Andrea Ballatore
Biographic Data
| ID | 288500 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrea Ballatore |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrea |
| FAMILY NAME | Ballatore |
| SIGNATURE | BALLATORE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3477-7654 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Complex Geography of Cultural Networks
This article examines the cultural sector as complex, sprawling, and uneven spatial networks, shaped by the interactions of people, institutions, goods and services. At the intersection of network science and geography, it synthesises how spatial network approaches have been applied to the study of cultural and creative industries, including art, museums, heritage, publishing, film, and music. Core concepts, such as small‐world topology, preferen…
Unrealized Fears: Monitoring Museum Closure and Reopening in the United Kingdom During the Covid‐19 Pandemic
Fears of widespread permanent closures of museums expressed at the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic prompted our research to monitor closures and other museum behavior in 2021–2022. We wanted to understand how the UK sector changed in this period. Which museums closed, and what factors were at work in their closure? Did museums that closed have anything in common? Were there trends or patterns across the sector? To monitor as widely as possible we …
Facebook city: Place-named groups as urban communication infrastructure in Greater London
This paper investigates the geography of Facebook use at an urban-regional scale, focussing on place-named groups, meaning various interest groups with names relating to places such as towns, neighbourhoods, or points of interest. Conceptualising Facebook as a digital infrastructure – that is, the platform’s urban footprint, in the form of its place-named groups, rather than what individuals share and create using the service – we explore the loc…
Changes in food and drink purchasing behaviour in England during the first 3 months of the Covid-19 pandemic: An interrupted time series analysis
Objective: This study examined changes food and drink purchasing during the first 3 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in England, and if changes varied by population subgroups. Design: We investigated changes in take-home food and drink purchasing and frequency of out-of-home (OOH) purchasing using an interrupted time series analysis design. The start of pandemic restrictions (the intervention) was defined as 16 March 2020, when first announced in …
Museums, Covid‐19 and the pivot to social media
This paper examines social media activity by UK museums during the COVID‐19 pandemic. There is a general perception that as museums closed their doors for extended periods, their digital presence increased to maintain connections with their audiences. However, much of the research conducted in this area is based on small‐scale studies and examples of best practice from large, well‐resourced museums. By contrast, this study utilizes a comprehensiv…
Associations between the food environment and food and drink purchasing using large-scale commercial purchasing data: A cross-sectional study
Despite some evidence for exposure to OOH outlets and UPF purchases, this study finds limited evidence for the impact of the food environment on household food and drink purchasing. Nonetheless, region-specific effects regarding alcohol purchasing indicate the importance of geographical context for research and policy
Associations between area deprivation and changes in the digital food environment during the Covid-19 pandemic: Longitudinal analysis of three online food delivery platforms
Online food delivery services facilitate access to unhealthy foods and have proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores associations between neighbourhood deprivation and exposure to online food delivery services and changes in exposure by deprivation during the first year of the pandemic. Data on food outlets delivering to 661 postcode districts in London and the North of England in 2020 and 2021 were collected from three onli…
The UK museum boom: Continuity and change 1960–2019
During the late-twentieth century there was a significant increase in the number of museums in the UK. Apart from the polemic heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, the boom in museums was not much investigated. Our project “Mapping Museums” collected and analysed data on over 4000 UK museums that were open in the period from 1960 to 2019. Here we present our findings. We show that the number of museums increased from around 1000 to a highpoint…
The context of outdoor walking: A classification of user-generated routes
Leisure walking has known benefits to public health, from both physical and psychological viewpoints. Complementing traditional print information sources, dedicated online platforms and apps provide tools to search, discover, plan and share routes. While walking routes are highly heterogeneous in terms of their properties and geographical context, current platforms adopt simple representations of basic attributes. In this article, we report on a …
This city is not a bin: Crowdmapping the distribution of urban litter
Urban litter, such as cans, packaging, and cigarettes, has significant impacts, and yet little is known about its spatio-temporal distribution, with little available data. In contexts of data scarcity, crowdsourcing provides a low-cost approach to collecting a large amount of geo-referenced data. We consider 1.7 million litter observations in the Netherlands, collected by the crowdmapping project Litterati. First, we analyze the biases of this da…
A geography of UK museums
Museums are important centres of heritage, culture, education, and tourism. These diverse institutions operate in different ways, reaching different audiences and managing varied collections. Thanks to a novel database of unprecedented completeness produced by the Mapping Museums project, this study provides a quantitative geography of museums in the UK, showing how about half of the sector had not been surveyed before. The presence of museums is…
