When I made my Paris Métro map, the joke was that the next step would be the leap in order of magnitude between subway stations and Vélib’ stations. For those who don’t know what Vélib’ is, it’s the Parisian bike-sharing system that I’ve already described in great detail. But I knew there was no way [...]
The last time I rapped at you, I talked about Métro coverage in Paris. I felt like Paris was exceptionally well covered by the Métro, and I used math to prove that basically one is never more than 700m from a Métro station in the city. How, though, does that coverage compare with Chicago? Would [...]
Anecdotally, I have felt since moving to Paris that one is never, ever too far from a Métro station. This is in contrast with Chicago, where one can be literally over a mile from an El stop. But I had not, until now, measured it out. Similarly, last year, a friend, who was living in [...]
[This post is a slightly enhanced version of an email I sent to the Humanist mailing list today in response to this message asking about the value of GIS curriculum in scholarship. Here, I begin by quoting the relevant parts of the original post] At my university, a vice president has been arguing that there [...]
“GIS indeed represents power to most audiences: it stands for funding and research grants, jobs, information, student enrollments, mesmerizing images on the computer screen, best solutions and locations, and the power to convince. This power derives …
This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre. I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall [...]
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you [...]
[I'm not entirely sure why I'm turning this into a post. It's essentially my final project for my Advanced GIS class. I think it's rather provocative, however, and it shows a few immediate possible further directions for analysis.] In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I [...]
Continue reading about Nearest Neighbors and Monte Carlo Simulations with Dos Passos
