Manuel Baer

Manuel Baer
University of Auckland · Centre for eResearch

Doctor of Philosophy
Developing a location-based game to crowdsource landscape perception data generation.

About

9
Publications
1,259
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68
Citations
Introduction
How individuals and groups of individuals perceive and interact with landscapes has enjoyed a long history of research in cognitive, geographic and linguistic sciences. Understanding how persons experience their environment has been an especially prominent field of research due to the importance of the topic for policy and decision-making purposes. The main aim of my PhD is to develop an application to actively collect and analyse landscape perception data using a gamified approach (e.g. using entertaining elements as a primary form of motivation). We will collect in-situ natural language descriptions along with photographs as the literature has identified the use of texts as viable underlying datasets to gage individual perceptions and sentiments.
Additional affiliations
June 2018 - March 2023
University of Zurich
Position
  • PhD Student
Description
  • PhD candidate in the geocomputation group, department of Geography, University of Zurich. In my PhD I was working on crowdsourcing natural language landscape descriptions through a web application and analysing the data using spatial as well as linguistic approaches.
June 2017 - June 2018
University of Zurich
Position
  • Research Assistant
Description
  • I worked as a research assistant in the geocomputation unit of the University of Zürich. Tasks involved administrative work, aid in research, writing papers and preparing for a PhD.

Publications

Publications (9)
Article
Full-text available
Location-based games are a highly technology-dependent game genre that has witnessed an exponential increase in popularity with the democratisation of smartphones as well as ubiquitous mobile data and access to satellite navigation. Moving forward into the future, location-based games can be expected to evolve as the technologies underlying the gen...
Article
Full-text available
What cultural ecosystem services (CES) do people perceive in their immediate surroundings, and what sensory experiences are linked to these ecosystem services? And how are these CES and experiences expressed in natural language? In this study, we used data generated through a gamified application called Window Expeditions, where people uploaded sho...
Article
Full-text available
Natural language has proven to be a valuable source of data for various scientific inquiries including landscape perception and preference research. However, large high quality landscape relevant corpora are scare. We here propose and discuss a natural language processing workflow to identify landscape relevant documents in large collections of uns...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Location-based games (LBGs) are based on digital representations of our surroundings and the spaces we inhabit. These digital twins of the real world, real world metaverses, are subsequently augmented by imaginary game content. However, the virtual reconstruction of the world inevitably emphasises some aspects of reality and disregards others. In t...
Article
Full-text available
Measuring what citizens perceive and value about landscapes is important for landscape monitoring. Capturing temporal, spatial and cultural variation requires collection of data at scale. One potential proxy data source are textual descriptions of landscapes written by volunteers. We implemented a gamified application and crowdsourced a multilingua...
Article
Full-text available
Visiting landscapes and appreciating them from specific viewpoints is not a new phenomenon. Such so-called motifs were popularised by travel guides and art in the romantic era, and find their contemporary digital twins through images captured in social media. We developed and implemented a conceptual model of motifs, based around spatial clustering...
Article
Full-text available
Social forest functions including recreation are important for increasingly urbanised societies. For effective management of forest recreation areas, monitoring visitor frequencies is crucial. Increasingly, attempts are being made to incorporate recreational use data into National Forest Inventories (NFI), but given the large scale of national asse...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that affected many cities around the world during the spring and summer 2020 was often met with regulations requiring people to lockdown, to quarantine or to respect social distancing. Urban spaces often became off-limits and depopulated, filled with borders isolating people confined at home. Nevertheless, in...
Article
Full-text available
Data contributed by a large number of non‐experts is increasingly used to validate and curate land cover data, with location‐based games (LBGs) developed for this purpose generating particular interest. We here present our findings on StarBorn, a novel LBG with a strong focus on game play. Users conquer game‐tiles by visiting real‐world locations a...

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