Web 2.0 and Neogeography. Opportunities for teaching geography
Abstract
This paper is focused on the use of the geographical contents in Web 2.0 applications for didactics andparticularly as a valuable source for many of the operations traditionally carried out when working withgeographical data and issues in a GIS environment. The paper represents an introductory examination of todate well known topics concerning geographical data and software but with the focus of using them forteaching geographical issues and introducing them for the use of (online) Geographic Information tools.In particular it will be pointed out how geographical questions can be raised and tackled by means of dataand features spread over the web and containing geographical data. There is also an analysis of how theycan be elaborated cartographically. The paper opens with a short introduction to the geographical“revolutions†that took place in the late XX and early XXI centuries in the digital age, with the advent ofGIS and the so-called neogeography. A brief review on how GIS and geospatial technologies in general canbe effectively used to disseminate geographical issues follows. The attention is then focused on an exercise,that can be proposed to geography students, or that is, the analysis of the Italian 2013 general election. Theexercise foresees the use of geocoded tweets from Twitter, the popular social media, and some of thehashtags used in the pre-election periods (#elezioni2013) to observe their concentrations. The exercise alsoimplies working with a free web GIS service such as GeoCommons, which together with other families ofsimilar online software, make it possible to produce maps showing some thematic representations of theresults obtained as well as analyzing the data with more than basic visualization functions.References
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