Information School News

On October 8 2022, the fourth and final public policy dialogue table  "Ancestral knowledge, climate change and innovation policies: steps for a common agenda", was held. Co-organized by the Institute of Nature, Land and Energy (INTE ) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the University of Sheffield with the support of the NGO Andes, it involves the participation of representatives from the National Institute of Agrarian Innovation, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Culture and the International Potato Center. Participants traveled to the city of Cusco to meet with the members of the Potato Park of the district Pisac and Parque Chalakuy in the district of Lares and learn about their experiences working with innovation.  This activity was the last in a series of four roundtables that have been implemented for more than a year, as part of the research project which seeks to make visible the contributions of innovation by I...

An article co-authored by Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova, Information School and Dr Giuseppe Veltri, University of Leicester, has been published in Public Understanding of Science. Their article ‘ Climate change onTwitter: Content, media ecology and information sharing behaviour’ studied  the content, use of sources and information sharing in over 60,000 tweets using automatic thematic analysis, semantic network analysis and text classification.  Findings about a major role still being played by traditional media come amid increasing media coverage of the United Nations climate conference COP21 taking place in Paris from 30 November until 11 December 2015.

Jo Bates and Robert Villa have both been successful applying to the AHRC's " Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities " Big Data projects call. Jo Bates - The Secret Life of a Weather Datum The Secret Life of a Weather Datum is a 15 month research project that will explore the socio-cultural values and practices shaping, and being shaped by, the production, collation, distribution and re-use of weather data produced by the UK’s Met Office. In order to achieve this aim, the project will be following the ‘journey’ of a single weather datum from its production into three cases of re-use: climate science, weather risk markets and citizen science projects. These cases will comprise of interviews, observations, digital ethnography and policy research. The final outcome of the project will be an interactive website and multimedia research data archive that will allow members of the public to explore this journey in more detail, thus contributing to the public ...

Jo Bates’ work on the Big Data driven financial markets being developed in response to climate change has been published by The Conversation and New Statesman . Read more below.    Big agriculture, big data, big weather. Chemophilia The recent news story regarding Monsanto’s US$930million acquisition of the ‘Big Data’ science company, Climate Corporation, raises important questions about the economies developing in response to climate change. A new generation of data analytics firms are emerging, using innovations in the field of data science in order to turn vast datasets (‘Big Data’) into exploitable information. As the Financial Times reported , Monsanto’s purchase of Climate Corporation signals the ‘first significant acquisition’ of this emerging ‘Big Data’ industry. Climate Corporations’ key offering is a product called ‘Total Weather Insurance’  (TWI), which it currently sells directly to farmers in the USA. TWI pays out based solely upon obse...