Throwing the spatial analysis ‘baby’ out with the big data ‘bathwater’

Three days at the splendidly organised Twelfth International Conference on GeoComputation (Wuhan, China, 23rd-25th May) have provided a welcome opportunity for intellectual refreshment in the company of old friends and colleagues. Nevertheless an irritating feature of the meeting has been the apparently endless queue of speakers with diverse national and intellectual backgrounds all wanting to …
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Big Data Masochists must resist the Dominatrix of Social Theory

Here at the AAG in Los Angeles it has been good to witness at first hand the continued vibrancy and diversity of geographical inquiry.  In particular, themes such as Agent-based Modelling, Population Dynamics, and CyberGIS have been well represented alongside sessions on Social Theory, Gender and Cultural and Political Ecology.  At Friday’s sessions on big …
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How many social scientists does it take to transform a lightbulb?

I was invited to contribute to a round-table meeting to discuss Computational and Transformational Social Science which took place at the University of Oxford on Monday 18th February.  In the background papers for the meeting I learned that the International Panel for the Review of the e-Science Programme, commissioned by the UK Research Councils in …
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