Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Considering The Non-Programming Geographer's Perspective When Designing Extracurricular Introductory Computer Programming Workshops, Thomas R Etherington

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Computer programming is becoming an increasingly important scientific skill, but geographers are not necessarily receiving this training as part of their formal education. While there are efforts to promote and support extracurricular introductory computer programming workshops, there remain questions about how best to deliver these workshops. Therefore, as part of a recent introductory programming extracurricular workshop I organized for non-programing geographers, I tried to understand more about their perceptions of computer programming. I identify that one of the most important aspects for geographers to learn to computer program is to have training that is domain specific to ensure that the …

Towards Harmonizing Property Measurement Standards, Abdullah Kara, Volkan Çağdaş, Ümit Işıkdağ, Bülent Onur Turan

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Area and volume values of buildings and building parts have been used in many applications including taxation, valuation and land use planning. Many countries maintain a national standard for representing the measurements of floor areas in buildings. The national standards generally use similar basis for measuring building floor areas, in fact, areas specified in national standards often have semantic differences. Therefore, a number of international standards have been developed for harmonizing floor area measurements; however, they also have differences. This study aims at harmonizing the floor areas defined in the international property measurement standards by revealing the semantic relations between …

Bridging Space, Time, And Semantics In Giscience, Margarita Kokla, Eric Guilbert, Mir Abolfazl Mostafavi

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.

Hyper-Local Geographically Weighted Regression: Extending Gwr Through Local Model Selection And Local Bandwidth Optimization, Alexis Comber, Yunqiang Wang, Yihe Lü, Xingchang Zhang, Paul Harris

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is an inherently exploratory technique for examining process non-stationarity in data relationships. This paper develops and applies a hyper-local GWR which extends such investigations further. The hyper-local GWR simultaneously optimizes both local model selection (which covariates to include in each local regression) and local kernel bandwidth specification (how much data should be included locally). These are evaluated using a measure of model fit. The hyper-local GWR approach evaluates different kernel bandwidths at each location and selects the most parsimonious local regression model. By allowing models and bandwidths to vary locally, this approach extends and refines the …

Georeferencing Places From Collective Human Descriptions Using Place Graphs, Hao Chen, Stephan Winter, Maria Vasardani

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Place descriptions in everyday communication or in online text provide a rich source of spatial knowledge about places. Such descriptions typically consist of references to places and spatial relationships between them. An important step to utilize such knowledge in information systems is georeferencing the referred places. Beside place name disambiguation, another challenge is that a significant proportion of place references in such descriptions are not official place names indexed by gazetteers, thus cannot be resolved easily. This paper presents a novel approach for georeferencing places from collective descriptions using place graphs, regardless of whether they are referred to by gazetteered …

Towards Place-Based Exploration Of Instagram: Using Co-Design To Develop An Interdisciplinary Geovisualization Prototype, Catherine Emma Jones, Daniele Guido, Marta Severo

Journal of Spatial Information Science

An abundance of geographic information is hidden within texts and multimedia objects that has the potential to enrich our knowledge about the relationship between people and places. One such example is the geographic information embedded within user-generated content collected and curated by the social media giants. Such geographic data can be encoded either explicitly as geotags or implicitly as geographical references expressed as texts that comprise part of a title or image caption. To use such data for knowledge building there is a need for new mapping interfaces. These interfaces should support both data integration and visualization, and geographical exploration …

What College Students Learn From Teaching Others, Larkin N. Hood

Journal of Archaeology and Education

This article describes what undergraduate students learned from participating in a museum docent program at a large, public university on the West Coast of the United States. The majority (93%) of students report an increase in their ability to effectively communicate specialized knowledge to museum visitors in one or more of the following ways: 1) identifying what visitors know and adjusting their explanations accordingly; 2) translating technical information to visitors; 3); communicating information in an active, hands-on manner; 4) confidently communicating their knowledge to others. Students reported personal and professional benefits as well. In addition to this focused observation approach, …

Minerva 2018, The Honors College

Minerva

This issue of Minerva includes an article on the Honors Endeavor by recently retired faculty member, David Gross; an adaptation of Isaac Record's 2018 Distinguished Honors Graduate lecture; an article on 2018 Honors Read Just Mercy; and a wonderful farewell to beloved Honors College Administrative Specialist, Deb Small. Other highlights include a reflection by CLAS-Honors preceptor of philosophy, Hao Hong; and a look into 2018-2019 student thesis research.

