Its been a while since the Where2.0Now conference in Harrogate, but I have been otherwise occupied. Firstly, it was great to see such a good turnout with all-round high calibre speakers, well done Rollo for organising.
The highlight for me was without a doubt the networking part and in particular talking to old school paleogeographers Professor John Stillwell, and Professor Henk Scholten about Stan Openshaw. I did a presentation which highlighted potential issues we may face as Geoweb technologies begin to mature beyond the basic implementations. To illustrate this I walked through a scenario of how John Snow could have come to the wrong conclusions about the causes of the Cholera deaths in 1854 if he used Geoweb technologies. In particular I talked about Stan Openshaws Modiafiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) and how it applies to Choropleth mapping. Here are my slides for more details.
Anyway, I was acutely aware I was tup’North, which is Stan Openshaw’s territory, as he used to work at Leeds University. I am not an expert on MAUP, so had a sudden panic attack that what if Stan is present at the conference, and what if my interpretation of his famous MAUP is completely wrong, I will look a fool!
So in the coffee break i asked around if Stan is present and I got talking to Prof. John Stillwell of Leeds University. John informed me that Stan no longer seems to get out since he had his stroke in May 1999. However, he knew Stan very well and went on to reminisce. He said he used to be Stan’s “minder” on the account that he can get quite vocal when at conferences, in fact he said he can be quite rude, so he was often on stand-by to pull Stan away when things got heated. He would even be the same when approaching investors for funding at Leeds University, which John found a bit tricky to say the least!
Then Professor Henk Scholten joined the conversation as he had known Stan too. Henk remembers he was doing his very first public presentation and he was busy explaining his theory and Stan stood up from the audience and said “Are you from the moon?”…… John was shocked at this, but ignored him and carried on…. Stan repeated “ARE YOU FROM THE MOON?”…..not knowing what to do, he said “sorry, what do you mean?”…. Stan said “if you think your model is going to work, then you must be from the moon! John went on to say that 75% of what Stan said was correct and the other 25% was pure nonsense. Which is when he had to step in and withdraw Stan from the conversation. Ed Parsons and Simon Lewis also mentioned that they received a couple of lectures from him (back in the day). Stan would have well crafted OHP slides and after completing each slide he used to just grab it and throw it behind him. Can you imagine the aftermath of one of his presentations! Those stories coupled with the fact that Stan was an avid Heavy Metal fan (of which i am too), makes him quite a character.
This got me thinking. Stan was obviously a passionate geographer and he knew his stuff (having published numerous papers). Its a great shame he is not active in the Geocommunity today, but what if he was? What would he have to say about the Neogeographers? At the Where2.0Now conference, Chris Osbourne of ITOWorld (a renowned Neogeographer) showed us some amazing visualisations of Government transport data from data.gov.uk.
Data.gov.uk Traffic Visualisation Slides from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
There is certainly a lot of eye candy in there and on the face of it seems very intuitive. But is the visualisation model statistically unbiased, can you draw the correct conclusions in which to make accurate business decisions? ITOWorld are a clever bunch, so I am sure its all good, but I do wonder if Stan would have jumped up and asked Chris “Are you from the moon?”
