a university campus setting is used to outline an application of this technique. Details of the implementation and initial testing of this prototype are provided.
by
Michela Bertolotto
and
+1
Andrea Ballatore
Recommender Systems
User Centred Design
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Semantically enriching VGI in support of implicit feedback analysis
In recent years, the proliferation of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has enabled many Internet users to contribute to the construction of rich and increasingly complex spatial datasets. This growth of geo-referenced information...
more
In recent years, the proliferation of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has enabled many Internet users to contribute to the construction of rich and increasingly complex spatial datasets. This growth of geo-referenced information and the often loose semantic structure of such data have resulted in spatial information overload. For this reason, a semantic gap has emerged between unstructured geo-spatial datasets and high-level ontological concepts. Filling this semantic gap can help reduce spatial information overload, therefore facilitating both user interactions and the analysis of such interaction. Implicit Feedback analysis is the focus of our work. In this paper we address this problem by proposing a system that executes spatial discovery queries. Our system combines a semantically-rich and spatially-poor ontology (DBpedia) with a spatially-rich and semantically-poor VGI dataset (OpenStreetMap). This technique differs from existing ones, such as the aggregated dataset LinkedGeoData, as it is focused on user interest analysis and takes map scale into account. System architecture, functionality and preliminary results gathered about the system performance are discussed.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Ontology (Computer Science)
Volunteered Geographic Information
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Collaborative Filtering - A Group Profiling Algorithm for Personalisation in a Spatial Recommender System
As the quantity of geospatial information rapidly increases, information overload in the spatial domain is becoming a serious issue. Often the amount of information being displayed on digital maps makes it difficult to determine useful...
more
As the quantity of geospatial information rapidly increases, information overload in the spatial domain is becoming a serious issue. Often the amount of information being displayed on digital maps makes it difficult to determine useful content. In order to assist in resolving this problem, personalisation techniques have been developed. The most effective techniques implicitly monitor user interactions with map interfaces and content in order to infer user interests. This permits the map to be adapted to suit individual users by highlighting or displaying a subset of available content. The work presented in this paper builds on this paradigm to refine map adaptations by using group profiling techniques. Such techniques identify similar users to the target user and utilise their interests as an indicator of possible interests for the target user. The map can then be adapted accordingly. The approach has been effective in the non-spatial domain however it has not been widely studied in the spatial context. The methodology behind this technique is presented in this paper while the approach is demonstrated through a case study of a map navigational assistant.
by
Andrea Ballatore
and
+1
Michela Bertolotto
Recommender Systems
Information Overload
Recommender system, Collaborative filtering
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
A Comparison of Open Source Geospatial Technologies for Web Mapping
The past decade has witnessed a steady growth of open source software usage in industry and academia, leading to a complex ecosystem of projects. Web and subsequently geographical information systems have become prominent technologies,...
more
The past decade has witnessed a steady growth of open source
software usage in industry and academia, leading to a complex ecosystem of projects. Web and subsequently geographical information systems have become prominent technologies, widely adopted in diverse domains. Within this context, we developed an open source web platform for interoperable
GIServices. In order to implement this architecture, 14 projects were selected and analysed, including the client-side libraries and the server-side components. Although other surveys have been conducted in this area, little feedback has been formally obtained from the users and developers concerning their opinion of these tools. A questionnaire was designed to obtain responses from the relevant online communities about a given set of characteristics. This article describes the technologies and reports the results of the survey, providing first-hand information about open source web and geospatial tools.
by
Andrea Ballatore
and
+1
Ali Tahir
Web 2.0
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
A Holistic Semantic Similarity Measure for Viewports in Interactive Maps
In recent years, geographic information has entered the mainstream, deeply altering the pre-existing patterns of its production, distribution, and consumption. Through web mapping, millions of online users utilise spatial data in...
more
In recent years, geographic information has entered the mainstream, deeply altering the pre-existing patterns of its production, distribution, and consumption. Through web mapping, millions of online users utilise spatial data in interactive digital maps. The typical unit of visualisation of geo-data is a viewport, defined as a bi-dimensional image of a map, fixed at a given scale, in a rectangular frame. In a viewport, the user performs analytical tasks, observing individual map features, or drawing high-level judgements about the objects in the viewport as a whole. Current geographic information retrieval (GIR) systems aim at facilitating analytical tasks, and little emphasis is put on the retrieval and indexing of visualised units, i.e. viewports. In this paper we outline a holistic, viewport-based GIR system, offering an alternative approach to feature-based GIR. Such a system indexes viewports, rather than individual map features, extracting descriptors of their high-level, overall semantics in a vector space model. This approach allows for efficient comparison, classification, clustering, and indexing of viewports. A case study describes in detail how our GIR system models viewports representing geographical locations in Ireland. The results indicate advantages and limitations of the viewport-based approach, which allows for a novel exploration of geographic data, using holistic semantics.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Semantic similarity
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Geographic knowledge extraction and semantic similarity in OpenStreetMap
In recent years, a web phenomenon known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has produced large crowdsourced geographic data sets. OpenStreetMap (OSM), the leading VGI project, aims at building an open-content world map through...
