Computer Models for Social Change

Please check out the Region d'Acton site, GeoActon 2.0: Cartes Geographiques avec Participation Citoyenne  we built with the MRC d'Acton to engage small business owners in promoting local economic development. This is part of our Projet Geoweb Grant with the Ministry of Government Services of Quebec.

Led by Peter Johnson, postdoctoral fellow, with technical assistance and research by Pierre Beaudreau.

Our book chapter comes out next week: Connecting a 'Web' of Innovation: Lessons from the Participatory GeoWeb Case Study Laboratory in the GEOIDE book. With authors Pamela Tudge, Renee Sieber, Jon Corbett, Yolanda Wiersma, Pamela Robinson, and Steven Young.

Peter Johnson and I had a great crop of Advanced Geographic Information Science students this year. Here are their project abstracts.

Ana Brandusescu: Location-based services: Using mobile phones to record community perceptions of university spaces

The synergy between technology and mobility has rapidly strengthened over the last couple of decades and is continuing to do so. Mobile technology, in particular mobile phones, has played an important role in the advancement of location-based services (LBS). The report investigates Ushahidi’s Crowdmap, a free and open-source software (FOSS) used as the online mapping platform for University Spaces. University Spaces was created to determine whether mobile phones can be used to record community perceptions of university space.

Sieber is part of a team that has just obtained a Federal Government SSHRC Public Outreach Grant called Humanities Dissemination & Making Publics using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to build an experimental RDF framework. The project is headed by Dr. Marc Milner (with 3 other co-applicants). This project is part of our own digital humanities research node.

Thiago Alves de Souza is visiting us from Curitiba, Brazil for the term. He will be investigating the use of mobile apps to engage the public in discussions about how urban street furniture transforms the city. He joins Pierre Beaudreau and Korbin da Silva in our urban design 2.0 team.