Novel Approaches to research and discover Urban History

Photographs and plans are an essential source for historical research (Münster, Kamposiori, Friedrichs, & Kröber, 2018) and key objects in Digital Humanities (Kwastek, 2014). Numerous digital image archives, containing vast numbers of photographs, have been set up in the context of digitization projects. These extensive repositories of image media are still difficult to search. It is not easy to identify sources relevant for research, analyze and contextualize them, or compare them with the historical original. The eHumanities research group HistStadt4D, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) until July 2020 consists of 14 people – including 4 post-doctoral and 5 PhD researchers. Since a focal interest is to comprehensively investigate how to enhance accessibility of large scale image repositories, researchers and research approaches originate from the humanities, geoand information technologies as well as from educational and information studies. In contrast to adjacent projects dealing primarily with large scale linked text data as the Venice Time Machine project (“The Venice Time Machine,” 2017), sources addressed by the junior group are primarily historical photographs and plans. Historical media and their contextual information are being transferred into a 4D – 3D spatial and temporal scaled - model to support research and education on urban history. Content will be made accessible in two ways; via a 4D browser and a location-dependent augmented-reality representation. The prototype database consists of about 200,000 digitized historical photographs and plans of Dresden from the Deutsche Fotothek (“Deutsche Fotothek,”)

History, Sociology, Modernity : How Connect?

Special Issue on 'The State of Scottish History: Past, Present and Future'Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Macalester College Bulletin

This publication is the Macalester College Bulletin, 1975-76 Supplement. Annual college catalog listing courses of study, historical sketch, calendar, honorary degrees, admission requirements, descriptions of departments, lists of faculty and board of trustee committees, summary of students, and lists of faculty and trustees

'“A strange enough region wherein to wander and muse": Mapping Clerkenwell in Victorian Popular Fictions'

Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal, this essay attempts to perform a geocritical reading of the London district of Clerkenwell. After discussing the spatial turn in the Humanities and introducing a range of spatial critical approaches, the essay “maps” literary Clerkenwell from the perspectives of genre hybridity and intertextuality, spatially articulate cartography, multifocal and historically aware public perception and potentially transgressive connection to outside areas. Clerkenwell is seen to have stimulated a range of genre fiction, including Newgate, realist, penny and slum fiction, and social exploration journalism. In much of this writing, the district was defined by its negative associations with crime, poverty, incarceration and slaughter. Such negative imageability, the essay suggests, was self-perpetuating, since authors would be influenced by their reading to create literary worlds repeating existing tropes; these literary representations, in turn, influenced readers’ perceptions of the area.Intertextual, multi-layered and polysensorial geocritical readings,the essay concludes, can producepowerful andnuanced pictures of literary placesbut also face a formidable challenge in defining an adequate geocentric corpus

A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage

A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow, and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task. With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity. Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics. Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study, we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin

Conservation evo-devo: preserving biodiversity by understanding its origins

Unprecedented rates of species extinction increase the urgency for effective conservation biology management practices. Thus, any improvements in practice are vital and we suggest that conservation can be enhanced through recent advances in evolutionary biology, specifically advances put forward by evolutionary developmental biology (i.e., evo-devo). There are strong overlapping conceptual links between conservation and evo-devo whereby both fields focus on evolutionary potential. In particular, benefits to conservation can be derived from some of the main areas of evo-devo research, namely phenotypic plasticity, modularity and integration, and mechanistic investigations of the precise developmental and genetic processes that determine phenotypes. Using examples we outline how evo-devo can expand into conservation biology, an opportunity which holds great promise for advancing both fields

Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

Geographic Centroid Routing for Vehicular Networks

A number of geolocation-based Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing protocols have been shown to perform well in selected simulation and mobility scenarios. However, the suitability of these mechanisms for vehicular networks utilizing widely-available inexpensive Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware has not been evaluated. We propose a novel geolocation-based routing primitive (Centroid Routing) that is resilient to the measurement errors commonly present in low-cost GPS devices. Using this notion of Centroids, we construct two novel routing protocols and evaluate their performance with respect to positional errors as well as traditional DTN routing metrics. We show that they outperform existing approaches by a significant margin.Comment: 6 page

Big Data Techniques to Improve Learning Access and Citizen Engagement for Adults in Urban Environments

This presentation explores the emerging concept of ‘Big Data in Education’ and introduces novel technologies and approaches for addressing inequalities in access to participation and success in lifelong learning, to produce better life outcomes for urban citizens. It introduces the work of the new Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) at the University of Glasgow, presenting a case study of its first data product – the integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) project. Educational engagement and predictive factors are presented for adult learners, and older adult learners, in a representative survey of 1500 households. This was followed up with mobility tracking data using GPS data and wearable camera images, as well as one year’s worth of contextual data from over one hundred web sources (social media, news, weather). The chapter introduces the complex dataset that can help stakeholders, academics, citizens and other external users examine active aging and citizen learning engagement in the modern urban city, and thus support the development of the learning city. It concludes with a call for a more three-dimensional view of citizen-learners’ daily activity and mobility, such as satellite, mobile phone and active travel application data, alongside administrative data linkage to further explore lifelong learning participation and success. Policy implications are provided for addressing inequalities, and interventions proposed for how cities might promote equal and inclusive adult learning engagement in the face of continued austerity cuts and falling adult learner numbers