👋 Taking a break from Bluesky to focus on LinkedIn for now. Feel free to connect with me there! www.linkedin.com/in/andreabal... 👈

I frequently present data on population change but hadn't seen a visual that shows population loss in such a dark way. The short video shows population loss of Indigenous American populations over relatively short periods. Source: buff.ly/elJtXa0

Movies from foreign lands: Computing the geographies of cinema The article discusses President Trump’s proposed tariffs on foreign film productions, aiming to boost domestic cinema and challenge “woke” Hollywood. With a decline in traditional…

With Giovanni Quattrone (Middlesex University): 📽️ 🌎
President Trump’s erratic protectionist drive has turned toward “movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands”, with proposed tariffs aimed at non-American productions...
aballatore.space/2025/05/08/m... #cinema #geography

Nel grafico è indicato da dove provengono i cardinali e da chi sono stati nominati.
Qui abbiamo messo insieme altre mappe e grafici per capire chi sono, quanti sono, che facce hanno e quanti anni hanno: ilpost.link/Ve6Ij21duQ

Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its sen...

Yay! Buttons & knobs forever.

RIP Skype — you were right about almost everything Skype saw the future of video and messaging before almost everyone. It also probably never had a chance.

"...Skype was right: we don’t need another social platform or suite of work apps... We need something that operates between apps + devices, that doesn’t care where you’ve registered an account[,] that doesn’t force us to put all our trust in a company that has quarterly results to worry about."

New Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War I am incredibly excited to be part of this groundbreaking initiative to tackle one of the most enduring and troubling issues in global affairs: slavery. As the lead of the Cultural Geo-Analytics La…

🎓👉 I am incredibly excited to be part of this groundbreaking £10 million Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War established by King’s College London in partnership with the University of Nottingham #slavery #digitalhumanities #history aballatore.space/2025/04/22/n...

Charting cultural events on Eventbrite Here’s a new paper led by our PhD student Yue Wang, to be presented at GISRUK 2025 in Bristol! 🌎 🎹🎭 Abstract: This study explores the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of cultural life by in…

Here’s a new paper led by our PhD student Yue Wang to be presented at GISRUK 2025 in Bristol! 🌎 🎹🎭 In this study, we explore how over 50,000 Eventbrite listings reveal the patterns of urban cultural events at a very granular level
#UrbanStudies #CulturalAnalytics aballatore.space/2025/04/17/c...

Lecturer in Human Geography and Gender (Education) at King's College London Explore an exciting academic career as a Lecturer in Human Geography and Gender (Education). Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

We’ve got a 3 year lecturership in human geog and gender now advertised.

Deadline 6th May 2025

Please spread the word!

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMS710/l...

Digital research led by Kings to forecast the emergence of slavery in war zones Academics from the Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab will spearhead digital research in the new Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War.

👏 Professor @s-tanner.bsky.social and Dr @aballatore.bsky.social from @kingsdh.bsky.social and experts from King's Digital Lab will spearhead digital research in the new Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War, funded by @leverhulme.ac.uk 🔽

Panel discussion on Digital Placemaking and Soft City Sensing I’m excited to announce that I’ll be participating in the upcoming panel discussion titled “Digital Placemaking and Soft City Sensing”, scheduled for 20th of May 2025, hoste…

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be participating in the upcoming panel discussion titled “Digital Placemaking and Soft City Sensing”, scheduled for 20th of May 2025, hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. 🇩🇰 🎓🗣️
aballatore.space/2025/04/14/p...

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Place ratings: platforms, effects, discontents ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Everywhere we go, we’re asked to rate our experience—5 stars for a coffee, a thumbs-up for a park, or maybe just a smiley face at the toilet. Place ratings have become a routine part of digital lif…

In this new article in GeoJournal, I explore the role of place ratings in shaping our digitally augmented experiences of place. It was fun to write and I hope it's also fun to read ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #digitalplace #ratings #onlinereviews #place #geography
👉 aballatore.space/2025/04/09/p...

Permanent + digital 🫠

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

We are currently recruiting for a Lecturer in Technologies in Digital Humanities to join the Department of Information Studies at UCL.