Localizing Content Moderation: Approaching the Orientational Spaces of Facebook Group Admins and Mods
This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on content moderation by focusing on its practice in relation to localized social media contexts, an area which remains under-researched. It makes two key contributions. Firstly, it presents the results of a study on moderation practices in relation to place-named Facebook groups across Greater London. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrators and moderators from 16 Facebook groups, we …
Imagining the thinking machine: Technological myths and the rise of artificial intelligence
This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: The creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of the human mind. Based on a content analysis of articles on AI published in two magazines, the Scientif…
The Daily Mile: 15 Minutes Running Improves the Physical Fitness of Italian Primary School Children
The Daily MileTM is an innovative school-based intervention that requires children to run or jog outside for 15 min at a self-selected pace during class time. Today, only one study has investigated the efficacy of The Daily Mile on physical fitness, which was conducted with Scottish children. Thus, we aimed to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of The Daily Mile in Italian primary schools. A total of 486 children participated in The Daily…
The missing museums: Accreditation, surveys, and an alternative account of the UK museum sector
Surveys of the UK museum sector all have subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. Since the 1980s, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting half of the museums in the UK. In this article we examine how data collection became tied to the accreditation scheme and its effects on how the museum sector is represented as a professionalised sphere. While is important to understa…
New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos: The persistence of Anglo‐conformity in the American motion picture industry
Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain over‐represented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity to the WASP ideal type persists despite the fact American actors are disproportionately born in Los …
Sonifying data uncertainty with sound dimensions
The communication of data uncertainty is a crucial problem in data science, information visualization, and geographic information science (GIScience). Effective ways to communicate the uncertainty of data enables data consumers to interpret the data as intended by the producer, reducing the possibilities of misinterpretation. In this article, we report on an empirical investigation of how sound can be used to convey information about data uncerta…
Digital Hegemonies: The Localness of Search Engine Results
Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Although these representations of place are increasingly important and consequential, little is known abo…
Google chemtrails: A methodology to analyze topic representation in search engine results
Search engine results influence the visibility of different viewpoints in political, cultural, and scientific debates. Treating search engines as editorial products with intrinsic biases can help understand the structure of information flows in new media. This paper outlines an empirical methodology to analyze the representation of topics in search engines, reducing the spatial and temporal biases in the results. As a case study, the methodology …
E-readers and the death of the book: Or, new media and the myth of the disappearing medium
The recent emergence of e-readers and electronic books (e-books) has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progress. We argue that in order to comprehend such narratives, we need to inscribe them in the…
The web will kill them all: New media, digital utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement
This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement ( Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses hav…
Good location, terrible food: Detecting feature sentiment in user-generated reviews
Digital Hegemonies: The Localness of Search Engine Results
Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Although these representations of place are increasingly important and consequential, little is known abo…
E-readers and the death of the book: Or, new media and the myth of the disappearing medium
The recent emergence of e-readers and electronic books (e-books) has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progress. We argue that in order to comprehend such narratives, we need to inscribe them in the…
The web will kill them all: New media, digital utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement
This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement ( Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses hav…
A geography of UK museums
Museums are important centres of heritage, culture, education, and tourism. These diverse institutions operate in different ways, reaching different audiences and managing varied collections. Thanks to a novel database of unprecedented completeness produced by the Mapping Museums project, this study provides a quantitative geography of museums in the UK, showing how about half of the sector had not been surveyed before. The presence of museums is…
The missing museums: Accreditation, surveys, and an alternative account of the UK museum sector
Surveys of the UK museum sector all have subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. Since the 1980s, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting half of the museums in the UK. In this article we examine how data collection became tied to the accreditation scheme and its effects on how the museum sector is represented as a professionalised sphere. While is important to understa…
