I am currently a Professor in Geography at the University of Kentucky (USA) and have just completed a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tartu (Estonia).
For the past several years I have studied the production and practices surrounding user-generated, geotagged data in order to better understand where, when, and by this kind of content is being created. I focus on how code, space and place interact as people increasingly use of mobile, digital technologies to navigate through their everyday, lived geographies. Of special interest is the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal and individualize our experiences in the hybrid, digitally augmented places that cities are becoming. The FloatingSheep research blog provide an overview of this work, particularly some of the more quirky dimensions that are hard to place in more mainstream academic outlets. After all, the Internet (and information space more generally) can be a wild and woolly place.
I am also the Director of the The DOLLY Project (Data On Local Life and You) is a repository of every geolocated tweet in the world since July 2012 that allows for real-time research and analysis. Most recently I joined the editorial team of the new journal, Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries, an open access peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes interdisciplinary work principally in the social sciences, humanities and computing and their intersections with the arts and natural sciences about the implications of Big Data for societies. The Journal’s key purpose is to provide a space for connecting debates about the emerging field of Big Data practices and how they are reconfiguring academic, social, industry, business and government relations, expertise, methods, concepts and knowledge.
Geographies of information, augmented realities, big data and society, code, geosocial media.