Closing date 12th April: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Reading Maps at a Distance: Texts on Maps as New Historical Data Published in Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography (Vol. 76, No. 2, 2024)

Just in time for the final day of the @dataculture.bsky.social project, our experimental article, ‘Reading Maps at a Distance’ is published (OA) in Imago Mundi: doi.org/10.1080/0308..., which was a blast to write with @kmcdono.bsky.social, Kaspar Beelen and Rosie Wood… #dh 🗃️ 1/2

Creating story maps with imperfect spatial data | Humap Story maps need locations - but what if you don't have perfect spatial data? This blog explores the different solutions used by Humap clients

You're making a map project. You find a perfect primary source. There isn't any location data.

ARGH!

In our latest blog we ask Humappers how they create story maps with imperfect spatial data. Take a look at humap.me/blog-community/blo...

#GIS #HGIS #DigitalHumanities #StoryMaps #EdTech

Decoding (and debunking) Hard Fork’s Kevin Roose His latest New York Times piece tells us a lot about what he doesn’t really understand

"At least for another decade or two and probably more, big projects are always going to require software architects who know what they are doing. If hype deters kids from learning to code, we are screwed." - @garymarcus.bsky.social

I think most of who have worked in writing or entertainment know that piracy is a fact of life, and has been for a long time now.

But there’s a difference between a broke student downloading a PDF of your book, and a multibillion dollar company stealing your work for its own bullshit purposes.

Found this in the abandoned draft drawer. I don't even remember what this was for... #place #GIScience #geography

SMAU London 2024: AI, geographic data, and the future of innovation Today, I had the privilege of speaking at SMAU | Italy RestartsUp in London, an event dedicated to the Italian startup scene 🇮🇹🚀 — the panel I contributed to focused on the impact of digitalisation…

Today, I had the privilege of speaking at SMAU | Italy RestartsUp in London, an event dedicated to the Italian startup scene 🇮🇹🚀 Great to feel the energy and creativity in the room! aballatore.space/2025/03/20/s...

The programme for #GISRUK2025 is now live! See whats happening at this years conference in Bristol, April 22-25th. Registration is still open for if you haven't yet registered! gisruk.org/gisruk-2025

@levijohnwolf.bsky.social @caitrobin.bsky.social

Mapping Museums data used by Office for National Statistics (AI image source: Dall E) Exciting news! The Mapping Museums Lab data has been incorporated into the latest ONS dataset on UK museums—and I’m proud to have contributed to this effort over the years…

Exciting news! The Mapping Museums Lab data has been incorporated into the latest ONS dataset on UK museums—and I’m proud to have contributed to this effort over the years with Fiona Candlin et al. 🏛️📊 aballatore.space/2025/03/14/m... #museums #mappingmuseums

National Library cracks down on public data access Archives are throttling access to data that was supposed to be open.

Openly licensed cultural heritage vs GenAI: institutions are increasingly spooked re the few bad actors scraping content, so shutting off access to everyone. This is a clash of values: we're going to see more and more memory institutions trying to roll back on access to out of copyright material 😞

This perspective map shows invasion routes into Russia from the Russian perspective. This is the type of logic that the Kremlin pushes to justify their war in Ukraine. The map hints at what other plans Putin might have.

Looking forward to seeing you at Spatiotemporal Causal Analysis (#STCausal2025), stcausal2025.spatial-causal.org with @grantdmckenzie.bsky.social and Cecile de Bezenac!

Is the regional GDP higher or lower than the EU average? Germany (as to be expected) is split in two, so is Italy. The high Irish GDP doesn't necessarily translate into high average wealth. Spotting capital cities is easy in this map too.

The macho, violent culture of Italian fascism was prophetic | Aeon Essays The glamour, bullying and violence of the libertarian alt-Right has a direct political ancestor, and it’s not Nazi Germany

This essay, mentioned by @georgemonbiot.bsky.social in his latest article, is chillingly relevant. Written in 2017, it is the warning we all downplayed back then. An unbearable depiction of the hatred for nature, vulnerability & femininity that has taken over in the US aeon.co/essays/the-m...

A huge thank you to Ross Parry, Stef De Sabbata and the fantastic team at University of Leicester for organising such an inspiring hackathon for the Museum Data Service (museumdata.uk)! It was fun to explore innovative ways to work with millions of museum object records #museumanalytics 🏛️🧑‍💻