Adrian’s academic research career began with his BA (Honours) Geography dissertation, conducted at Durham University (Palaeoenvironmental changes at a site in Romney Marsh, Kent, over the last 5,000 years.), followed by his MSc GIS dissertation (A qualitative comparison of several elevation interpolation algorithms.) submitted to the University of Edinburgh.
His Doctoral research, conducted part-time at the University of Portsmouth, was titled Geotagging matters? The role of space and place in politicised social media discourse. His PhD thesis was completed in late 2017 and his Doctorate awarded in 2018.
Prior to returning to academia in 2011, after graduating from Edinburgh with Distinction in his MSc GIS in 1992, Adrian had been busy starting up and developing geo-enabled businesses, researching best-of-breed technologies, data products, professional practices and programming languages.
To read more about his recent academic research please follow the links below.
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Contested Geographies
As Donald Trump’s naming of the ‘Gulf of America’ (ahem… Gulf of Mexico!) shows, the naming of geographical areas on land or sea can be highly contested. One of Adrian’s Postdoctoral research projects, led by Professor Humphrey Southall at the University of Portsmouth, assisted by Dr Paula Aucott, examined contested geographical naming. The research used…
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Big Data Environments
Geographical data have always been ‘big’, presenting special challenges for geo-computation. Adding Web-scale ‘Big Data’ makes things even bigger, into the Gigabytes, Petabytes, Terabytes or more… Adrian’s PhD research had highlighted several problems, e.g., with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) ‘ingesting’ large amounts of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or trusty old CSV (Comma Separated Values)…
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Natural Language Processing
Adrian’s PhD research had used a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems to search for toponymic (place name) mentions in Online Social Network (OSN) interactions sourced from Twitter and Facebook: As part of a separate research project these technologies were applied to Professor Richard Healey’s research into the Illinois Central Rail Road (ICRR) and…
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PhD research
Adrian embarked upon Doctoral research in the Department of Geography (as was) at the University of Portsmouth, part-time, in 2011 under the supervision of Professor Richard Healey, who had taught him years earlier as a lecturer on the MSc GIS programme at the University of Edinburgh. Adrian’s PhD was finally awarded, years later, in 2018.…
Adrian continues to combine his interests in Big Data, Natural Language Processing, computational text and data analysis in his research.