more
In recent years, a web phenomenon known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has produced large crowdsourced geographic data sets. OpenStreetMap (OSM), the leading VGI project, aims at building an open-content world map through user contributions. OSM semantics consists of a set of properties (called ‘tags’) describing geographic classes, whose usage is defined by project contributors on a dedicated Wiki website. Because of its simple and open semantic structure, the OSM approach often results in noisy and ambiguous data, limiting its usability for analysis in information retrieval, recommender systems and data mining. Devising a mechanism for computing the semantic similarity of the OSM geographic classes can help alleviate this semantic gap. The contribution of this paper is twofold. It consists of (1) the development of the OSM Semantic Network by means of a web crawler tailored to the OSM Wiki website; this semantic network can be used to compute semantic similarity through co-citation measures, providing a novel semantic tool for OSM and GIS communities; (2) a study of the cognitive plausibility (i.e. the ability to replicate human judgement) of co-citation algorithms when applied to the computation of semantic similarity of geographic concepts. Empirical evidence supports the usage of co-citation algorithms—SimRank showing the highest plausibility—to compute concept similarity in a crowdsourced semantic network.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Semantic similarity
The Similarity Jury: Combining expert judgements on geographic concepts
A cognitively plausible measure of semantic similarity between geographic concepts is valuable across several areas, including geographic information retrieval, data mining, and ontology alignment. Semantic similarity measures are not...
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A cognitively plausible measure of semantic similarity between geographic concepts is valuable across several areas, including geographic information retrieval, data mining, and ontology alignment. Semantic similarity measures are not intrinsically right or wrong, but obtain a certain degree of cognitive plausibility in the context of a given application. A similarity measure can therefore be seen as a domain expert summoned to judge the similarity of a pair of concepts according to her subjective set of beliefs, perceptions, hypotheses, and epistemic biases. Following this analogy, we first define the similarity jury as a panel of experts having to reach a decision on the semantic similarity of a set of geographic concepts. Second, we have conducted an evaluation of 8 WordNet-based semantic similarity measures on a subset of OpenStreetMap geographic concepts. This empirical evidence indicates that a jury tends to perform better than individual experts, but the best expert often outperforms the jury. In some cases, the jury obtains higher cognitive plausibility than its best expert.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Semantic similarity
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload....
more
Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing ‘geographic intelligence’ in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users’ spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geoknowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Volunteered Geographic Information
Geo Web
Linked Open Data
Good location, terrible food: detecting feature sentiment in user-generated reviews
A growing corpus of online informal reviews is generated every day by non-experts, on social networks and blogs, about an unlimited range of products and services. Users do not only express holistic opinions, but often focus on specific...
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A growing corpus of online informal reviews is generated every day by non-experts, on social networks and blogs, about an unlimited range of products and services. Users do not only express holistic opinions, but often focus on specific features of their interest. The automatic understanding of “what people think” at the feature level can greatly support decision making, both for consumers and producers. In this paper, we present an approach to feature-level sentiment detection that integrates natural language processing with statistical techniques, in order to extract users’ opinions about specific features of products and services from user-generated reviews. First, we extract domain features, and each review is modelled as a lexical dependency graph. Second, for each review, we estimate the polarity relative to the features by leveraging the syntactic dependencies between the terms. The approach is evaluated against a ground truth consisting of set of user-generated reviews, manually annotated by 39 human subjects and available online, showing its human-like ability to capture feature-level opinions.
by
Andrea Ballatore
and
+2
Marie-aude Aufaure
Ilaria Tiddi
Sentiment Analysis
OPINION MINING AND SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Computing the semantic similarity of geographic terms using volunteered lexical definitions
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is generated by heterogenous ‘information communities’ that co-operate to produce reusable units of geographic knowledge. A consensual lexicon is a key factor to enable this open production model....
more
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is generated by heterogenous ‘information communities’ that co-operate to produce reusable units of geographic knowledge. A consensual lexicon is a key factor to enable this open production model. Lexical definitions help demarcate the boundaries of terms, forming a thin semantic ground on which knowledge can travel. In VGI, lexical definitions often appear to be inconsistent, circular, noisy and highly idiosyncratic. Computing the semantic similarity of these ‘volunteered lexical definitions’ has a wide range of applications in GIScience, including information retrieval, data mining and information integration. This article describes a knowledge-based approach to quantify the semantic similarity of lexical definitions. Grounded in the recursive intuition that similar terms are described using similar terms, the approach relies on paraphrase-detection techniques and the lexical database WordNet. The cognitive plausibility of the approach is evaluated in the context of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Semantic Network, obtaining high correlation with human judgements. Guidelines are provided for the practical usage of the approach.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Natural Language Processing
Semantic similarity
Volunteered Geographic Information
The web will kill them all: new media, digital utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement
This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto...
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This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses have been inserted into the movement’s political message, and how the construction of the web as a myth has shaped the movement’s discourse and political practice. The 5-Star Movement is compared and contrasted with other social and political movements in western countries which have displayed a similar emphasis on new media, such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement, and the Pirate Parties in Sweden and Germany. By adopting and mutating cyber-utopian discourses from the so-called Californian ideology, the movement symbolically identifies itself with the web. The traditional political establishment is associated with “old” media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a “walking dead,” doomed to be superseded and buried by a web-based direct democracy.
by
Andrea Ballatore
Media Studies
New Media
Italian Politics
Beppe Grillo
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