Introducing Sheep Droppings: Floatingsheep's Weekly News Roundup

Here at Floatingsheep Headquarters (also known as 'the tubes'), we've been having some discussion as of late as to what the blog should look like moving forward. While we've had much less in the way of original maps and research over the past year or so, we fully plan to continue providing sneak peeks of our research in progress in order to solicit feedback and continue promoting research on internet geography and the geoweb, more generally. But one way we've decided to move the blog forward is by providing a weekly news roundup (at least loosely inspired by Aaron Bady's Sunday Reading), including links to recent posts from the blog, new papers, relevant news items and other marginalia floating around in the universe we all inhabit. So with that, we provide you the Inaugural edition of Sheep Droppings: FloatingSheep's Weekly News Roundup!

As I'm sure many of you know, we had a little event called SheepCamp last weekend, bringing together nearly two dozen researchers from around the country to talk all things geoweb and big data. If you want to know more, you should check out the #geowebchat transcript from this past week, when we had a discussion of SheepCamp and possibility of similar events in the future.

One of the things we worked on at SheepCamp was a submission to the Knight News Challenge. You can read more about the DOLLY Project here, as well as about Mark's projects on Geographies of Wikipedia and Wikichains.

Another really awesome thing to come out of SheepCamp was the creation of geoweb-r, a listserv dedicated to academic research on the geoweb (thanks Alan!). If you haven't already, you should join the 200 or more of your closest friends in sharing what is sure to be a great informational resource for the community.

In other sheep-related news, the past week has been big. The Oxford Internet Institute won a big award from the Wikimedia UK Foundation, largely as a result of Mark's work on the geographies of Wikipedia. Mark and Monica also won another award for a related infographic on Wikipedia from the OxTalent awards competition at Oxford.

And that doesn't even include the fact that Mark and Monica had a featured graphic published in the most recent issue of Environment and Planning A, as well as the acceptance of a paper by Mark, Matt and Andrew Boulton into the Transactions of the IBG.

In non-sheep-related publication news, friend-of-the-sheep Muki Haklay has posted an excerpt from his forthcoming paper, "Neogeography and the delusion of democratisation", which will be included in a special issue of E&PA entitled Situating Neogeography, guest edited by Mark and Matt 'Two-Dot' Wilson.

While we may be experimenting with the formats of future Sheep Droppings (you know, they come in all shapes and sizes), be sure to pass along any leads that you think ought to be included to any one of the Floating Sheeple.