William Payne

About William Payne

I use qualitative and quantitative methods to study the relationship between geospatial technologies and urban inequality. I teach students how to acquire, clean, analyze, and visualize spatial data to address issues like housing justice and the climate crisis. I also make open-source tools for spatial data visualization and computational research.

Areas of Expertise

Technology, Society and Analytical Methods

Selected Publications

• Payne, Will B. “Review Bombing the Smart City: Contested Political Speech on Local Review Platforms,” Big Data & Society. (2024).
• Deitz, Shiloh, Will B. Payne, Eric Seymour, Kathe Newman, and Lauren Nolan. “Local Landscapes of Assisted Housing: Reconciling Overlapping and Imprecise Administrative Data for Research Purposes,” Cityscape. (2024).
• Payne, Will B. & Evangeline McGlynn. “Relational Reprojection Platform: Non-linear distance transformations of spatial data in R,” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (2023).
• Payne, Will B., Lauren Nolan, and Eric Seymour. “When a City isn’t a City: Aggregating Data from the Picture of Subsidized Households to the Municipal Scale for Research Purposes,” Cityscape (2023).

Recent Courses Taught

• 591: Introduction to GIS
• 592: Topics in GIS
• 595: Command-Line GIS