As part of our Digital Conversations series, we invite you to join us for an evening discussing the use of place data in understanding politics and economies; this takes place on Tuesday 29 January, 18:30 - 20:30, in the British Library Knowledge Centre, to book a ticket go here.

Drawing upon recent research at the University of Birmingham, which utilises data from the UK Web Archive to understand individual online behaviour, we are opening the discussion around the value of web archives, digital collections and metadata as a means to understand the role of place in politics and digital economies. Our speakers will explore the spatial information included in web archives and other collections, demonstrate innovative uses of these rich datasets, and discuss the challenges, both ethical and technical, that accompany their use. After the presentations, the audience and panel will have a chance to discuss these issues in detail.

 

 

Animated image illustrating the number of domains that reference a postcode per inhabitant distributed within London

Chaired by the Library's Head of Contemporary British Publications Ian Cooke, our panel includes the following speakers: Mark Birkin, Miranda Marcus, Jeremy Morley and Emmanouil Tranos.

Mark Birkin is Professor of Spatial Analysis and Policy in the School of Geography, Director of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, University of Leeds and also the Programme Director for Urban Analytics at the Alan Turing Institute. He has longstanding interests in mathematical modelling of urban and regional systems including geodemographics, microsimulation, agent-based modelling, and spatial decision-support systems. Mark has a notable track record of collaboration, including ten years as an executive director of Geographical Modelling and Planning Limited, who developed into a market analytics business with 120 employees and global reach, working with household name partners such as Ford Motor Company, Asda-Walmart, HBoS, Exxon-Mobil and GSK. An ethos of collaboration with external partners in business and the public sector continues in his current role as Director of the Consumer Data Research Centre, a national investment within the ESRC Big Data Network. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Miranda Marcus leads the Open Data Institute's research and development programme. She is a digital programme manager specialising in applied research, agile delivery and digital strategy. Her background is in design and digital anthropology and she has worked across the arts, education and third sectors. Her personal research field focuses on the impact of engineering practices on medical artificial intelligence applications. Miranda is also Director of the AXNS Collective, an interdisciplinary organisation bringing together art, neuroscience and technology.

Jeremy Morley is Chief Geospatial Scientist at Ordnance Survey. He has worked in geospatial research since the mid-90s, first at University College London before moving to the University of Nottingham in 2009 as Geospatial Science Theme Leader in the Nottingham Geospatial Institute. His academic career spanned a range of geospatial information topics from radar mapping of ice and terrain, through crowd-sourcing and citizen science to applications of geospatial science in fields from the digital economy to planetary mapping. He joined Ordnance Survey in 2015 where he leads the Research team who carry out research and standards development in conjunction with universities and other research organisations. Their research aspirations include enabling the business' medium-term business plans, plus horizon scanning to identify plausible "unknown unknown" research topics which might affect our future services or role, nationally or internationally. Jeremy will discuss the meaning of place, and how locations and places are represented and described online, and hence their relevance to digital services, online activities and the wider digital economy.

Emmanouil Tranos is an economic geographer focusing on the spatiality of the digital economy. He is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham and Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He has published on issues related with the geography of the internet infrastructure, the economic impacts that this digital infrastructure can generate on cities and regions and the position of cities within spatial, complex networks. His current research utilises digital archives as a means to understand cities and the spatial economy. His research aims to generate new knowledge about business activities, the digital economy and its evolution over space and time.

We are looking forward to a fascinating and lively discussion, so please prepare your questions for the panel! If you can't attend in person, please follow #BLdigital for the twitter stream during the event.