Colleagues in the Learning City Networks may be interested in some of the specific work currently being undertaken by the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) at the University of Glasgow in the field of Education.

Recently there has been much government policy and academic research emphasis on big data in the UK , resulting in the funding of the ESRC ‘Big Data Network’ in order to address social and health inequality within everyday life.  Part of this initiative has been the creation of the UBDC, due to be launched on 30 September 2014.  The UBDC seeks to address issues such as sustainability, social mobility, transport efficiency, communications, sense of place and links with a variety of education-related variables and outcomes.  Big data refers to the vast amounts of information created and stored by organisations and can include traditional databases (such as school performance indicators and energy use), to private business-linked databases and finally to include more technologically diverse sources of data, such as social media, geographical mapping data and GPS.  The centre will yield novel approaches to questions of access and success within various types of formal, in-formal and non-formal learning, as well as attitudes, behaviours, skills and literacy linked with place and geographic variables.  It is within this context that the Urban Big Data Centre at the University of Glasgow has been created to promote the exploitation of existing big data sets, as well as create and develop new urban city metrics for academics, private organisations, policy makers and members of the public to use. 

According to Lynch (2008) there are various ways in which data can be ‘big’. There is no specific size, although the datasets involved are likely to be large and beyond the capacity of most relational database systems to manage. More significant perhaps is the complexity of the data, its variety of form, the rapidity of its development and change, and the need for novel methods to capture, analyse and interpret it.  The integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) project will create the first ‘data product’ for the UBDC.  The data will be available for academics, policy practitioners and the general public.  It will be housed alongside other large publicly available datasets within the UBDC data archive. The iMCD seeks to create a large dataset in the area of education by firstly with a large-scale data crawl capturing social media (textual and visual).  This will be followed by a large-scale survey of the greater Glasgow area.  This survey of 2,000 households sets out to investigate the extent to which values, attitudes, beliefs, skills and learning influence behaviours and activity within the greater Glasgow area. Specifically the survey will examine individuals’ patterns of travel activity and daily tasks, values and priorities. This survey is supplemented by GPS tracking, travel diaries, life logging and sensing data, to gather rich and complex data regarding the lives of these citizens. Data will be collected on people’s daily living, how they use their time and their mobility and broadly measures individuals’ and households’ demographic backgrounds/ profiles, as well as attitudes, values, literacy/ knowledge and behaviours.  These data will yield a three dimensional picture of peoples’ daily activity and mobility.  The UBDC was created with the aim of ultimately promoting behavioural interventions, and is therefore a key model for how big data can be used, not just by academics, to improve the lives of others.  

Finally one very important aspect of the work of the iMCD to PASCAL subscribers and particularly those in the LCN will be to attempt to operationalise some of the UNESCO's Key Features of Learning Cities. What we are doing in Glasgow is potentially transferable to other cities and regions around the world.

Please get in touch if you are interested in the big data we are collating, collecting, indexing and making available to the wider public.

Further details can be found at http://ubdc.ac.uk or contact me at [email protected]