IMAGE OF THE WEEK
International Space Station Commander Alexander Gerst watched and took this photo as the SpaceX’s Dragon craft approached. The Dragon cargo craft contained supplies and experiments, including the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), which will provide high-quality laser ranging observations of the Earth’s forests, among others. The question for geographers is: What coastline is seen below the Dragon craft? Image: ESA/Gerst
GOOD NEWS
An orientation/info session for UROC students will be held on Jan. 24, at 4:30 p.m. in 319 Walker Building.
The GIS Coalition will meet Monday, Jan. 28 at 7:00 p.m. in 229 Walker Building.
The Center for Landscape Dynamics will hold a brown bag lunch on Feb. 12 on “Making Science Relevant: how past graduate awardees of the award connect their research to communities and landscape management,” at noon in 319 Walker Building. The event is a way to learn more about the CLD-Graduate-Research-Award.
The PAC Herbarium has announced its spring workshop series. The first one is Feb. 21, “Forest fairies and princess pines: the club and spikemosses of Pennsylvania.” The workshops take place 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the PAC Herbarium, 10 Whitmore Lab. For more information and to register visit sites.psu.edu/herbarium
EMEX, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences annual student-run Open House is scheduled for Mar. 23. To learn more visit: www.ems.psu.edu/undergraduate/want-know-more/attend-prospective-student-events/emex
COFFEE HOUR
Next Coffee Hour is Feb. 1 with Elizabeth Wentz (’97g) speaking on “Empowering community resilience through a university-community knowledge exchange.” For more information visit: www.geog.psu.edu/event/coffee-hour-empowering-community-resilience-through-university-community-knowledge-exchange
NEWS
from The Conversation
MLK’s vision of love as a moral imperative still matters
Fifty-one years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the United States remains divided by issues of race and racism, economic inequality as well as unequal access to justice. These issues are stopping the country from developing into the kind of society that Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for during his years as a civil rights activist.
GEOGRAPH newsletter issues now online
The 2018, 2017, and 2016 issues of the GEOGRAPH newsletter are now available on the department website www.geog.psu.edu under News and Events. The 2018 issue is fully available online and the other are available as downloadable PDFs. GEOGRAPH is printed and mailed annually to alumni and friends of the Department of Geography. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, send your postal address to geography@psu.edu under the subject “add GEOGRAPH subscription.” From time to time, articles originally published in the GEOGRAPH will be highlighted here in DoG enews.
from GEOGRAPH
Seed grant supports collaborative research in immersive technologies for research and teaching
A trans-disciplinary research team, led by Alexander Klippel, professor of geography and Gosnell Senior Faculty Scholar, received one of 10 seed grants to pilot programs that support Penn State’s 2016–2020 Strategic Plan. The proposal is titled, “Digital Innovation through Immersive Technologies: Establishing New Paradigms for Environmental Decision Support.”
The project primarily supports the thematic priority, Driving Digital Innovation, and also addresses Advancing the Arts and Humanities, Stewarding our Planet’s Resources, and Transforming Education. The goal is to demonstrate the potential that immersive technologies offer for all academic disciplines, but with a focus on environmental communication.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
GeoTxt: A scalable geoparsing system for unstructured text geolocation
Karimzadeh M, Pezanowski S, MacEachren AM, Wallgrün JO
Transactions in GIS
https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.12510
In this article we present GeoTxt, a scalable geoparsing system for the recognition and geolocation of place names in unstructured text. GeoTxt offers six named entity recognition (NER) algorithms for place name recognition, and utilizes an enterprise search engine for the indexing, ranking, and retrieval of toponyms, enabling scalable geoparsing for streaming text. GeoTxt offers a flexible application programming interface (API), allowing for customized attribute and/or spatial ranking of retrieved toponyms. We evaluate the system on a corpus of manually geo‐annotated tweets. First, we benchmark the performance of the six NERs that GeoTxt provides access to. Second, we assess GeoTxt toponym resolution accuracy incrementally, demonstrating improvements in toponym resolution achieved (or not achieved) by adding specific heuristics and disambiguation methods. Compared to using the GeoNames web service, GeoTxt’s toponym resolution demonstrates a 20% accuracy gain. Our results show that places mentioned in the same tweet do not tend to be geographically proximate.