Crowdsourcing Urban Data

Dear Colleagues,

Authoritative data sources (e.g., national censuses, municipal records, federal mapping agencies, macroeconomic records) historically provided the backbone for quantifying, analyzing, and understanding mechanisms that operate in a city. While these data sources continue to provide valuable information, non-authoritative data sources are growing in volume and availability. Mobile devices, social media, and the underlying telecommunications infrastructure, have resulted in a global trend where individuals are increasingly volunteering to collect and share observations of the world around them. These crowdsourced data, as images, text, time, and location, are an invaluable resource because they provide spatially and temporally continuous observations that would otherwise go unrecorded. The increased volume of these data make it difficult for the scientific community to ignore even though these data are viewed with skepticism about their scientific validity. In this Special Issue, we seek to engage with scholars to better understand the possibilities, opportunities, and limitations of crowdsourced urban data. We therefore invite manuscript submissions on theoretical and empirical research on a range of themes related to crowdsourced data, including, but not limited to:

analytics
validation
visualization
ethics
accessibility
content analysis
uncertainty

Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Wentz
Lindsey Conrow
Heather Fischer
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Urban Science is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.