Associations between area deprivation and changes in the digital food environment during the Covid-19 pandemic: Longitudinal analysis of three online food delivery platforms
Online food delivery services facilitate access to unhealthy foods and have proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores associations between neighbourhood deprivation and exposure to online food delivery services and changes in exposure by deprivation during the first year of the pandemic. Data on food outlets delivering to 661 postcode districts in London and the North of England in 2020 and 2021 were collected from three onli…
The UK museum boom: Continuity and change 1960–2019
During the late-twentieth century there was a significant increase in the number of museums in the UK. Apart from the polemic heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, the boom in museums was not much investigated. Our project “Mapping Museums” collected and analysed data on over 4000 UK museums that were open in the period from 1960 to 2019. Here we present our findings. We show that the number of museums increased from around 1000 to a highpoint…
New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos: The persistence of Anglo‐conformity in the American motion picture industry
Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain over‐represented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity to the WASP ideal type persists despite the fact American actors are disproportionately born in Los …
Good location, terrible food: Detecting feature sentiment in user-generated reviews
The web will kill them all: New media, digital utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement
This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement ( Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses hav…
Google chemtrails: A methodology to analyze topic representation in search engine results
Search engine results influence the visibility of different viewpoints in political, cultural, and scientific debates. Treating search engines as editorial products with intrinsic biases can help understand the structure of information flows in new media. This paper outlines an empirical methodology to analyze the representation of topics in search engines, reducing the spatial and temporal biases in the results. As a case study, the methodology …
E-readers and the death of the book: Or, new media and the myth of the disappearing medium
The recent emergence of e-readers and electronic books (e-books) has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progress. We argue that in order to comprehend such narratives, we need to inscribe them in the…
Digital Hegemonies: The Localness of Search Engine Results
Every day, billions of Internet users rely on search engines to find information about places to make decisions about tourism, shopping, and countless other economic activities. In an opaque process, search engines assemble digital content produced in a variety of locations around the world and make it available to large cohorts of consumers. Although these representations of place are increasingly important and consequential, little is known abo…
Sonifying data uncertainty with sound dimensions
The communication of data uncertainty is a crucial problem in data science, information visualization, and geographic information science (GIScience). Effective ways to communicate the uncertainty of data enables data consumers to interpret the data as intended by the producer, reducing the possibilities of misinterpretation. In this article, we report on an empirical investigation of how sound can be used to convey information about data uncerta…
The Daily Mile: 15 Minutes Running Improves the Physical Fitness of Italian Primary School Children
The Daily MileTM is an innovative school-based intervention that requires children to run or jog outside for 15 min at a self-selected pace during class time. Today, only one study has investigated the efficacy of The Daily Mile on physical fitness, which was conducted with Scottish children. Thus, we aimed to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of The Daily Mile in Italian primary schools. A total of 486 children participated in The Daily…
The missing museums: Accreditation, surveys, and an alternative account of the UK museum sector
Surveys of the UK museum sector all have subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. Since the 1980s, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting half of the museums in the UK. In this article we examine how data collection became tied to the accreditation scheme and its effects on how the museum sector is represented as a professionalised sphere. While is important to understa…
New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos: The persistence of Anglo‐conformity in the American motion picture industry
Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain over‐represented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity to the WASP ideal type persists despite the fact American actors are disproportionately born in Los …
Imagining the thinking machine: Technological myths and the rise of artificial intelligence
This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: The creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of the human mind. Based on a content analysis of articles on AI published in two magazines, the Scientif…
Localizing Content Moderation: Approaching the Orientational Spaces of Facebook Group Admins and Mods
This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on content moderation by focusing on its practice in relation to localized social media contexts, an area which remains under-researched. It makes two key contributions. Firstly, it presents the results of a study on moderation practices in relation to place-named Facebook groups across Greater London. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrators and moderators from 16 Facebook groups, we …
