👋 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

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

Yay! Buttons & knobs forever.

"...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."

🎓👉 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...

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...

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...

👏 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 🔽

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.

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...

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/...

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

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

"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

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

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

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.

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 🏛️🧑‍💻

Thank you to everyone who has already supported our work on open-source spatial analysis resources like Geocomputation with R and Geocomputation with Python! 🙏🌍 If you’ve found our books helpful, consider supporting future updates and free resources […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

Procrastination ∝

Subtle but important change in the IGN (France) name. From geographic info, to geolocalization/geolocalized info. Hoping to open the tent to more people. cnig.gouv.fr?lang=en Also of note, they refer to a wider "ecosystem" of geodata! cnig.gouv.fr/qui-sommes-n...

Delighted to be welcoming @roopikarisam.bsky.social to give the second King's Public Lecture in Digital Humanities in May: "Everything Is Awful, But Maybe We Can Change Things: Digital Humanities in Times of Crisis". Details and registration here - www.kcl.ac.uk/events/every... @kingsdh.bsky.social

The government's consultation on AI and copyright closes today.

Ora e sempre, resistenza

I am delighted to welcome visiting PhD student Laura Dunne (University College Dublin, Ireland) to the Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab. Her research focusses on optimizing bus networks using machine learning 🚌 aballatore.space/2025/02/24/n...

🗺️ Hi Bluesky! We're Humap, a map platform built with and for #GLAMA, #DigitalHumanities, and #CitizenScience Here are some of the amazing projects on our platform 🧵 An archival history of #Tampa #Florida created by the University of South Florida tampa-through-time.humap.site #USHistory #USA

Harrison Ford gets us better than anyone!

"Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them." www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

I think most of my #GISChat friends have heard of and used colorbrewer2.org tools for their maps - but have any of you checked out mapcolpal.org yet?

Can’t be repeated often enough ‘The UK’s creative industries are vital to the economy. Valued at £124bn, they are worth more than the life sciences, aerospace and automotive industries combined. Arts and culture alone contribute an impressive £34.6bn.’ on.ft.com/42hzVmL

Dorothy summaries the issues with Frontiers/MDPI well but for those who still aren't convinced here are a few basic things worth considering 1/

One of the highlights of 2024 for me was meeting with UN Maps people in Valencia, where (among other things) we ideated a Humanitarian GeoAI webinar delivered by colleagues Rami and Lisa. Check it out: aiforgood.itu.int/event/unlock...

I’m a frequentist, when I give a movie 7/10 it means if I watch it 10 times I enjoy 7 of them

Good piece by @natureportfolio.bsky.social. The erosion of thinking time—driven by admin, bureaucracy, industry agendas, and unrealistic output targets—stifles curiosity-led science. These pressures undermine innovation and the intellectual freedom vital for real progress. 🧪🌱🌍 #ScienceIsNotBusiness

Spotify ha abituato i suoi utenti a usare le sue playlist come sottofondo, scegliendole in base al “mood” e non per gli artisti o le canzoni. In questo modo, Spotify ha potuto riempirle di canzoni “finte” commissionate appositamente:

The algorithms running the world are a lot more sinister, and harder to untangle from our everyday lives, than the ones making every coffee shop look the same, writes T.M. Brown: theatln.tc/Snt5w4qD

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in the field of #UrbanSociology, who can demonstrate expertise in the social and spatial life of the city, and how planning and/or design impacts urban life. Applications close Sunday 19th January 2025 (23.59 UK time).