Thursday, August 27, 2015

Digital archive of political parties digs deep

If you ever suspected Canadian politicians flip-flopped on a specific issue, or wondered where they stand on another, a new online tool will help you easily find out for sure.

Professor Ian Milligan at the University of Waterloo is charting the content of millions of archived political webpages spanning the last decade, allowing the public to compare what Canadian political leaders and pundits said in the past compared to now.

WebArchives.ca pulls from collections that the University of Toronto Library has been collecting for a decade. Professor Milligan and his research team at Waterloo, as well as project collaborators from York University and Western University made the data searchable and accessible, drawing on code that staff at the British Library developed.

“We’ve got access to a collection of 50 archived websites from political parties and interest groups, allowing you to search them back to 2005,” said Milligan, a professor in the Department of History at Waterloo. “It means, for example, that anyone can find out what parties and groups said about climate change or free trade in the 2008 or 2011 election, or at any point between elections.”

A search comparing depression against recession shows parties and groups such as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Green Party and the Council of Canadians tended to describe economic downturn as depression, whereas the New Democrats, the Liberals and the Conservatives more typically use the term recession.

"We can use these searches to quickly find the historical allegories that some made towards the Great Depression, and economic action plans to remedy the situation,” said Professor Milligan.

Users can quickly access previously public content that is now stored as big data in a digital archive. The website’s search tool produces millions of historical results that wouldn't turn up in a Google search because the pages are no longer live. It also provides sophisticated analysis functions.

“You can run keyword searches, such as finding out the context of a word — Alberta and oil for instance — as well as being able to trace the prevalence of cultural ideas over time,” said Milligan.

The tool can trace how often a term or phrase appears in each year of the collection’s 10-year range. It contains interactive graphs where users can click on any point in a graph line to open all the citations associated with a specific term at a specific date.

In order to compare and analyze shifting rhetoric and platform points, users can compare what one party has said over the past few years about topics ranging from global warming to public transit. The tool also tracks the change in language, such as tar sands becoming Canada’s Oil Sands.

The project is possible through funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant and an Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation’s Early Researcher Award.

For retailers and GIS, it's location, location, location

by Sarah Steiner. This is an excerpt of an interview posted on the Piinpoint blog. Piinpoint, an online platform that enables businesses to find the best location for expansion, was founded in 2013 by Jim Robeson, a graduate of Waterloo's MBET program, and Adam Saunders, a Geomatics and Computer Science student.

Think GIS is mostly used for mapping weather patterns and population? Think again. We had the chance to speak with University of Waterloo professor, Dr. Derek Robinson, who tells us why GIS tools and spatial analysis are critical to today's retailers.

PiinPoint: Tell us a little bit about you and how you got involved in the GIS world.

Dr. Robinson: I first became interested in GIS in high school - I found working with computers to be a lot of fun and the interdisciplinary nature of geography really exciting. I was at IE Weldon Secondary School in Ontario and my teacher at the time, Mr. Miller, introduced me to the world of GIS and everything that it is capable of doing. After doing some reading outside of school classes about GIS I talked with the department head at the time, Mr. Hancock, who was a former Waterloo grad, and he pointed me to the University of Waterloo. The University of Waterloo became an academic playground for me. The sheer number of courses for GIS, having work placements in various places in Canada and abroad through the co-op program - those experiences made GIS an exciting area to work in, especially when it was combined with being submersed in the innovative and commercial spirit of Waterloo.

PiinPoint: How did you become involved in using GIS for retail?

Dr. Robinson: When I started as a professor at the University of Waterloo in 2012, one of the courses I took on had a retail location assignment. I got excited about that assignment since it was something I could talk about with my family to help them understand what I do as a professor. It was easy for them to visualize and make sense of the idea of locating a new store. I quickly got involved in that assignment and blew it up into a full blown research proposal that funded 4 masters students. Through sheer joy of education and learning, I went after making a dent in the retail science side of things.

PiinPoint: Tell us about GIS and retail. How long has GIS been used in a retail application?

Dr. Robinson: The capacity has been around a long time but it seems not many are using it, which is surprising, because you would think that with the majority of data having some sort of spatial component, it can make a big difference in your bottom line. Perhaps what I mean is that many individuals or companies use GIS or have someone working with GIS, but it is often highly underutilized in retail applications.

PiinPoint: Can you give us some examples of the types of applications you've seen GIS used in for retail?

Dr. Robinson: GIS has been used in a traditional sense for a while, for suitability analysis and trying to find a location for a new store. One area of research and application that I find really interesting is for tracking shoppers in a mall. Using GIS and GPS or other sensors, you can identify not only what shops they visited, but also the order that shops were visited, the length of time they spent there, the transit time between shops, how close they were to a shop when they were taking a break, plus their way-finding through the mall to find a shop. That is interesting on so many different fronts, because you’re tracking all these people and their behavioural information - but it’s also cool from a modelling perspective, since it’s a closed system.

Another neat application, is the use of agent-based modelling. For example, a fellow colleague in the Geography Department here at the University of Waterloo, Dr. Deadman collected data on park visitors at a state park in the US - somewhat similar to this mall situation - to see where conflicts between different types of visitors were occurring in the park. They had jeeps, bikers, and hikers if I remember correctly. The really exciting part of his research was that it was used to empirically inform a simulation model which he could use to optimize the visiting schedule. These agent based models, are simulations that can do things that mathematics and statistics can’t do on their own. The application of agent based modelling to retail is what I think is going to be really exciting, and it’s only in its infancy at this point in time. It gives you a platform to ask ‘what-if’ questions and pose scenarios to see how different scenarios pan out. Probably the most well known example is from a researcher in the UK, named Alison Heppenstall, who’s done some gasoline retail price competition setting work using agent based models in the UK.

Read the rest of the interview with Professor Robinson on the Piinpoint blog.

AccessAbility Services on the move; other notes

Is it just me, or are students getting younger?

Another academic support unit is making the move into the Needles Hall extension. "AccessAbility Services is moving," says a note from Amanda Annarilli. "Beginning Monday, August 31, you’ll find AccessAbility Services on the first floor of the new Needles Hall extension, room 1401."

AccessAbility Services will occupy the first floor of the new building, with spaces on the garage level to support the student access van drop-op as well as scooter charging. Other amenities include more exam space to better accommodate students and a new technology lab.

The office will remain open during the move.

The west side front entrance of the Student Life Centre at the Ring Road will be closed for repairs starting Friday, August 28 until Friday, September 5.

Registration is open for the Fall 2015 Velocity Alpha program, the series of sessions, workshops, panel discussions and brainstorming sessions that give startups and entrepreneurs skills and experience for starting and growing their businesses. Velocity Alpha sessions include "Find Your Kick A$$ Idea," "What's Your Problem," "Ain't No Model Like a Business Model" and "Find Your Customers Online." The sessions are held at the main campus and are open to anyone interested in building a startup.

Human Resources reports that Anne Lynk is retiring as of September 1. Anne joined the University in September 2004 and retires as Food Services Assistant in Food Services.