This city is not a bin: Crowdmapping the distribution of urban litter
Urban litter, such as cans, packaging, and cigarettes, has significant impacts, and yet little is known about its spatio-temporal distribution, with little available data. In contexts of data scarcity, crowdsourcing provides a low-cost approach to collecting a large amount of geo-referenced data. We consider 1.7 million litter observations in the Netherlands, collected by the crowdmapping project Litterati. First, we analyze the biases of this da…
A geography of UK museums
Museums are important centres of heritage, culture, education, and tourism. These diverse institutions operate in different ways, reaching different audiences and managing varied collections. Thanks to a novel database of unprecedented completeness produced by the Mapping Museums project, this study provides a quantitative geography of museums in the UK, showing how about half of the sector had not been surveyed before. The presence of museums is…
Museums, Covid‐19 and the pivot to social media
This paper examines social media activity by UK museums during the COVID‐19 pandemic. There is a general perception that as museums closed their doors for extended periods, their digital presence increased to maintain connections with their audiences. However, much of the research conducted in this area is based on small‐scale studies and examples of best practice from large, well‐resourced museums. By contrast, this study utilizes a comprehensiv…
Associations between the food environment and food and drink purchasing using large-scale commercial purchasing data: A cross-sectional study
Despite some evidence for exposure to OOH outlets and UPF purchases, this study finds limited evidence for the impact of the food environment on household food and drink purchasing. Nonetheless, region-specific effects regarding alcohol purchasing indicate the importance of geographical context for research and policy
Associations between area deprivation and changes in the digital food environment during the Covid-19 pandemic: Longitudinal analysis of three online food delivery platforms
Online food delivery services facilitate access to unhealthy foods and have proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores associations between neighbourhood deprivation and exposure to online food delivery services and changes in exposure by deprivation during the first year of the pandemic. Data on food outlets delivering to 661 postcode districts in London and the North of England in 2020 and 2021 were collected from three onli…
The UK museum boom: Continuity and change 1960–2019
During the late-twentieth century there was a significant increase in the number of museums in the UK. Apart from the polemic heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, the boom in museums was not much investigated. Our project “Mapping Museums” collected and analysed data on over 4000 UK museums that were open in the period from 1960 to 2019. Here we present our findings. We show that the number of museums increased from around 1000 to a highpoint…
The context of outdoor walking: A classification of user-generated routes
Leisure walking has known benefits to public health, from both physical and psychological viewpoints. Complementing traditional print information sources, dedicated online platforms and apps provide tools to search, discover, plan and share routes. While walking routes are highly heterogeneous in terms of their properties and geographical context, current platforms adopt simple representations of basic attributes. In this article, we report on a …
Facebook city: Place-named groups as urban communication infrastructure in Greater London
This paper investigates the geography of Facebook use at an urban-regional scale, focussing on place-named groups, meaning various interest groups with names relating to places such as towns, neighbourhoods, or points of interest. Conceptualising Facebook as a digital infrastructure – that is, the platform’s urban footprint, in the form of its place-named groups, rather than what individuals share and create using the service – we explore the loc…
Changes in food and drink purchasing behaviour in England during the first 3 months of the Covid-19 pandemic: An interrupted time series analysis
Objective: This study examined changes food and drink purchasing during the first 3 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in England, and if changes varied by population subgroups. Design: We investigated changes in take-home food and drink purchasing and frequency of out-of-home (OOH) purchasing using an interrupted time series analysis design. The start of pandemic restrictions (the intervention) was defined as 16 March 2020, when first announced in …
The Complex Geography of Cultural Networks
This article examines the cultural sector as complex, sprawling, and uneven spatial networks, shaped by the interactions of people, institutions, goods and services. At the intersection of network science and geography, it synthesises how spatial network approaches have been applied to the study of cultural and creative industries, including art, museums, heritage, publishing, film, and music. Core concepts, such as small‐world topology, preferen…
Unrealized Fears: Monitoring Museum Closure and Reopening in the United Kingdom During the Covid‐19 Pandemic
Fears of widespread permanent closures of museums expressed at the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic prompted our research to monitor closures and other museum behavior in 2021–2022. We wanted to understand how the UK sector changed in this period. Which museums closed, and what factors were at work in their closure? Did museums that closed have anything in common? Were there trends or patterns across the sector? To monitor as widely as possible we …
Sociology (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Business (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Data science (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (5 works) · Psychology (5 works)