1. Teaching Visualisation
Colleagues Kye Askins, Mike Jeffries and myself won research funding from GEES to undertake a project in how to teach students visualisation. We did this as part of a second year module on our BA (Hons) Geography degree which focuses on globalisation. For an assignment students had to visualise an aspect of globalisation. We had high hopes but the work students produced still managed to surprise us. We're in the process of writing it up and will post our report here in the near future.
2. Skateboarding
We've pretty much wrapped our skateboarding research with the acceptance of a second paper: Jenson, A., Swords, J. and Jeffries, M. (forthcoming) "The Accidental Youth Club: Skateboarding in NewcastleGateshead." Journal of Urban Design.
Another paper has been published in Human Geography which focuses on the map we produced from skaters' maps. More info on the project can be found here.
3. Film and TV Production in North East England
I'm currently researching the film and TV industry in North East England. As part of this I'm using a database of productions tagged with a filming location somewhere in the North East on the Internet Movie Database (compiled by a research assistant, Heather Clark). The list of productions and crew who worked on them is huge, and more importantly ripe for visualising. Here is an early iteration:
If you look closely (really closely) there are c.10,000 nodes representing people, organisations and productions and c.14,000 connections between these. Clouds of nodes represent films and TV shows of various types.
Note - there are many caveats with the data. The next few months will be filtering it, and producing iterations to create a more accurate picture of the region's film and TV sectors. It is created in gephi using the force atlas 2 algorithm.
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