Key To The Past: Community Perceptions Of Yup’Ik Youth Interaction With Culturally Relevant Education Inspired By The Nunalleq Archaeology Project, Sean R. O'Rourke, Justin J. Turner, Krista Ritchie

Journal of Archaeology and Education

This study qualitatively describes a) the implementation of culturally relevant education (CRE) programs for Yup’ik youth in Quinhagak, Alaska that developed from the Nunalleq Project—a nearby archaeological excavation—and b) community members’ and program facilitators’ perceptions of associated youth social and psychological outcomes. Ten semi-structured interviews (seven community members, three program facilitators) were undertaken and analyzed using constant comparative analysis. Community members and program facilitators attributed numerous outcomes to the Nunalleq-related CRE, such as imparting practical skills (e.g., wilderness survival, artistic and technological skills), teaching young people to value their heritage (e.g., educating them about the struggles their ancestors overcame), and …

Using Mobility Data As Proxy For Measuring Urban Vitality, Patrizia Sulis, Ed Manley, Chen Zhong, Michael Batty

Journal of Spatial Information Science

In this paper, we propose a computational approach to Jane Jacobs' concept of diversity and vitality, analyzing new forms of spatial data to obtain quantitative measurements of urban qualities frequently employed to evaluate places. We use smart card data collected from public transport to calculate a diversity value for each research unit. Diversity is composed of three dynamic attributes: intensity, variability, and consistency, each measuring different temporal variations of mobility flows. We then apply a regression model to establish the relationship between diversity and vitality, using Twitter data as a proxy for human activity in urban space. Final results (also …

Locally-Varying Explanations Behind The United Kingdom's Vote To Leave The European Union, Roger Beecham, Aidan Slingsby, Chris Brunsdon

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Explanations behind area-based (Local Authority-level) voting preference in the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union are explored using aggregate-level data. Developing local models, special attention is paid to whether variables explain the vote equally well across the country. Variables describing the post-industrial and economic "successfulness" of Local Authorities most strongly discriminate variation in the vote. To a lesser extent this is the case for variables linked to "metropolitan" and "big city" contexts, which assist the Remain vote, those that distinguish more traditional and "nativist" values, assisting Leave, and those loosely describing material outcomes, again reinforcing Leave. Whilst variables …

Modeling Movement Probabilities Within Heterogeneous Spatial Fields, Jed A. Long

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Recent efforts have focused on modeling the internal structure of space-time prisms to estimate the unequal movement opportunities within. This paper further develops this area of research by formulating a model for field-based time geography that can be used to probabilistically model movement opportunities conditioned on underlying heterogeneous spatial fields. The development of field-based time geography draws heavily on well-established methods for cost-distance analysis, common to most GIS software packages. The field-based time geographic model is compared with two alternative approaches that are commonly employed to estimate probabilistic space-time prisms - (truncated) Brownian bridges and time geographic kernel density estimation. …

Determining The Optimal Spatial And Temporal Thresholds That Maximize The Predictive Accuracy Of The Prospective Space-Time Scan Statistic (Pstss) Hotspot Method, Monsuru Adepeju, Andrew Evans

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The spatial and temporal thresholds (K and T) are two key parameters that control the performance of the prospective space-time scan statistical (PSTSS) hotspot method. This study proposes an objective function approach, in which the optimal values of K and T that maximize the mean hit rate (a measure of predictive accuracy), are determined. The proposed approach involves sweeping through a range of values defined for each parameter and monitors their impacts on the mean hit rate. A case study of the crime data sets of the South Chicago area is presented in which 100 one-day consecutive predictions are carried …

25 Years Of Gisruk, Jonny Huck

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Special Feature Editorial

Parameter-Free Aggregation Of Value Functions From Multiple Experts And Uncertainty Assessment In Multi-Criteria Evaluation, Benjamin Rohrbach, Robert Weibel, Patrick Laube

