New Data, cities, & futures in the making: GED Seminar 8 September

GED Seminar Series

Thursday 8 September 2016, 4-5pm

VUW Kelburn, Cotton 304

All welcome

New Data, cities, & futures in the making

Speaker: Agnieszka Leszczynski, School of Environment, University of Auckland 

Abstract: In this talk, I take up ‘big data’ as a material-discursive project of future-ing (Anderson 2010) - of anticipating, shaping and circumscribing the horizon of possibiltites. Specifically, I focus on the ways in which urban big data – digital content about city spaces from city spaces – needs to be understood not only in terms of practices of automated management in ‘actually-existing’ smart cities (Shelton, Zook and Wiig 2015), but also as implicated in regimes of speculating about cities-to-come. As (big) data enrolled within modes of urban governance actualize particular visions of urban futures, I address the question of what kind of city is actually being enviosioned and affected.

As the city is subsumed as an object/subject of the data-security assemblage, rather than anticipating a radically different urban as would be consistent with an understanding of the future as something that is organically open, urban big data cannot divest itself of urban inequalities and the persistence of their geographies, projecting these forward in time and space. Extant inequalities are abstracted into data flows, informing and propagating through the calculation of algorithmically anticipated urban futures. Using empirical examples of the management of individual urban mobilities via neighbourhood safety apps and the securitization of city spaces through sentiment analytics, I demonstrate that the anticipation of unequal urban futures can be discerned at two scales of digital praxis: that of the body, and that of the city itself.

Biography:

Agnieszka Leszczynski is a Lecturer in GIScience at the University of Auckland. Her longstanding research interests are in GIScience & Society, with current attention towards how geolocation is valued in emergent market sectors such as the variously designated sharing, last-mile, platform and gig economies.

Seminar 15 October: Usability issues in Geoinformation Science research

Seminar by Dr Ioannis Delikostidis on the 15th of October from 4-5pm in Cotton 304, Victoria University, Kelburn campus.  

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/sgees/about/events/vuw-ged-seminar-usability-issues-in-geoinformation-science-research

Public lectures at VUW: Mapping the World through Time (Julie Sweetkind-Singer) and Mapping texts: Using GIS to understand the geographies in large collections of texts (Ian Gregory)

As part of the Australasian Rare Book Summer School, two free public lectures will be held in Wellington in January 2015, hosted by Victoria University of Wellington and the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. We hope you can join us!

Mapping the World through Time

Speaker: Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Assistant Director of Geospatial, Cartographic and Scientific Data & Services, Stanford University Libraries

Date: 27 January 2015

Time: 5.30pm-6.30pm

Cost: Free

Location: Tiakiwai (lower ground floor), National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, Aitken Street entrance.

Mapping texts: Using GIS to understand the geographies in large collections of text

Speaker: Ian Gregory, Professor of Digital Humanities, Lancaster University, UK

Date: 29 January 2015

Time: 5.00pm-6.00pm

Cost: Free

Location: Stout Research Centre, Room 203, Victoria University Kelburn campus.

For more information please visit http://wtap.vuw.ac.nz/wordpress/digital-history/rbss-public-lectures/

MGIS Thesis Talks: Wednesday December 10 5-6pm, CO304, Cotton Building, Kelburn Campus.

MGIS student thesis talks on Wednesday 10 December, 5-6pm

Cotton 304, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University of Wellington

::All welcome::

Modelling irrigation in an ecosystem services framework: A GIS module for the Land Utilisation & Capability Indicator

Stuart Easton

Supervisors: Bethanna Jackson, Mairéad de Róiste

There is a need for spatially explicit modelling of irrigation so that inefficiencies in water use can be determined and targeted for management or mitigation at sub-field scales. A complimentary need exists for irrigation modelling within ecosystem decision support tools so that nutrient and water movements can be accurately quantified. Preliminary outputs from a spatially explicit irrigation simulation model are presented. The model aims to add irrigation flows to the hydrology component of the Land Utilisation and Capability Indicator (LUCI) ecosystem service modelling framework and produce standalone outputs that can inform management decisions. 

Waiting and weighting: Public transport model sensitivity to waiting time and schedule deviation

Richard Law

Supervisors: Mairéad de Róiste, Toby Daglish, Yigit Saglam

Models of public transportation systems can take a variety of forms, but are typically based on the schedule and adopt assumptions about passenger waiting strategies that together lead to a representation that may not accurately  reflect the operation of the real transit system, such as delays and missed connections. Using the complete record of Greater Wellington Regional Council's real-time information (RTI) system, I develop more realistic models of Wellington's public transportation system, and quantify the error associated with travel time estimates and the measurement of spatial accessibility made from models that lack this additional information.

