Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Free Taylor & Francis Academic Geography Articles

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com!

Taylor & Francis, an academic journal publishing company, is celebrating the 2013 annual conference of the Association of American Geographers by allowing open access to some 70 academic geography articles.  The articles' themes are Emerging Asia, Global Urbanization & Borders, Climate Change, Variability, Adaptation and Justice, Geography GIScience and Health, and Activist Geographies: Struggles for Social and Environmental Justice.

Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Wiley Press Economic Geography Lectures

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com!

Wiley Press, an academic journal company and publisher of Economic Geography, has posted a video of the 2011 Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography.

In 2011 Trevor J. Barnes presented Notes From the Underground: Why the History of Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Economic Geography Matters

Virtual Geography Convention 2013: AAG 2013 Day 3 Twitter Roundup

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com! 

An update on the useful and not so useful information being shared on Twitter at the Association of American Geographers conference in Los Angeles.  

'1.24% of tweets have a GPS location, with ~60% using a profile location and ~15% are easily geocodable' @SeanGorman #aag2013

@ajturner

At #AAG2013 , @elsevierscience is buying you a drink at the expense of your library's budget. #Openaccess now! pic.twitter.com/b6yfALDR4H

@favrebulle

Gary Fields: US border patrol officials have told him that Israelis have come to visit US/Mexico border to learn. #AAG2013 #PalMex
Reece Jones: Like Israel's wall, the US/Mexico border was also created through military conquest. #AAG2013 #PalMex

@quiquivix

Fascinating talk by Jess Bier on how contemporary Palestian maps of West Bank based on digitized British colonial maps from 1930s #AAG2013
@RobKitchin

Tired of repetitive accounts of crude neoliberalism, including at #AAG2013 (no names mentioned). If only power were so crude! #GlobalPOV
@AnanyaRoy_Cal

Reading the #aag2013 twitter feed. Wish I could show off what "impact" looks like. Then probably have a session on, "Now I have to kill u."

@Fantom_Planet

Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Royal Geographical Society Guides to Publishing and Communicating Outside of Academia

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com!

The Royal Geographical Society is giving away free online copies of two manuscripts primarily for academic and graduate student geographers:  Communicating Geographical Research Beyond the Academy (PDF) and Publishing and Getting Read (PDF).  I want to thank the RGS for their free and open distribution of this information.

The communications guide actually discusses blogging in a positive light.  Personally I feel blogging and publishing go together hand-in-hand.  Too often geographers write in academic babel to a very closed audience of journal readers.  I have the aim of writing things my mother can understand.  If she can get what I am trying to say then I know my efforts can reach and educate the public.  Many academic geographers would do well to remember that working merely to get an article in a journal (where it will have no impact and die) is a waste of time and one's life.  Until we return to a Harm de Blij model of public outreach on real issues we geographers will remain in a sort of exile.

Share knowledge and educate the world!

Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Ancient Mayan Water Storage and Purification

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com!

Graduate student  Jeffrey Brewer is presenting “Hinterland Hydrology: Mapping the Medicinal Trail Community, Northwest Belize” at the AAG 2013 conference.

While is presentation is not online the University of Cincinnati has a news article about his research into Ancient Mayan water storage and purification.  An interesting part of the article is

"Brewer ‘s discovery of artificial reservoirs – topographical depressions that were lined with clay to make a water-tight basin – addressed how the Maya conserved water from the heavy rainfall from December to spring, which got them through the region’s extreme dry spells that stretched from summer to winter. “They also controlled the vegetation directly around these reservoirs at this hinterland settlement,” says Brewer. “The types of lily pads and water-borne plants found within these basins helped naturally purify the water. They knew this, and they managed the vegetation by these water sources that were used for six months when there was virtually no rainfall."