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper makes a threefold contribution to spatial multi-criteria evaluation (MCE): firstly by presenting a new method concerning value functions, secondly by comparing different approaches to assess the uncertainty of a MCE outcome, and thirdly by presenting a case-study on land-use change. Even though MCE is a well-known methodology in GIScience, there is a lack of practicable approaches to incorporate the potentially diverse views of multiple experts in defining and standardizing the values used to implement input criteria. We propose a new method that allows generating and aggregating non-monotonic value functions, integrating the views of multiple experts. The new approach …

A Grounding-Based Ontology Of Data Quality Measures, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik, Amin Mobasheri, Luisa Griesbaum, Melanie Eckle, Clemens Jacobs, Carolin Klonner

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Data quality and fitness for purpose can be assessed by data quality measures. Existing ontologies of data quality dimensions reflect, among others, which aspects of data quality are assessed and the mechanisms that lead to poor data quality. An understanding of which source of information is used to judge about data quality and fitness for purpose is, however, lacking. This article introduces an ontology of data quality measures by their grounding, that is, the source of information to which the data is compared to in order to assess their quality. The ontology is exemplified with several examples of volunteered geographic …

Say What?: Demystifying Discourse Analysis For Archaeology Students, Cynthia L. Van Gilder

Journal of Archaeology and Education

Most archaeology instructors are eager to have their students appreciate that the study of the past is relevant to the present. In fact, most current introductory textbooks include a section, however brief it may be, on the socio-politics of archaeology. These discussions are usually framed around how ideas about the past have been used to justify abuse (e.g., Nazi archaeology to support an Aryan homeland), or how the involvement of descendant communities in research is now considered best practice in the field (e.g., NAGPRA, community based archaeology). One of the most powerful tools for understanding how what we say about …

Digital Bridges Across Disciplinary, Practical And Pedagogical Divides: An Online Professional Master’S Program In Heritage Resource Management, John R. Welch, David V. Burley, Jonathan C. Driver, Erin A. Hogg, Kanthi Jayasundera, Michael Klassen, David Maxwell, George P. Nicholas, Janet Pivnick, Christopher D. Dore

Journal of Archaeology and Education

Growth and diversification in heritage resource management (HRM) archaeology since the 1960s have created new demands for training the next generations of HRM leaders and for addressing persistent and counterproductive divisions between academic and applied archaeologies. The Simon Fraser University Department of Archaeology (SFU) has responded to these demands with an all-new, cohort-based, thesis-focused graduate program created by and for HRM professionals. The program’s target audience is HRM practitioners who hold Bachelor’s credentials, have initiated promising careers in HRM, and desire advanced, research-focused degrees to enable their professional capacity and upward mobility. The SFU program is structured and focused to …

Teaching Bones From My Garden, John C. Whittaker

Journal of Archaeology and Education

Abstract

Faunal analysis, or zooarchaeology, is an important subfield that provides information on human ecology, economy, culture, and society. Few of my students have much experience with hunting, farming, anatomy, or even eating meat these days, so faunal analysis labs in an Archaeological Field Methods class present some difficulties.

Faunal assemblages from archaeological sites are often small, fragile, and too valuable for class use. They require good comparative collections, and it may be difficult for students to relate to unfamiliar animals and cultures.

These problems can be overcome by producing a faunal teaching assemblage from home meat consumption. For over …

How Well Is Maine Doing? Comparing Well-Being Across Maine Counties, Angela Daley, Andrew Crawley, Muntasir Rahman, Jake Demosthenes, Erin Lyons

Maine Policy Review

Maine has experienced major challenges over the last decade including recession, stagnant recovery, and industrial and population decline. But by some measures, Maine is still seen as one of the best in the United States for well-being. In this paper, we critique the notion of what well-being is and how it is measured. Based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Initiative, we then propose and construct an index to compare well-being across Maine counties. Our work gives new insights on the types of challenges counties are facing and provides policymakers a new way of empirically understanding …