Tagging Banksy: using geographic profiling to investigate a modern art mystery
By MV Hauge, Mark D. Stevenson, D. Rossmo, SC Le Comber, Michelle V. Hauge, S. L. Comber. 2016
The pseudonymous artist Banksy is one of the UK’s most successful contemporary artists, but his identity remains a mystery. Here, we use a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model of geographic profiling, a mathematical technique developed in criminology and finding increasing application within ecology and epidemiology, to analyse the spatial patterns of Banksy artworks in Bristol and London. The model takes as input the locations of these artworks, and calculates the probability of ‘offender’ residence across the study area. Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy. More broadly, these results support previous suggestions that analysis of minor terrorism-related acts (e.g., graffiti) could be used to help locate terrorist bases before more serious incidents occur, and provides a fascinating example of the application of the model to a complex, real-world problem.
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Citations in the corpus
- Critical data studies: An introduction (2016, background): “There is evidence that data are surreptitiously extracted from data subjects (Hauge et al., 2016; Metcalf and Crawford, 2016), hijacked to serve agendas that benefit research and industry (Ioannidis, 2005, 2016), and compromised by the interests of not only powerful business organizations but also h”
- Where are human subjects in Big Data research? The emerging ethics divide (2016, background): “But for our purposes, we will only focus on the ‘‘ethical note’’ that appeared at the end of the article: ‘‘the authors are aware of, and respectful of, the privacy of [subject name removed] and his relatives and have thus only used data in the public domain’’ (Hauge et al., 2016: 5).”