Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: culturomics (Page 2 of 3)

New paper in PLOS Biology

October 29, 2020 /
A re-thinking of the pre-dam Site C conceptual map from Yan Chen's Masters thesis, as used in this paper, accompanied by Google Earth imagery of the Site C dam site, 2012 and 2019 respectively.

A re-thinking of the pre-dam Site C conceptual map from Yan Chen’s Masters thesis, as used in this paper, accompanied by Google Earth imagery of the Site C dam site near Fort St. John, BC, in 2012 and 2019 respectively.

Thanks to Ivan Jarić, from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, for inviting Yan Chen and I onto this interesting new paper out in PLOS Biology today, Expanding conservation culturomics and iEcology from terrestrial to aquatic realms. This geographically and disciplinarily diverse writing team led to many rich conversations and debates as the manuscript took shape. The idea was to differentiate the emerging field of iEcology from conservation culturomics, and advocate for their application in aquatic realms which have a dearth of data. Our work on advancing social impact assessment of hydroelectricity and dyke realignment using Instagram datasets provided one of the six key areas of application outlined in this paper.

New paper: conceptual mapping of Instagram

April 15, 2019 /

The second paper from Yan Chen’s MES thesis is now out in Society and Natural Resources, Leveraging social media to understand younger people’s perceptions and use of hydroelectric energy landscapes. It is a research note demonstrating the utility of manual coding and conceptual mapping of a year of Instagram images around two hydroelectricity sites to predict how changes might affect young residents. Unlike her first thesis paper in Landscape and Urban Planning, which carried out spatial mapping of value ‘hotspots’–a method widespread in today’s growing literature on cultural ecosystem services–this paper makes statistical links between features, activities and values conveyed through Instagram. The diagrams provide insight to the lifestyle and emotions associated with different landscape features, some changeable with hydro development or removal, and informs our new work on conservation culturomics for social impact assessment. Yan continues to drive this work as an IDPhD student. Congratulations, Yan.

Yan Chen in Singapore

January 29, 2019 /
Yan Chen at NSF-funded workshop in Singapore, January 28-29, 2019.

Yan Chen presenting her IDPhD work at NSF-funded workshop in Singapore, January 28-29, 2019.

Yan Chen is wrapping up a few days in Singapore for the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) in Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) on Putting Sustainability into Convergence: Connecting Data, People, and Systems. This international workshop has been diverse in attendees and disciplines. Yan reflected, “The most discussed question is how people from different disciplines can collaborate. There are many scholars like me, as social scientists who are using sophisticated data analysis models; while others are engineers working on social issues. We both, at a certain degree, struggle in ‘cultural shocks’ between different disciplines.” It’s been a great opportunity for her to workshop with similarly cross-cutting folks. She described her session as discussing, “data sources, sizes, validity, sharing, proxies, and so on. …. [agreeing] that data or method cannot develop only on the technologies, but has to answer certain questions. For social scientists, finding a good mechanism of data sharing or archiving may be very useful. Also, how to cope with the rapidly developing technologies will be another challenge for us.” Thanks to SSHRC for supporting Yan’s trip, via Mike Smit’s Insight Grant, on which I’m a CI, Assessing the social impacts of hydroelectricity-driven landscape changing using text, images and archives: a Big Data approach.

Culturomics on the horizon

January 23, 2018 /
Conservation culturomics is one of this year's emerging issues.

Conservation culturomics is one of this year’s emerging issues.

I drove in this slippery morning listening to the Smiths, turning off my car during Some Girls are Bigger Than Others. It’s still in my head, but now I’m hearing “some cites are better than others”. Earlier this week I saw that our Mactaquac ‘flocus group’ work was cited in an interesting new article by Susana Batel engaging critically with social acceptance of energy literature. Bummer, then, to see our paper reported as case work from Nevada, USA, instead of New Brunswick, Canada! Improving my mood, this morning, our culturomics commentary in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on the potential of images in culturomics was one of five cited in the ninth annual ‘horizon scan’ of emerging issues for global conservation and biological diversity in Trends in Ecology & Evolution to support the growing importance of conservation culturomics. Some citations are truly better than others.

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