The Arthur H. Robinson Colloquium will be given by Matthew Zook, Professor of Geography University of Kentucky.
Socializing Data: Mapping Culture and
Governing Cities in the Era of Big Social Media
Friday, February 19, 2016
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Derby Hall 1080
New sources of geographically referenced “big data” have become central to the perception and governance of cities. Of particular interest are crowd-sourced contributions from social media that provide key raw material for automatically-coded representations of places (e.g., a map based search for amenities on a mobile phone). This talk reviews the power-laden ways in which social media-derived data represent the cultures of cities as well as the potential/problems in using these data for urban research and decision-making. The recent style of “smart cities” urban governance, leverages big data – collected from mobile phones, social media feeds, sensors embedded in the built environment, etc. – to rationalize the management of urban areas. After documenting the historical longevity associated with the central ideas within smart city governance – particular the idea that enough data/information/knowledge can solve society problems – this talk critiques the idealized approach to urban governance found both in marketing materials and some criticisms. In contrast to these overly simplistic approaches, this talk demonstrates how social media data and derived metrics might offer useful insight and policy direction, while recognizing that the decisions of what is important and possible to record is simultaneously producing the cities that we aim to measure.
Dr. Zook is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky . He studies how the geoweb is produced order to better understand where, when, and by whom geo-coded content is being created. As an economic geographer Dr. Zook also studies study how flows of material goods in the global economy are shaped by immaterial flows of information. His interest is in the range of ways in which material and virtual flows are intertwined: sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, but always central to the evolution of spatial relations in the economy.
He is also the Director of The DOLLY Project (Data On Local Life and You) is a repository of billions of geolocated tweets that allows for real-time research and analysis. Building on top of existing open source technology, DOLLY ingests all geotagged tweets (~8 million a day), does basic analysis, indexing and geocoding to allows real-time search throughout the entire database (3 billion tweets since Dec 2011).
