In2scienceUK Placement Week
We look forward to welcoming you at CASA! We have (loosely) themed the week around ideas relating to neighbourhoods, change, and data. Over the course of the week we’ll be talking about complexity, about gentrification, about Arduino sensors, and about maps as story-telling devices. We hope to share with you some of our excitement about what is possible in an interdisciplinary research environment where architects, computer scientists, artists and planners (amongst many others!) work together.
Monday
AM: Welcome & Complex Systems
In the introductory talk we’ll run through the programme for the week, talk about what we hope you (and we) will get from the week, and a little bit on who we are and what we do.
In the next talk, Elsa will talk about how complexity and emergence crop up everywhere around us—in both natural- and human-influenced environments—and what this can tell us about ways of understand our world. Looking at leaves and roads, mountains and cities, you’ll hopefully gain a sense of how powerful complexity is as a tool with which to understand the world we live in. Here are the readings on science and complexity and more is different.
PM: Simulating Neighbourhood Change
Drawing on the concepts covered this morning, we’ll be using NetLogo to explore how emergence (and the concept of feedback in particular) can be a useful tool for understanding how neighbourhoods might change thanks to nothing more than a slight preference for ‘people like us’ (also known as the ‘birds of a feather’ idea). Using a ‘simple’ model created by Sarah, one of our colleagues, we’ll consider George Box’s assertion that “All models are wrong but some are useful.”
Tuesday
AM: Conceptualising Gentrification
We’ll start by talking about The Science of Urban Change to give you some background on the concept by reading the foundational text by UCL’s Ruth Glass, how it builds on what we explored yesterday, and some initial ideas about what you should be looking out for on the field trip. Glass’s original article. We’ll also review the history of Brixton as a site of change and resistance.
Some of the language used in Glass’ article is offensive to us today; however, we hope that you’ll still find the article worth reading because of the perspective it offers on the duration of these ‘processes of change’ in London, despite the obvious racist dimension to the language.
PM: Field Trip to Brixton & Debrief
We’ll be taking the Tube to Brixton and doing a purposeful walk around its market, high street, and residential areas using an investigative, research-oriented approach in order to think more deeply about what we’re seeing and how it does/does not mark out change and continuity. We’ll all come back to CASA for a debrief and discussion.
By pure coincidence, here’s a whole Twitter thread on non-residential signs of gentrification.
Wednesday
If you thought that only ESRI made GIS software and that you had to run it on a Windows PC, then today’s going to show you a powerful alternative that runs on both Macs and Windows, and is always free: QGIS.
AM: Making a Map
An introduction to QGIS and the basics of getting a new project set up, including: adding a background to get oriented, selecting and adding OpenStreetMap data, and adding and joining vector data. Here’s Part 1.
PM: Mapping Gentrification
Building on the first half of the day, we’ll talk a bit about presenting and comparing data, asking questions about the data and, finally, printing out a map! Here’s Part 2.
If you’d like to explore a little further, Adam has a number of tutorials, including Exploring Census Data Through Visualisation, and Lying with Maps, but there’s a whole bunch more than that for students!
For a sense (and example) of how QGIS can be used in a more computational context for automating the presentation of data at scale without necessarily writing a lot of Python code check out Alasdair Rae’s Constituency Cards. There is one of these for each MP (an example from the web site is below) and the presentation of everything is automated: name, colouring, the numbers inserted into the sidebar and below, the second place party…
Thursday
AM: Working with Sensors
PM: Programming a Sensor
In teams, you will be writing code to be run by an Arduino sensor. As a group you will then vote on the most interesting projects!
Friday
Maps as Storytelling
Leah and Duncan present the Memory Mapper project and the context of Maps as Storytelling. You will be out collecting your own, personal geo-data as part of a reflection on the past and future of the Olympic Park. Did you know that there used to be Europe’s largest fridge mountain on the Lea? Here’s a write-up on ten years on.
Your contributions to the Memory Mapper are at In2science.memorymapper.org.
Reflection & Write-up
We’re going to ask you to reflect on the week: what you’ve learned and how it has shaped (or not!) your thoughts about studying STEM (or other) disciplines at university! Our objective here is one: 1) to learn from your experiences; and 2) to give you a chance to produce something that you can reference in your UCAS personal statement. I’ve printed them out, but you can find a copy of the questions here if you want to jog your memory.