Digital Geography in a Web 2.0 World - Presentations Online

I attended this seminar a fortnight ago hosted by CASA and the National Centre for E-Social Science (NCeSS) at the Barbican Theatre in London. An excellent event which highlighted how Web 2.0 technology can and is being used with digital geography in the research community, enabling new approaches in modelling as well as in the presentation of results for analysis.

There were some great youtube-tastic presentations which made even the not so relevant topics (to me) fly by. There were two highlights of the day for me. The first was a presentation entitled Geographical Statistics and the Grid (see it here) by Richard Harris & Chris Brunsden. It outlined how they had used the R open source statistics package in combination with a distributed computing network (The UKs National Grid Service) to run a Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) analysis. ...A little dry I know but of relevance to my current work ;-)

The second highlight was the final presentation by Andrew Hudson-Smith on what the future has to offer entitled Web 2.0, Neogeography and Virtual Worlds. GIS and Second Life anyone? Check it out here.

Also worth a mention, Richard Milton launched a new site called MapTube: A place to put maps. Not sure how long it will be able to keep the name, but it is basically a youtube for maps. As I understand it you use their free software GMapCreator to prepare your data. Stick it on your webserver and register the location on MapTube along with anything you want to say about it. Other people can then pick and choose your data and others to mash up onto a single map. See what Richard said about it himself and view his presentation here.

All the presentations are available for download here.