Spatial Humanities - a Project of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship

http://spatial.scholarslab.org

The aim of this website from the University of Virginia seems to also follow a transdisciplinary kind of model in regards to GIS as a tool for humanities research. It includes:

• a set of framing essays on the spatial turn across the disciplines


• an evolving, crowdsourced catalog of research resources and featured projects and organizations


• related feeds from Q&A sites and social media


• a peer-reviewed, occational publication for step-by-step helpsheets and tutorials in humanities GIS.

There is research and projects in a variety of disciplines, including architecture. Although it is not exactly how we are looking at GIS and social media, I thought it was interesting to see current research on the uses of GIS in a variety of different contexts.

GIglow

Parametric Neighborhoods

Must neighborhoods continue to be confined by two-dimensional polygonal boundaries?

Can census data and associative modeling techniques generate a new concept of neighborhood?

This latest iteration from the novi pontrella partnership addresses these questions by mobilizing the potential of CAD modeling software and GIS based data.

The goal: to generate new neighborhoods, understood not as a generalized wholes, but instead as as blurry elastic sums of their constituent parts.

Hot Spots and Corridors in the process

There is a moment of spatial ambiguity in the face of homelessness and the city. Under the assumption that most cities have a network of citizens (or non-citizens) without permanent shelter or adequate means to purchase basic living resources, this community associated with homelessness can be considered largely transient and under represented. Census counting asks who, what, when, where questions about this community, but only at a precise moment in time; their act of counting the sans par makes its first big mistake by attributing ideals of permanence and spatial stability to a uniquely unstable and impermanent community.

We question not who are the homeless, where are they, and/or how can we help them?*...but rather, what are the urban resources (official and unofficial) and spatial hot spots/corridors that facilitate the mobility of this general community. Working primarily through identification of spatial and temporal aspects of food resources and shelter features, our project maps each feature in order to find places and programs for intervention. Our TINs represent the relationships between specific locations, time and frequency, and proximity over multiple scales. Stay tuned to learn more...

*how can we help them? a somewhat banal and irresponsible question. How do we know that help is actually needed beyond the resources already provided? We need to identify this community first not through the lens of homelessness = person who needs a home, but instead, homelessness = person who migrates, plugs into various resources and spaces, and/or a different kind of urban user.

FYI re Census 2010

Most Shapefiles from Census 2010 are now available...

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/documentation.html

Walking Syracuse with TIN shades

Video study to find the latent field conditions conceived in the TINs we made from GIS features targeting walkers across Hwy I-690.

This project aims to facilitate the interaction and awareness of the user groups of walkers and drivers in Syracuse, with respect to their relative speeds, in proximity to former or active pollutants within the city. By using I-690, a site of former industrialization, as an artery for future development, interventions (signage, sensors, frames, etc..) will counteract and increase awareness of these environmental factors.

Modeling for Latent Cities - A Guide to our Latest Experiment

modeling for latent cities

the love bus in chicago!

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-04-13/news/0604130161_1_chicago-transit-authority-wicker-park-young-professionals

Understanding The TIN

This presentation on TINs was given in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Geography. This is a good resource if you are looking for a quick and clear explanation of what Triangulated Irregular Networks are, its various components, and the basic mathematics behind the process.

Going the Distance...

New GIS tool

"Near" or "Generate Near Table"

This tool takes a feature's location and records its distance to other features. From there, the distance is either added to the data table of your original feature, or can be joined manually (which is very helpful, because once you use the Near tool, there is no way to remove the results if desired, ie wrong measurement unit, etc.) The tool is located under Analysis Tools _ Proximity

For Team Homeless, as we create TINs based on time/frequency of certain amenities in relation to spatial features, considering distance may also be useful. Consider a 2G TIN relating distance, location, and time. Check-in soon to see the results!