His abstract is below

"The Medicinal Trail site, covering an area approximately 1 kilometer in diameter, is a dispersed hinterland community located near the major ancient Maya site of La Milpa in northwestern Belize. Occupied primarily during the Classic Period (AD 250-900), this terraced community consists of at least three closely related formal courtyard groups, a number of informal mound clusters, and multiple landscape modifications including terraces, depressions, and linear features. These plaster-paved surface features served to direct water into the natural depressions, or reservoirs, which served as open catchment basins partially designed to collect wet season rainfall and hold sporadic surface runoff or water from more permanent canalized surfaces. Two years of total station mapping at the site have revealed distinct patterns of settlement selection and water management practices. Survey and mapping have revealed a settlement pattern in which, (a) the largest, and most complex household groups are associated with ridge tops, (b) possible artificial drainages and reservoirs are associated with dense settlement, and (c) numerous terraces are located on the slopes of the ridges, adjacent to some of the drainage features. Mapping data collection will continue in future seasons—as will interpretation of the hydraulic landscape—as we seek gain a clearer understanding of the complex interrelationship between water and people within this peripheral settlement."

Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Spatial Methodologies for the Analysis of Vulnerability in Urban Areas - A Case Study for Terrorism in Tokoyo, Japan

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com!

Konstantin Greger, a graduate student at the University of Tsukuba, is presenting "Spatial Methodologies for the Analysis of Vulnerability in Urban Areas - A Case Study for Terrorism in Tokyo, Japan" at the AAG 2013 conference.

Greger's slides are below and his somewhat html butchered notes area available here.

Konstantin Greger - Spatial Methodologies for the Analysis of Vulnerability in Urban Areas from Konstantin Greger

His abstract is below

"The geographic analysis of crime risk, criminogenic factors and their spatial influence has gained legitimate interest in the past, most notably by the increased popularity in the Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) methodology by Caplan & Kennedy. Our research is an attempt to apply this concept to the analysis of vulnerability to terrorism in urban areas. In the course of this effort we developed a generic Spatial Urban Vulnerability Analysis (SUVA) framework. The aim is to analyze the distribution of vulnerability in space based on the attributes of the objects defining that space (such as people, buildings and infrastructures). This paper is a case study of an application of the SUVA framework in a central area in Tokyo, Japan. First we outline the underlying vulnerability concept, which consists of two factors: susceptibility and disutility. Then we explain the general SUVA framework and analysis methodologies. In the next part we briefly introduce the study area, present the selected vulnerability factors for this case study, and explain their selection process. This is followed by a detailed description of the operationalization of the vulnerability factors using spatial and non-spatial methodologies. We move on to the object-based vulnerability maps and the calculation and visualization of the vulnerability factors' spatial influence. Lastly we combine the single factor maps to a comprehensive vulnerability map of the study area. We conclude the paper with an evaluation of possible target audiences and the overall usefulness of the presented methodology."

Virtual Geography Convention 2013: Accommodating Big Data in Visual Analytics: Pairing Computation with Cognition

Welcome to the Virtual Geography Convention 2013!  If you have a presentation or blog post you wished published please contact me at catholicgauze [at] gmail [dot] com!  

Joshua Stevens of Pennsylvania State University presented the computer science-heavy "Accommodating Big Data in Visual Analytics: Pairing Computation with Cognition" at the 2013 Association of American Geographers conference.

His study shows how computer science can help understand big data in order to aid geospatial/geographic research.

While his presentation is not online he posted online an example of big data in visual analytics for geographic research.



His abstract is below

"Researchers in a variety of disciplines face enormous challenges related to the acquisition, analysis, and visualization of big data. This is especially true when the data contain both spatial and temporal attributes and when analytical procedures rely simultaneously on system computation and human cognition. For this reason, GIScientists are perhaps among those best prepared to make significant contributions to the emerging field of big data analytics. Intuitive and interactive visualizations that display rapidly changing, diverse spatiotemporal data will play a vital role in this process by improving the analytical and communicative stages of projects that make use of big data. The advent of big data brought along with it new challenges related to the velocity, complexity, and enormity of information and the pairing of many large, heterogeneous data sources. The challenges of visual analytics with big, spatiotemporal data are complicated further when maps only compose a portion of a visualization system consisting of animated graphs, tables, and other views that are employed alongside the computational processes. Although great strides have been made in developing tools to compute such data, questions related to the perception and cognition of big data faced by users of these tools remain unasked and unanswered. In light of these challenges, we make the case for considering cognition in the era of big data and introduce some of the efforts underway at Penn State related to GIScience and the dawn of big data visual analytics."