GIS and social computing

I am quite interested in this paper ‘Toward critical spatial thinking in the social sciences and humanities’, since I came from the GIS background in my undergraduate study, I had done some interesting projects during that time. My advisor at that time always reminded me try to combine spatial thinking with your research interests or what we have for the interests in the industry. Advised by him, I have done several projects I think related to spatial thinking and social sciences, one project is urban planning using GIS, we first modeled the city Zhuhai into spatial map, and then with the given urban planning indicators, such as the population, economic conditions, to re-plan the space allocation to achieve a better urban environment. The other one is the 3D visualization of the campus; firstly I collected thousands of elevation points at campus area and one aerial photograph with high resolution. After digitalizing these data, I conducted a 3D landscape as figure 1. Then I abstracted the models for every construction in campus as figure 2, and bonded all them together with the landscape, later I build up a virtual campus associated with university information, such as photographs, which turned out to a university management information system with 3D visualization. I think spatial thinking is a very fascinating and creative tool or way of knowledge representation, for example, when the student was the learning in history, with spatial thinking he can actually see how the one nation evolves, for example, like the territory. I don't how the elementary level of education works, but in China, most of time, if we have a teacher teaching history with amazing imagination, the class would be enjoyable and really helpful. But we don't really have that many teachers. It would be great we have such technology available for the students to interact with and learn through having fun.

 

Although I am now working mostly on research related to social computing, since it now has so much influenced on our social life and networking approaches and thus gains so much attention, I am for a long time wondering if I could combine the two discipline together to see how it will further change our social networking. I don’t really figure out how to do that, but will be very happy to continue doing research on it.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3