Digital Geography Lab blog

Authors: Janika Raun, Olle Järv

MOPA (Monipaikkaisen asumisen rytmit, paikat ja asiakasryhmät) project revealing multi-local living patterns in South Savo based on electricity data analysis has reached its end. The project was led by the researchers from Ruralia Institute (Torsti Hyyryläinen, Manu Rantanen, Toni Ryynänen) and was done in collaboration with the Digital Geography Lab researchers Janika Raun, Olle Järv and Tuuli Toivonen.

AIM OF THE PROJECT

We started the project by thinking more broadly about how different big data sources could be utilised in second home research. We first provided an overview on the potential use cases in Finnish (Raun & Järv 2022), which then finally resulted in a coherent perspective paper, “New avenues for second home tourism research using big data: prospects and challenges”, published in the Current Issues in Tourism Research (Raun et al., 2022). The article is available open access here: https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2022.2138282.

Our literature analysis for the article revealed that so far utility consumption data has been used relatively little in second home and multi-locality research. However, it has a high potential to uncover where second homes are located and when they are actually used and visited. Thanks to the fruitful collaboration between Ruralia Institute and the local electricity company Suur-Savon Sähkö Oy we were able to use monthly-level electricity consumption data of second homes and analyse what it can tell us about the multi-local living practises in South Savo. Our aim was to understand the spatiotemporal rhythms, variations, and trends in second home usage patterns and identify different user groups. Read more about the start and aims of the project from one of our previous blog posts.

WHAT WERE THE MAIN RESULTS?

Electricity consumption in second homes increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our results reveal that the electricity consumption in second homes has increased, especially during the years 2020 and 2021, indicating the intensified usage of second homes during the pandemic. The increase was biggest in areas with the highest relative share of free-time residences, such as Hirvensalmi, Mäntyharju, and Puumala municipalities. This finding is in line with the results of a previous study made in Finland using mobile phone data, which indicated that people escaped from cities when the pandemic started, and the increase of people was biggest in municipalities with the highest relative share of second homes (Willberg et al., 2021; and DGL blog posts here). The increase in electricity consumption was highest during the spring and autumn months, indicating that people extended their summer season and spent more time in their second homes also late spring and early autumn (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Monthly median electricity consumption (kWh) in municipalities during three periods: average for 2015-2019, 2020 and 2021. N represents the number of free-time residences in January 2021. Continue reading “MOPA project successfully completed! We showed the potential of electricity consumption data in multi-local living and second home research”

We are opening three positions in the upcoming ERC-funded project GREENTRAVEL: Greener Travel Environments for Everyone – from measured wellbeing impacts to Big Data analytics (2023-2027). The project studies the equitable availability of green travel environments for urban populations, and their potential wellbeing impacts. The project applies a mix of novel approaches from Virtual Reality experimentation to computer vision and from big data mining to spatial analysis. The project starts from the Helsinki region and then expands to several other European cities including London and Berlin. The aim is to produce knowledge that can be used to advance the quality and sustainability of urban environments, for all.

 The following positions are now open:

Doctoral Researcher in Spatial Modelling of Greenery Exposure:
The doctoral researcher will focus on analysing people’s everyday mobilities in urban environments and their exposure to greenery during these travels. During the PhD process, the researchers will grow to be an expert of travel-related greenery exposure modelling using mobile big data and seasonally sensitive greenery information, from the perspective of wellbeing and spatial and social equality.  More information: https://jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki/756838602/?feedId=350602&utm_source=CareerSite_UniversityOfHelsinki

Postdoctoral Researcher in Health and Wellbeing Impacts of Green Travel Environments:
The postdoctoral researcher will focus on the wellbeing and health impacts of green travel environments. The research aims at finding out if and how varying types of greenery or other natural elements influence travel experience and wellbeing during daily urban travels, and if seasonal variation and geographical context matters. These questions will be studied through extensive surveys and controlled experimentation in VR and in real environments. The postdoctoral researcher will be offered up to 3-year contract.  More information: https://jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki/756842702/?feedId=350602&utm_source=CareerSite_UniversityOfHelsinki

