👋 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

Movies from foreign lands: Computing the geographies of cinema

The article discusses President Trump’s proposed tariffs on foreign film productions, aiming to boost domestic cinema and challenge “woke” Hollywood. With a decline in traditional…

aballatore.space

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.

Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its sen...

wired.com

"...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."

RIP Skype — you were right about almost everything

Skype saw the future of video and messaging before almost everyone. It also probably never had a chance.

theverge.com

🎓👉 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...

New Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War

I am incredibly excited to be part of this groundbreaking initiative to tackle one of the most enduring and troubling issues in global affairs: slavery. As the lead of the Cultural Geo-Analytics La…

aballatore.space

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...

Charting cultural events on Eventbrite

Here’s a new paper led by our PhD student Yue Wang, to be presented at GISRUK 2025 in Bristol! 🌎 🎹🎭 Abstract: This study explores the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of cultural life by in…

aballatore.space

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...

Lecturer in Human Geography and Gender (Education) at King's College London

Explore an exciting academic career as a Lecturer in Human Geography and Gender (Education). Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

jobs.ac.uk

👏 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 🔽

Digital research led by Kings to forecast the emergence of slavery in war zones

Academics from the Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab will spearhead digital research in the new Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War.

kcl.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...

Panel discussion on Digital Placemaking and Soft City Sensing

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, hoste…

aballatore.space

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.

David D. Levine@daviddlevine.com · last yr.

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

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...

Place ratings: platforms, effects, discontents ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Everywhere we go, we’re asked to rate our experience—5 stars for a coffee, a thumbs-up for a park, or maybe just a smiley face at the toilet. Place ratings have become a routine part of digital lif…

aballatore.space

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/...

UCL – University College London

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

ucl.ac.uk

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

Reading Maps at a Distance: Texts on Maps as New Historical Data

Published in Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography (Vol. 76, No. 2, 2024)

doi.org

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

Creating story maps with imperfect spatial data | Humap

Story maps need locations - but what if you don't have perfect spatial data? This blog explores the different solutions used by Humap clients

humap.me

"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

Decoding (and debunking) Hard Fork’s Kevin Roose

His latest New York Times piece tells us a lot about what he doesn’t really understand

garymarcus.substack.com

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.

The Atlantic@theatlantic.com · last yr.

Search the LibGen database here, and peer inside a pirated library of millions of books and research papers used by Meta and others:

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...

SMAU London 2024: AI, geographic data, and the future of innovation

Today, I had the privilege of speaking at SMAU | Italy RestartsUp in London, an event dedicated to the Italian startup scene 🇮🇹🚀 — the panel I contributed to focused on the impact of digitalisation…

aballatore.space

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

Mapping Museums data used by Office for National Statistics

(AI image source: Dall E) 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…

aballatore.space

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 😞

National Library cracks down on public data access

Archives are throttling access to data that was supposed to be open.

ia.acs.org.au

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!

GIScience 2025 Conference@giscience-conf.bsky.social · last yr.

📢 Announcing the accepted Workshops at GIScience 2025! 🌍🛰️ Join us for 8 full and half-day workshops spanning GeoAI, spatial cognition, participatory mapping, reproducibility, and more! 📅 August 26, 2025 | 🌏 Christchurch, New Zealand Details: giscience2025.org/workshops.html

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...

The macho, violent culture of Italian fascism was prophetic | Aeon Essays

The glamour, bullying and violence of the libertarian alt-Right has a direct political ancestor, and it’s not Nazi Germany

aeon.co

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]