Author: jreades

Lecturer in Quantitative Human Geography at King's College London, coder, data head.

Research by jreadesDec 13, 20176:06 pm

MoDS: Mapping Knowledge with Data Science

I’m really excited to announce the latest addition to our department’s growing stable of computational geography research: a fully-funded 1+3 ESRC CASE studentship involving the application of data science techniques (text-mining, topic modelling, graph analysis) to a large, rich data set of 450,000+ PhD theses in order to understand the evolving geography of academic knowledge production: how are groundbreaking ideas produced and circulated, and how does researcher mobility and institutional capacity shape this process?

Python by jreadesFeb 10, 201712:20 pm

Feature Talk: Prof. Sergio Rey talks about PySAL, Open Source & Academia

We’re really pleased to announce that on Wednesday, 22 February Professor Sergio Rey, of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University will be discussing the Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL). […]

Teaching by jreadesAug 30, 20164:42 pm

GeoCUP: supporting a flexible student computing environment

Over the past year, we’ve been supporting our first cohort of Geocomputation & Spatial Analysis (GSA) students as they learn to code and work with geo-data in an open computing context (predominantly FOSS). This post reflects on some of the problems – and solutions – that emerged as a result.

Research by jreadesMar 23, 201610:31 am

Talk: Urban hierarchies and scaling laws

This afternoon’s seminar by CASA’s Dr. Elsa Arcaute will be of interest to a wide range of students and staff at King’s – with a background in theoretical physics and complexity, Elsa now studies how urban and regional systems scale and divide, and how these aspects are expressed in infrastructure and the built environment. To put it another way: where does London end? 4:30pm today in the Pyramid Room (K4U.04) and followed by wine and soft drinks.

Teaching by jreadesMar 16, 201612:40 pm

Aspect-Slope Maps in QGIS

While working with Naru to design our new 2nd year GIS methods training course (with parallel QGIS and ArcGIS streams!), I came across a rather striking map on the ESRI blog that managed to combine both slope (steepness) and aspect (direction) in a single representation. This post explains both a problem with the way that the colour scheme was specified and how to replicate this type of map in QGIS (with style sheet).

Research by jreadesJan 3, 201611:19 am

The Future of Geocomputation

On Friday 18 December, we hosted a workshop on ‘the future of geocomputation’ involving over 30 researchers from across the UK and Ireland. We’re still working to synthesise and write up the discussions that made up the second half of the workshop, but below are the presentations that kicked off the day. Some of the tweets from the day are embedded below but from more see our storify for the day or search #fogeocomp.

Teaching by jreadesAug 24, 20152:30 pm

Avoiding Email for Academics

How many times do you return from field work or a holiday to find that most of your first day is spent deleting emails that are no longer applicable or were never relevant to begin with? Or, worse, you are asked to address issue ‘x’ but have no history or documentation to explain how ‘x’ became a problem, what solutions have been considered, or even why you are the one to solve it! Asana and Slack can help with that.