1,721,060 research outputs found
Daily mobility patterns of small business owners and homeworkers in post-industrial cities
No full textThe rise of small businesses, self-employment, and homeworking are transforming traditional industrial ways of working. Our research fills a noticeable gap in the literature by using portable devices (i.e., smartphones) to capture individual mobility data on an understudied population group – small business owners (owner managers and self-employed with up to 49 employees) and whether they work from home in comparison with employees who work at their employer’s premises or partly or mainly from home. We recorded week-long individual GPS data on 702 participants and derived a set of measures of daily mobility (number of trips, trip duration, trip distance, and maximum distance from home). Each measure is modelled against a range of individual and neighbourhood-level covariates. Our findings contrast with existing studies that suggest homeworking or self-employment may be associated with lower levels of daily mobility or with compensatory effects between work and non-work travel. Overall, our study points to higher levels of daily mobility of owners of small businesses and the self-employed in cities as they travel longer distances. Further, some homeworkers have on aggregate longer daily trip distances than ‘traditional’ premise-based employees. Most striking, female home-based business owners fall into this group. If homeworking is here to stay after the COVID-19 pandemic, we may see both increases and/or decreases of daily mobility depending on worker types and gender
Activity graphs: Spatial graphs as a framework for quantifying individual mobility
No full textHuman mobility is poorly captured by existing methods which employ simple measures to quantify human mobility patterns. This paper develops spatial graph-based methods to quantify patterns of human mobility – termed activity graphs. Activity graphs are constructed with anchors representing activity locations and edges connecting anchors representing movement between anchors. We first perform a factor analysis to identify four primary dimensions of mobility that can be derived from activity graphs: quantity, extent, connectedness, and clustering. A case study with GPS tracking data from a sample of UK-based workers is then used to demonstrate how activity graphs can be applied in practice, and how new dimensions of mobility captured by activity graphs may lead to new insights about mobility behaviour. We provide several promising new areas for future work where activity graphs can be further extended to address increasingly sophisticated spatial questions around individual mobility. Our analysis fits within the time-geographic framework presented by Hägerstrand and our results highlight opportunities for continued research motivated by issues emphasized by Hägerstrand in his seminal work
Remote working and spatial implications in Wales: report commissioned by the Welsh Parliament
No full textThe work was commissioned under the Senedd Research COVID-19 Expert Register scheme, through which academics assist the Senedd with its work on the impacts of the COVID-19.The EIS Committee requested the study to inform its inquiry on Remote Working: Implications for Wales, which it undertook following the Welsh Government announcing a long-term ambition for 30% of the Welsh workforce to work remotely on a regular basis. The Committee was keen to build a greater evidence base in relation to remote working, as this is an emerging policy area.The report covers:geographical analysis of home working trends;trends in the use of co-working spaces;analysis of the different types of co-working spaces that exist in Wales; andinternational best practice around governmental support for co-working spaces
Locating creativity in the city using Twitter data
Get PDFThis study applies a new methodology using the location of tweets from creatives to study where economic creativity takes place in a city. Based on a Twitter network in Brighton and Hove (United Kingdom), a creative hub, we identify freelancers and entrepreneurs in the creative industries that form the ‘core’ of the ‘creative class’ but have rarely been captured in existing spatial research. We use a comprehensive geodatabase of ‘Points-of-Interest’ and Census of Population residence and workplace locations to match tweets with types of places. Findings show that practices of economic creativity are less spatially clustered in central parts of the city and more spatially distributed across the city than studies that used business register data or cluster approaches suggested. Residential areas, which proxy for home locations, have a high incident of creative activities besides urban amenities and coworking spaces. It is concluded that local economic development should support the creation and maintenance of attractive places of social interactions across the city to foster creativity and innovation which has become even more important with the surge in homeworking due to Covid-19
How Does Travel Environment Affect Mood? A Study Using Geographic Ecological Momentary Assessment in the UK (Short Paper)
Get PDFDaily travel is a large part of life, and it is widely believed that our mood can be affected by the environment in which travel takes place. In this study, we investigate how environmental factors affect mood while performing daily travel activities using an app-based geographic ecological momentary assessment study. Our study (the WorkAndHome study) involved over 1000 participants tracked using a bespoke GPS mobile phone app in three cities (Birmingham, Leeds, and Brighton and Hove, UK) At the end of trips (i.e., when a stop in the GPS data was detected) we pushed a survey to participants asking them to score their current happiness and stress levels on a 7-point Likert scale. We combined individual GPS data with environmental data on green and blue spaces and weather conditions. We found that green and blue space availability and weather variables, such as daytime, apparent temperature, and visibility, significantly affect our happiness levels at the end of trips. While these weather factors were also significant predictors of stress level, availability of green and blue space was not. The results of this study provide fine-scale evidence from direct surveys about the associations between environment and weather and our moods when performing daily travel activities
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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