In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimu...

With everything readers need to know about how to execute their research project, this book is written specifically for information systems (IS) and computing students. It introduces key quantitative and qualitative research methods, makes sense of underlying philosophies, and helps readers navigate and assess existing academic papers. Special features support students as they bridge the gap between theory and practice. These include:- research examples from the IS and computing di...

This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life.Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, dat...

"The definitive guide to a technology that succeeds or fails depending upon our ability to accommodate societal context and structures. This handbook is lucid, integrative, comprehensive and, above all, prescient in its interpretation of GIS implementation as a societal process."- Paul Longley, University College London**"This is truly a handbook - a book you will want to keep on hand for frequent reference and to which GIS professors should direct ...

This book introduces the Internet through a systematic geographical interpretation, thus shedding light on the Internet as a spatial entity. The book’s approach is to extend basic concepts developed for terrestrial geography to cyberspace, most notably those relating to space, structure, place, distance, mobility, and presence. It further considers the Internet by its constitution of information space, communications space, and screen space. By using well-known concepts from traditional hu...

Big data has the power to transform education and educational research. Governments, researchers and commercial companies are only beginning to understand the potential that big data offers in informing policy ideas, contributing to the development of new educational tools and innovative ways of conducting research.This cutting-edge overview explores the current state-of-play, looking at big data and the related topic of computer code to examine the implications for education and s...

Globalisation has not led to the ‘death of geography’. Intensified relations between communities in different parts of the world have only highlighted the need for understanding and managing phenomena on a variety of geographic scales. From global warming to credit crunch, and from epidemics to terrorism, causes and solutions are sought on local, regional, national as well as inter-continental levels. With the advent of Geospatial Technology, scholars, policymakers and entrepreneurs have v...

Spatial planning is a process. The focus of this book is on the sequence of key tasks that constitute the process and on special techniques that are suitable to conduct these tasks. Spatial planners require a number of skills to manage this process in an efficient manner, select the necessary tasks for each specific planning context, as well as the appropriate techniques for each task – always considering the people with whom and for whom they plan.Rather than recommending options,...

This book will prove a unique source of information and instruction for anyone seeking to make better human-oriented policy, whether urban planner, business strategist, or manager in the field of education, health or welfare, Ingeniously Wyatt has created two books in one: the main text covers the types of software package available: mainstream software, peripheral software, innovative software, frontier software; the lessons generated from the software are outlined in lesson boxes. Reader...

This book explains how mobile computer usability is shaped by the increasing integration of personal circumstances in organization. It represents an attempt to conceptualize an alternative model of mobile computer usability. It is motivated by the author’s conviction that we do not yet have an adequate understanding of this concept because we have not taken seriously the transformation of human personality by the co-evolution of organization and ICTs. The author argues that the transformat...

This book presents a set of selected and edited papers presented at the 2nd and 3rd Design and Decision Support Conference. The purpose is to provide examples of innovative research in decision support systems in urban planning from throughout the world.

There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilizing data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from and make sense of the urban world. Recently, we have entered the age of big data, and now many aspects of everyday urban life are being captured as data and city management is mediated through data-driven technologies.Data and the City is the first edited collection to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of how this new era of urban big ...