GED Seminar: Accessibility, commuting and the car ownership decision - Thursday 22 May 4-5pm Kelburn

GED Seminar Series

Accessibility, commuting and the car ownership decision

Thursday 22nd May, 4-5pm

Cotton Seminar Room 304

Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Campus

Abstract:

Rising fuel prices, costly transport infrastructure, congestion, external environmental impacts and impending peak oil difficulties highlight the importance of understanding the economic decisions behind commuting patterns.  Where a person lives and works are important factors in an individual’s transport decision and are key determinants for car ownership. However these spatial factors are interlinked and an individual’s residential location is also determined by where they work and their transport choices among other factors. Households are also likely to compromise on their commuting, car ownership and residential choices according to the needs of multiple members of the household.

Based on the New Zealand household travel survey, this study asks the question of how residential and work locations, and by what means a person commutes affects the number of vehicles they own through a joint decision making process for individuals within a household.  By calculating the accessibility to work over a geographic transport network of where a person lives as well as a large number of other residential alternatives, this study uses a discrete choice model to explore the extent to which these spatial factors influence car ownership of households.  This study breaks new ground by developing first a joint decision model and second applying it to the three levels of that joint decision (car ownership, residential location and commuting strategy). 

Speakers: Mairead de Roiste, Toby Daglish and Yigit Saglam

GED Seminar Series: Fan-deltas of the Western Coromandel Peninsula: an integrated study of fluvial dynamics, delta building and marine deposition

Thursday 20^th March, 4-5pm

Cotton Seminar Room 304, Kelburn Campus

Victoria University of Wellington

speaker:

     Dr Jon Tunnicliffe

      School of Environment, University of Auckland 

Residential development and recreational use along the western coast of the Coromandel Peninsula is largely concentrated upon six major coarse-grained fan-deltas. These landforms preserve a record of long-term adjustments amongst fluvial sedimentation from floods and debris flows, long-shore and cross-shore coastal processes, and sea-level fluctuations throughout the Holocene. We have employed a combination of geophysical sounding, sediment tracing, and sonic drilling to develop a chronology and stratigraphic record of adjustment and changes in river base-level over the last 10,000 years. The record is consistent with earlier studies of the Firth, most notably the chronology developed on the chenier plain of the western coast. The record clearly reveals the timing of major geomorphic events, including the onset of marine sedimentation following sea incursion of the Firth at roughly 6,500 years BP. The semi-enclosed Firth effectively provides a ‘sink’ term for a Holocene fluvial-coastal sediment budget, and a reasonable proxy for long-term sediment yield from these rivers.

In this talk, we consider the ‘sediment delivery problem’ – how to leverage long-term records of sedimentation such as this one to develop a sediment budget that takes explicit account of sediment storage, abrasion, and changes in system configuration, within the fluvial and coastal systems. Records such as these are important for calibrating our models of sediment delivery, and for providing guidance to managers and engineers who are working to minimize risk in these important and sensitive coastal environments.

“Using airborne lidar to map river morphology and habitat”: Talk by

GED Seminar Series

Thursday 3^rd May 2012

3-4pm, CO304 (NOTE CHANGE OF TIME)

Speaker: Associate Professor Noah Snyder, Boston College

“Using airborne lidar to map river morphology and habitat”

Much progress has been made linking the fields of geomorphology, hydrology, ecology and tectonics over the past 20 years using digital elevation models (DEMs) to study stream processes. The first-generation DEMs were generated from topographic maps, and with pixel sizes of 10 to 90 meters on each edge, these grids allowed investigators to make measurements of parameters such as stream gradient and contributing drainage area over entire channel networks. Next-generation DEMs generated from airborne laser elevation (lidar) surveys open up new opportunities for research on stream processes because they improve resolution by an order of magnitude compared to traditional DEMs. With pixel sizes of 0.5 to 5 meters and the ability to measure height down to 5 to 20 centimeters lidar DEMs enable researchers to identify channel features, such as the water surface, bank edges, and floodplains, as well as measure the slope of channels over short stream reaches. Furthermore, they provide new types of data about watershed land cover, such as the height and density of the tree canopy, because the laser instrument receives returns from both treetops and the land (or water) surface. In this talk, I will present several applications of airborne lidar data to study channel processes, morphology and habitat in North American rivers.