Andrea Ballatore (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Data Science at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He directs the Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab, which leverages geographic data science and GIS to study cultural institutions, industries, and audiences, providing insights into how and where culture is produced, accessed, and experienced.

His lab’s current work examines how spatial data can help understand cultural patterns and dynamics, including the geographic distribution of cultural institutions and creative industries, the role of geographic user-generated content from social media in urban analytics and planning, and geo-visualisation for the digital humanities. His research has led to over 60 peer-reviewed publications and numerous collaborative projects with academic and non-academic partners, receiving more than £1.2 million in competitive funding from sources such as the AHRC, Ordnance Survey, and Facebook Research.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and its Geographic Information Science Research Group, a member of the Computational Humanities Research Group at King’s College London, and a member of the Mapping Museums Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. From 2016 to 2021, he was a Lecturer in Geographic Data Science at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to that, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2013, he completed a PhD in Computer Science at University College Dublin, focusing on spatial user-generated content.

His lab’s website and blog are available at https://aballatore.space.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Cultural Geo-Analytics: leverages geographic information systems (GIS) to investigate the socio-spatial aspects of cultural production and consumption, analysing how cultural objects—such as museum collections, books, maps, films, and songs—are geographically distributed and how they flow across different regions. It examines the dynamics of museums, cultural institutions, heritage, and creative industries, investigating their impact on cultural production, audience engagement, and regional economies.
• Digital Geographies: explores how digital platforms, including web maps, apps, search engines, and social media, influence perceptions and interactions with places. His work employs data analytics to study online communication patterns and location-based behaviours, using datasets like social media posts, Google searches, and online advertisements.
• Spatial Digital Humanities: develops GIS-based visualisation techniques and interactive tools to investigate spatial and temporal processes in disciplines such as history, heritage studies, film studies, and museology, providing new ways to understand and represent cultural and historical phenomena.

As a geographic data scientist, he is keen to supervise PhD students working on quantitative and computational methods at the intersection of geography, GIS, cultural and creative industries, cartography, museum studies, and media studies. He particularly welcomes applications from students eager to develop their data science skills within these domains.

Selected Publications

• Ballatore, Andrea, and Fiona Candlin. ‘A Geography of UK Museums’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 48, no. 1 (2023): 213–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12578.
• Ballatore, Andrea, Scott Rodgers, Liam McLoughlin, and Susan Moore. ‘Facebook City: Place-Named Groups as Urban Communication Infrastructure in Greater London’. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2 January 2024, 23998083231224136. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083231224136.
• Ballatore, Andrea, Valeri Katerinchuk, Alexandra Poulovassilis, and Peter T. Wood. ‘Tracking Museums’ Online Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study in Museum Analytics’. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 17, no. 1 (2024): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/362716.
• Ballatore, Andrea, Stefano Cavazzi, and Jeremy Morley. ‘The Context of Outdoor Walking: A Classification of User‐generated Routes’. The Geographical Journal 189, no. 3 (2023): 485–500. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12511.
• De Sabbata, Stefano, Andrea Ballatore, Harvey J. Miller, Renée Sieber, Ivan Tyukin, and Godwin Yeboah. ‘GeoAI in Urban Analytics’. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 37, no. 12 (2023): 2455–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2023.2279978.
• Ballatore, Andrea, and Stefano De Sabbata. ‘Los Angeles as a Digital Place: The Geographies of User-Generated Content’. Transactions in GIS 24, no. 4 (2020): 880–902.

See more of Dr Andrea Ballatore's publications

Teaching

I have more than 15 years of experience as a geographic data scientist in both industry and academia. I teach a range of topics, including geographic information systems, cartography, databases, information visualisation, web technologies and design, statistics, and quantitative methods for the social sciences and the humanities. I also teach topics related to critical cartography, science & technology studies, and virtual reality.