By Suthee Sangiambut The conversation around open data is most commonly found at the city level. Ian Parfitt, GIS instructor and Coordinator of Selkirk College’s Selkirk Geospatial Research Centre, has a project looking at open data for rural communities. Parfitt’s past challenges in gaining access to data led to his project, which is helping to develop open data for planning … Read More
On the Hunt for Social Justice and Empowerment
By Logan Cochrane, Mark Gill, Jon Corbett The participatory geoweb has the potential to transform relations of power – who contributes and names places, what is excluded and labeled. This transformation can occur through newfound opportunities for engagement and giving voice to spatially relevant issues. In the 1990s, GIScience recognized this potential and made explicit the importance that social issues … Read More
Local News Map Will Be First To Highlight Disparities in Coverage Across Canada
By Drew Bush The impact of newsroom cutbacks, consolidations, and closures across Canada will be the focus of a new crowdsourced online geoweb map. The public can contribute to it now—with the full map available online this June. “The idea of the map is it will allow us to gather data that we haven’t been able to gather on our … Read More
Geothink in the Okanagan: A Winter Student Exchange
This is a guest post from Geothink Student Tenille Brown, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa. She writes about her experiences as the first student in Geothink’s student exchange program. By Tenille Brown This past winter, I had the opportunity to be the inaugural ‘student visiting researcher’ through a new Geothink learning initiative focusing on student exchanges. Geothink is a … Read More
Mapping Inclusive Employment: Community Engagement on the Participatory Geoweb
By Naomi Bloch In British Columbia, researchers have been using a crowdsourced mapping tool to capture positive employment experiences of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Geothink co-applicant Jon Corbett, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, is one of several UBC contributors to the participatory research project. Recently, the group published findings from its two-year pilot … Read More
Spotlight on Recent Publications: Critical Reflections on Outcomes from Three Geoweb Partnerships
By Naomi Bloch Exploring university–community partnerships Participatory geospatial technologies have the potential to support and promote citizen engagement. This great promise has led to more collaborations between academics and community partners interested in pursuing this aim. In their recently published paper, “A web of expectations: Evolving relationships in community participatory geoweb projects,” four Geothink researchers and their colleagues cast a reflective eye … Read More
Mapping to Empower Excluded Populations with Jon Corbett at University of British Columbia
By Drew Bush In our daily usage, most maps contain a logical representation of a city’s streets or a forest’s hiking trails that allows us to safely navigate to new locations. For many indigenous and excluded populations, maps can play a more fundamental role. Jon Corbett, an Associate Professor in Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British … Read More
Geothink Summer Institute to Kick-off Monday, June 15, 2015!
By Drew Bush Get ready Geothinkers, this year’s Geothink Summer Institute will run from June 15-16, 2015 and will be held at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Check in at our Summer Institute web site, where we’ll be live tweeting the day’s events. The agenda is jam-packed with big names in the emergent field of crowdsourcing, which one … Read More
Making Waves
Making Waves: Developing, Testing and Deploying a Smart Phone App to Share Examples of Good and Poor Water Conservation in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia by Prof. Jon Corbett Here at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, we have just hired two students, Andrew Barton and Emily Millard, to work on the Geothink project. They are being co-financed by … Read More