Report from the first workshop on cyber ethics in platial research

The examination of morality has a long-standing history in philosophy, but recent events, including the dramatic rise of computational technologies has expanded the field into a multidisciplinary study of ethics. With the global connectivity provided by the Internet,cyber ethics is unique due to rapid changes in technology and ever-changing ethical considerations pertaining to everything from human subjects to artificial intelligence (AI). Among the deluge of data generated by machines and humans, place-based information is special due to its vague boundaries, subjectivity, and heterogeneity of descriptive data. Compared to spatial data, platial information is a much broader concept as it is more than simply geographic coordinates and often involves human attachments. While we fully support the recent renewed interest in the field of geoethics(Goodchild, 2022), we also feel it is important to discuss ethic beyond the surface of the earth. Here, we propose to extend this discussion to include cyberspace and bring together the concepts of cyber and geo-ethical studies under the umbrella of place-based cyber ethics. We encourage the readers of this workshop report to reflect on these questions and the importance of place-based cyber ethics in their own work

Unveiling place perspectives with the place standard tool

This report presents the outcomes of the workshop titled ‘Unveiling Place Perspectives with the Place Standard Tool’ held at the Fourth International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL'23), which took place on 19–21 September 2023 in Dortmund, Germany. The workshop convened participants from diverse locations and disciplinary backgrounds during the symposium. Using the open-access participatory instrument known as the Place Standard Tool as a framework, the event provided a dynamic platform for engaging discussions and reflections. The tool offers a guideline around 14 major themes, which encompass our place experience. It has been widely adopted and implemented in a variety of contexts, and the workshop has built on its expertise to facilitate dialogue around a place that was selected as a workshop site. The participants conducted an exploratory walk and completed an evaluation of place, sharing their results in a final discussion. The workshop successfully unveiled diverse place perspectives, affirming efficacy of the Place Standard Tool as a versatile instrument for open conversations about place. The hands-on format, fostering informal exchanges, seamlessly aligned with the symposium's broader objectives of nurturing platial discourse and expanding it towards new disciplines and fields

Mapping Great Britain's semantic footprints through a large language model analysis of Reddit comments

Observed regional variation in geotagged social media text is often attributed to dialects, where features in language are assumed to exhibit region-specific properties. While dialects are seen as a key component in defining the identity of regions, there are a multitude of other geographic properties that may be captured within natural language text. In our work, we consider locational mentions that are directly embedded within comments on the social media website Reddit, providing a range of associated semantic information, and enabling deeper representations between locations to be captured. Using a large corpus of geoparsed Reddit comments from UK-related local discussion subreddits, we first extract embedded semantic information using a large language model, aggregated into local authority districts, representing the semantic footprint of these regions. These footprints broadly exhibit spatial autocorrelation, with clusters that conform with the national borders of Wales and Scotland. London, Wales, and Scotland also demonstrate notably different semantic footprints compared with the rest of Great Britain

Mapping Emotional Attachment as a Measure of Sense of Place to Identify Coastal Restoration Priority Areas

Our applied case study demonstrates how knowledge from community stakeholders about emotional attachment (as a key component of sense of place) can inform and influence future coastal restoration priorities at various scales in the Indian River Lagoon, Florida (USA). We map aggregate measures of emotional attachment from community stakeholders using Geographic Information Systems. We then analyze this human systems level data with kernel density estimation measures at the broader lagoon scale and with inverse distance weighted measures at more localized scales. By connecting these mapped results back to the primary reasons that participants provided for having high or low emotional attachment in a location, we show how varying spatial patterns of emotional attachment as a primary component of sense of place within and across broader geographic regions can be represented, mapped, and visualized to enhance future restoration priorities. We demonstrate how aggregate results gained from community stakeholders can help restoration teams prioritize their science communication and education strategies to align human systems level data with natural systems level data

Exploring the law of text geographic information

Textual geographic information is indispensable and heavily relied upon in practical applications. The absence of clear distribution poses challenges in effectively harnessing geographic information, thereby driving our quest for exploration. We contend that geographic information is influenced by human behavior, cognition, expression, and thought processes, and given our intuitive understanding of natural systems, we hypothesize its conformity to the Gamma distribution. Through rigorous experiments on a diverse range of 24 datasets encompassing different languages and types, we have substantiated this hypothesis, unearthing the underlying regularities governing the dimensions of quantity, length, and distance in geographic information. Furthermore, theoretical analyses and comparisons with Gaussian distributions and Zipf's law have refuted the contingency of these laws. Significantly, we have estimated the upper bounds of human utilization of geographic information, pointing towards the existence of uncharted territories. Also, we provide guidance in geographic information extraction. Hope we peer its true countenance uncovering the veil of geographic information.Comment: IP