As I’ve been tracking the ongoing crisis in Syria I often felt I was only getting half the story not being able to read Arabic. This was especially frustrating when I’d check out all the rich data being generated by SyriaTracker.   Citizens in Syria are reporting on the violence through social media [...]

As the number of data sets on GeoCommons continues to grow we are constantly looking for new ways to allow users to explore the data.  A variety of recent projects have pushed us develop new tools for interacting with emerging multidimensional data streams.  Today we are pushing out a new release that gives you three [...]

I saw some interesting Google Fusion Table data sets popping across Twitter yesterday and wanted to see how hard it was to push them into GeoCommons.  Chris Helm wrote a great post a while back on connecting Fusion Tables to GeoCommons, and I wanted to see if I could still follow directions.  Chris had [...]

As we’ve done more work analyzing the spatio-temporal dimensions social media a few questions come up repeatedly.  Leading the charge is the bias of social media – Twitter is just a collection of pre-teens and bots discussing Justin Bieber.  The implication being that social media does not provide a representative sample of the population.  For example there is likely [...]

Over the last few blog posts we’ve raised several problems with the current approach to GIS, but have not specifically offered solutions.  At some point you have to stop being an armchair quarterback and provide suggestion for a path forward.  Since our critique has meandered across multiple blog posts I thought it would be useful [...]