Visualizing Conflict: Possibilities for Urban Research

The Center for Spatial Research (CSR) is undertaking a multiyear project investigating what we have termed Conflict Urbanism. The term designates not simply the conflicts that take place in cities, but also conflict as a structuring principle of cities intrinsically, as a way of inhabiting and creating urban space. The increasing urbanization of warfare and the policing and surveillance of everyday life are examples of the term (Graham, 2010; Misselwitz & Rieniets, 2006; Weizman, 2014), but conflict is not limited to war and violence. Cities are not only destroyed but also built through conflict. They have long been arenas of friction, difference, and dissidence, and their irreducibly conflictual character manifests itself in everything from neighborhood borders, to differences of opinion and status, to ordinary encounters on the street. One major way in which CSR undertakes research is through interrogating the world of ‘big data.’ This includes analyzing newly accessible troves of ‘urban data,’ working to open up new areas of research and inquiry, as well as focusing on data literacy as an essential part of communicating with these new forms of urban information. In what follows we discuss two projects currently under way at CSR that use mapping and data visualization to explore and analyze Conflict Urbanism in two different contexts: the city of Aleppo, and the nation of Colombia

Visualizing Conflict: Possibilities for Urban Research

The Center for Spatial Research (CSR) is undertaking a multiyear project investigating what we have termed Conflict Urbanism. The term designates not simply the conflicts that take place in cities, but also conflict as a structuring principle of cities intrinsically, as a way of inhabiting and creating urban space. The increasing urbanization of warfare and the policing and surveillance of everyday life are examples of the term (Graham, 2010; Misselwitz & Rieniets, 2006; Weizman, 2014), but conflict is not limited to war and violence. Cities are not only destroyed but also built through conflict. They have long been arenas of friction, difference, and dissidence, and their irreducibly conflictual character manifests itself in everything from neighborhood borders, to differences of opinion and status, to ordinary encounters on the street. One major way in which CSR undertakes research is through interrogating the world of ‘big data.’ This includes analyzing newly accessible troves of ‘urban data,’ working to open up new areas of research and inquiry, as well as focusing on data literacy as an essential part of communicating with these new forms of urban information. In what follows we discuss two projects currently under way at CSR that use mapping and data visualization to explore and analyze Conflict Urbanism in two different contexts: the city of Aleppo, and the nation of Colombia

Living In/difference; or, How to Imagine Ambivalent Networks

In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers

Towards an Understanding of Sustainability of Web-Based Digital Mapping Projects

The making of maps is no longer restricted to the rarefied realm of cartographers. Students, scholars, and researchers in all fields have recognized the power that maps can bring to data of many kinds. Architectural scholars can integrate digitized historical maps and demographic datasets to analyze changes over time in different neighborhoods; oceanographers can marry the bathymetric measurements to the configuration of the coastline and layer that with storm-related data to estimate storm surge in coastal communities. A historian explores geopolitical change over time, by layering political boundary lines and other features over a map of Africa. Thanks to easily available mapping software, it is increasingly easy to experiment with and build mapping projects to answer questions and share data. And yet, many of the tools and platforms that make this possible are part of for-profit businesses, such as Google or ESRI. Others, like Mapzen, are open source, but subject to the same vagaries of many small organizations. Started in 2014 with over 70,000 users, Mapzen announced in 2018 that it would be ceasing operations, and its team disbanded, off to continue developing parts of the code, in the service of other organizations. Scholars and others in the academic sector whose work is built using these tools and platforms need solutions they can rely on to endure. On May 30 and 31, 2019, Columbia University Libraries convened a group of 26 experts, practitioners, developers, and project leads from a range of disciplines to discuss the sustainability and preservation challenges specific to web-based digital mapping projects. The meeting was designed as a series of discussions, brainstorming, and planning exercises, with the aim of identifying the issues and scope concerning the sustainability and preservation of web-based digital mapping projects. Workshop leaders sought to identify specific challenges, as well as some concrete types of solutions that might begin to address them. The findings of the workshop and post-workshop survey suggest a deep and growing interest not only in mapping tools for academia, but in exploring ways in which the academy itself can play an active and strategic role in supporting them. Certain details in our recommendations will be expanded in an addendum to this white paper after an in-person meeting of several Task Force members in January 2020 to continue developing the solutions outlined in that meeting, particularly the best practice/guidance and infrastructure solutions. This will be enabled by a no-cost extension on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant that supported the conference

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The mirage of the metropolis: city imaging in the age of digital chorography

Even as cities evolved geographically, the basis of city imaging (as codified by Kevin Lynch) remained relatively stable for over half a century. More recently, digitally driven transformations in urban life challenge the continued relevance of established city-imaging paradigms. Although digital navigation and mapping devices are readily at hand to neutralize any disorienting predicaments, the ability to image cognitively the wider urban environment remains integral to the construction of a meaningful sense of place. Towards the objective of reconciling city imaging with the place-making challenges of the contemporary metropolis, this paper explores the potential for innovating modes of urban mapping and representation. Specifically, the digital re-envisioning of the historical mapping practice of ‘chorography’ is positioned within Fredric Jameson’s challenge for a new aesthetic of cognitive mapping that enables the situational representation of the individual within the vaster totality. In doing so, the paper contributes to the wider adaptation of urban discourse to digitally propelled shifts in urban life

Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Using the highest-resolution satellite imagery available to anyone outside the U.S. or Russian military or intelligence community, I am interested in creating digital images of the monochrome landscapes which represent some of the most vulnerable sites of the 21st century. The landscapes look familiar, even stereotyped - blue (the Atlantic Ocean), green (the Cameroon rain forest), yellow (the Iraqi desert), and white (the Alaskan tundra). But they are produced with instruments and materials (commonplace and yet still extraordinary ones) that in their very construction call into question the material which constitutes a landscape. These landscapes, these images, ask profound questions about their own future -- and ours --even as they adopt the formal strategies of the most abstract, non-referential, 'aesthetic' of the last century's museum pieces

Laura Kurgan & Eric Cadora: Mapping Justice

Architecture Fall 2007 Lecture Series - October 24, 2007 at The Warehouse. Kurgan and Cadora contend that criminal justice, social welfare, and economic development policies are intimately related to particular jurisdictions, neighborhoods, and locales in our society. This Syracuse Symposium lecture offers an informative and compelling exploration of the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for research and practice in community and institutional corrections