Postdoctoral Researcher in Designing Virtual Reality Environments for Green Travel Experiments:
The postdoctoral researcher focuses on designing realistic virtual reality (VR) environments with varying greenery features and seasons, to be used for controlled experiments of greenery exposure during travel. These experimentations will be a group effort of the GREENTRAVEL project team and the postdoctoral researcher will have a key role in developing the realistic VR environments with varying levels of urban greenery and other nature elements, and studying their usability in controlled scientific experimentations.  More information: https://jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki/756839202/?feedId=350602&utm_source=CareerSite_UniversityOfHelsinki

 

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The Digital Geography Lab is an interdisciplinary research team focusing on spatial Big Data analytics for fair and sustainable societies. Go to the main site here. 

 

Teksti: Petteri Muukkonen

CRITICAL-hankkeen maantieteilijöiden tiimi Helsingin yliopistosta palkittiin kautta aikain ensimmäisellä kansallisella Vuoden avoin oppimateriaali -palkinnolla. Palkinnon myönsi Avoimen tieteen ja tutkimuksen kansallisen koordinaation sihteeristö, joka toimii osana Tieteellisten seurain valtuuskuntaa. Aiemmin on jaettu vain avoimen tieteen edistämisestä palkintoja, mutta nyt ensimmäistä kertaa palkittiin myös avoimen oppimisen edistäjiä. Palkinto jaettiin Avoimen tieteen kesäpäivien yhteydessä 31.5.2022. Työpaketin vetäjä Petteri Muukkonen on yhdessä muiden CRITICAL-hankkeen maantieteen tutkijoiden sekä opettamansa projektikurssin opiskelijaryhmän kanssa laatinut avoimia oppimateriaaleja paikkatiedon ja geomedian opetukseen käytettäväksi eri koulutustasoilla – esimerkiksi maantieteen lukio-opetuksessa tai yliopistossa kandivaiheen opiskelijoiden kanssa.

Continue reading “Vuoden avoin oppimateriaali -palkinto 2022 CRITICAL-hankkeen maantieteilijöille”

Author: Tatu Leppämäki

In a nutshell: A geoparser recognizes place names and locates them in a coordinate space. I explored this topic in my thesis and developed an open source geoparser for Finnish texts: find it in this GitHub repo. 

As geographers, we are interested in the spatial aspects of data: where something is located is a prerequisite to the follow-up questions of whys and hows. Of the almost innumerable data sources available online – news articles, social media feeds, digital libraries – a good portion are wholly or partly text-based. Texts and the opinions and sentiments within are often related to space through toponyms (place names). For us humans, it’s very easy to understand a sentence like “I’m enjoying currywurst in Alexanderplatz, Berlin” and the spatial reference there, but geographical information systems process data in unambiguous coordinates. To bridge this gap between linguistic and geospatial information, the text must be analyzed and transformed: in other words, it must be parsed. This is the motivation for the development of geoparsers. 

Geoparsing: what and why 

Geoparsing can be divided into two sub-tasks: toponym recognition and toponym resolution. In the former, the task is to find toponyms amidst the text flows and in the second, to correctly locate the recognized toponyms. A geoparser wraps this process and outputs structured geodata. 

Geoparsing: a top-level view. 

Continue reading “Geoparsing: How to gain location information from (Finnish) texts?”

Geoinformatiikan tutkimuspäivät kokoavat vuosittain yhteen paikkatietoalan osaajia eri organisaatioista. Tapahtuma järjestettiin vuonna 2022 Helsingin yliopiston Kumpulan kampuksella 9.-10.5.2022. Mukana oli n. 80 kuulijaa, osa paikan päällä, ja osa etäyhteyden kautta. CRITICAL-hanke oli tiistaina 10.5. esillä sessiossa Teaching and learning map and GI skills in various age groups and education levels. Sessio koostui kolmesta esityksestä sekä lyhyestä johdannosta:

• Petteri Muukkonen, HY. Session johdanto. Katso tallenne.
• Petteri Muukkonen, HY. CRITICAL-project: Educating critical literacy skills on geomedia and thematic maps. Katso tallenne.
• Martin Hanus, Charles University, Tsekki, Maps as tools for the development of geographical thinking. Katso tallenne.
• Sirpa Ojansuu, HY. Kasvattamassa nuoria osallistuviksi kansalaisiksi: kansalaisten kartta- ja paikkatietotaidot tukemassa kaavoitushankkeisiin osallistumista. Katso tallenne.

