Julian Holman

Dynastes tityus (eastern Hercules beetles)

I’m Julian. I live in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and am a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Geography & Environmental Systems MS & BA + GIS Certificate with Distinction).

During my time as an undergraduate, I worked as a research assistant on various projects and served as a lab proctor; as a graduate student I mentored undergrads in my advisor (Dr. Chris Hawn)’s lab. I also held several internships, including at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Assessment Division.

My expertise is in data science (GIS, statistics, AI/ML), but I also have background in social science, public policy, and biology.

selected publications

Sentiment Analysis of Human-Arthropod Interactions

Julian A. Holman

University of Maryland Baltimore County Theses and Dissertations, 2021

Abs HTML Code

Humans’ intense fear of spiders is well-known. There are studies that show it exists and theories on why. However, the body of work on how warranted this fear is based on potential harm by spiders is much smaller. Few species pose real danger to humans relative to all worldwide and this handful is not globally distributed. Additionally, due to lacking funding/researchers, there is little knowledge on ranges and distributions of spiders compared to locations of people that fear them. The proliferation of social media provides new opportunities for mapping and opinion data collection. Methods were synthesized to collect and analyze point data geolocated inside the United States from Twitter (Chapter 2) and iNaturalist (Chapter 3). Literature was reviewed to find which spiders are medically-important: those generally agreed upon by scientists to have venom likely to harm humans. Data were normalized to account for spatial userbase differences. Most tweets about spiders in the US were posted from major cities during peak spider activity in late spring/early fall. However, geographic locations of these online activities and sentiment of relevant tweets had little overlap with ranges and distributions of spiders that could actually harm them. This implies that many people discuss spiders, often negatively, regardless of their likelihood of encountering any of medical importance. Prior to this research, there has not been a spatially-explicit arachnophobia test. This methodological synthesis constitutes a new paradigm for creating estimate species maps and comparison to opinion data, expanding public outreach and conservation possibilities.