Themes
[website currently under construction]
New Maps is currently advancing three broad initiatives:
- Big data on Nature and Society: Focuses on developing strategies and tools at the University of Kentucky for mapping and analyzing “big data” sources that are becoming increasing available and relevant to humanities, social science and natural science disciplines. Ranging from digitized collections of texts and other cultural artifacts to the transactional records of day-to-day life captured by social media to the ubiquity of environmental sensors, scholars are just beginning to understand the possibilities and challenges of these rich sources of data on the time and location of the social and natural processes of everyday life.
- Online Public Engagement Atlas (OPEnAtlas): The world is moving increasingly toward shared resources that are filled with rich and hard-won knowledge. The cost of storage is lower than it has ever been. Information is increasingly being loosened from local confinement in the hands of a few producers. Tools exist for sharing, cloud storage, and collaborative acts of creativity. But more remains to be done. In a "map or be mapped" world, too many are on the wrong side of digital divides. Too many find themselves mapped, but unable to tell their own story. OPEnAtlas, a project of The New Mappings Collaboratory at the University of Kentucky, is a platform to redress this information asymmetry. OPEnAtlas is collaboratory from the bottom up. OPEnAtlas is free of charge (gratis) and as free of constraints (libre) as can be made. It is not software, but a platform or open source system. It is a vision for open collaboration for sharing the geographical dimension of our lives.
- Place-based GIS: The effort to analyze the relationship between local, individual, or place-based phenomena with broader regional and global spatial phenomena. Within human geography, this represents attention to place and landscape, with attendant social-cultural, political, economic, and historical traditions. Within physical geography, this marks shifts, as in landscape ecology, from patches, polygons, and fragmentation towards more continuous representations. Additionally, this attention to place signals, as in fluvial geomorphology and hydrology, a coming to grips with discontinuity, discrete representations, and the “fish’s eye” view of the river, i.e., agent-based modeling approaches.