Koko tapahtuman ohjelma.

Helsingin yliopiston kriittisen geomedialukutaidon tutkimustiimi on osa Strategisen tutkimuksen neuvoston (STN) rahoittamaa CRITICAL-tutkimushanketta.  Tiimissä työskentelevät:
Petteri Muukkonen (tiiminvetäjä, yliopistonlehtori, tutkija, aineenopettaja)
Tua Nylén (tutkija, aineenopettaja)
Markus Jylhä (yliopisto-opettaja, aineenopettaja, viestintävastaava)
Panu Lammi (väitöskirjatutkija, aineenopettaja)
Laura Hynynen (tutkimusavustaja, varhaiskasvatuksen opettaja)
Ronja Päivärinta (harjoittelija)
Michaela Söderholm (harjoittelija)

Author: Jussi Torkko

The highlights of the study

Throughout late 2020 and 2021, with the help of Digital Geography Lab, I did my master’s thesis on modelling and understanding how people experience greenery. Most often greenery is observed from a top-down point of view, through the sensors of aerial vehicles or satellites. However, we do not know sufficiently well how greenery measures captured from high above match the true greenery experience by the people on the ground level. This experienced greenery is termed human-scale greenery for this thesis. Methods for modelling and quantifying human-scale greenery are based on data sources like street view images or LiDAR. Similarly to the top-down perspective, it is not known how well these data and methods reflect the experience of people.

This lack of knowledge is what I set out to solve with this thesis. By comparing greenery assessments collected from people by interviews to modelled greenery values from the same locations, I was able to show that all tested greenery modelling methods have a strong linear relationship with the greenery that people experience. However, the results also revealed that the modelling methods underestimate the amount of greenery people perceive and that while the modelled values share a strong relationship with surveyed greenery, there are significant deviations between the modelled and perceived values. Also interestingly, methods created specifically for quantifying human-scale greenery do not always appear to have an advantage over traditional top-down greenery assessment methods.

While interviewing people, I also collected limited sociodemographic data of the respondents. I found that age may affect people’s relationship with greenery, but this could not be confirmed with certainty. However, it was clear that people with less experience of nature and belonging to the age group around 30 years were met more frequently at study sites with low greenery values than other groups of respondents. In future studies, additional attention should thus be given to how people can experience human-scale greenery. More detailed descriptions of the results for both modelled and sociodemographic pathways can be found in the thesis.

Continue reading “Modelling and understanding greenery on the scale of people: A look into Jussi Torkko’s MSc thesis”

Authors: Steve O’Hern (Tampere University), Elias Willberg (University of Helsinki), Christoph Fink (University of Helsinki), Sergio Useche (University of Valencia)

Highlights:

• • We have published a new study on cyclists’ behaviour in Finland in the journal Safety together with researchers from Tampere University and the University of Valencia
  • Using a survey, we aimed at understanding the behaviour and attitudes of bicycle riders in Finland.
  • Our results show that Finnish bicycle riders report low errors and violations, and high levels of knowledge regarding traffic rules, which is consistent with previous similar studies from other countries.
  • Most participants also report low levels of aggression, which is generally dealt with in constructive ways,
  • Anger was most commonly reported a result of interactions with motor vehicles and less with other road users such as pedestrians,
  • The results point to a need for further separation between bicycle riders and motorised vehicles. Furthermore, we recommend to encourage positive behaviour and train risk perception among those engaging in risky behaviors.

Continue reading “New study on cyclists’ behaviour in Finland”