Sheep Droppings: 7/9-7/15

Another week, another edition of Sheep Droppings...

First, to get the sheep-related news out of the way, Matt and Taylor have a book chapter out in the new edited collection Cities, Regions and Flows, edited by Peter V. Hall and Markus Hesse. Though it isn't exactly geoweb-related, the chapter deals with the mutually constitutive relationship between material commodity flows in the global economy and the virtual flows of information which enable them. Email Matt or Taylor if you'd like a copy of the chapter...

It also seems the Church vs. Beer map just won't go away, as we now have the honor of being featured on the Japanese version of CNN.com. 

There's also a new paper in GeoJournal by Jonathan Cinnamon and Nadine Schuurman on ways to ameliorate the data-divide in poorer communities. GeoJournal also has a couple of relevant papers that have been stuck in the Online First section for awhile, including one by Matthew Kelley on "The emergent urban imaginaries of geosocial media" and one by Stefanidis et al on "Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds".

...and one more bit of new publication news: James Cheshire and Michael Batty have a new editorial in E&PB on visualization tools for big data. You can read James' summary of the editorial and some other general thoughts on his blog.

Slate had an interesting piece this week on how the Wikipedia controversy over Kate Middleton's wedding dress serves as an indicator of gender bias within user-generated content online.

In the cool maps of the week department, we found these neat maps of internet infrastructure -- most are of undersea cables, but there is also a good map of internet infrastructure in New York City. There was also this new map of linguistic variations of pop vs. soda vs. coke in the US using Twitter data. Just for comparison's sake, here are Eric Fischer's map using similar data from Twitter, our map using Google Maps refernces, and Alan McConchie's original using survey data.

Our last bit of news for the week comes from industry, where the geoweb and big data gurus at GeoIQ decided to join forces with the ever-so-hated behemoth at Esri. You can check out some interesting critiques of the move here and here. 

Until next time, sheeple!