Web 2.0 and Neogeography. Opportunities for teaching geography

Abstract

This paper is focused on the use of the geographical contents in Web 2.0 applications for didactics and particularly as a valuable source for many of the operations traditionally carried out when working with geographical data and issues in a GIS environment. The paper represents an introductory examination of to date well known topics concerning geographical data and software but with the focus of using them for teaching geographical issues and introducing them for the use of (online) Geographic Information tools. In particular it will be pointed out how geographical questions can be raised and tackled by means of data and features spread over the web and containing geographical data. There is also an analysis of how they can be elaborated cartographically. The paper opens with a short introduction to the geographical “revolutions” that took place in the late XX and early XXI centuries in the digital age, with the advent of GIS and the so-called neogeography. A brief review on how GIS and geospatial technologies in general can be effectively used to disseminate geographical issues follows. The attention is then focused on an exercise, that can be proposed to geography students, or that is, the analysis of the Italian 2013 general election. The exercise foresees the use of geocoded tweets from Twitter, the popular social media, and some of the hashtags used in the pre-election periods (#elezioni2013) to observe their concentrations. The exercise also implies working with a free web GIS service such as GeoCommons, which together with other families of similar online software, make it possible to produce maps showing some thematic representations of the results obtained as well as analyzing the data with more than basic visualization functions.