Mapping Arabic Wikipedia

As part of an IDRC-funded multi-year project to understand local knowledge production on Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa, we plan to release our initial results on this blog.

In the project, we ask three key questions about Wikipedia in the region:

1) What is the geography of articles in the Middle East and North Africa, and how does this compare to the rest of the world? (we are also asking similar questions within the contexts of East Africa. This might mean that we occasionally mix some of our data from the two regions (as we do in the maps below)).

2) Do local authors in the region comprise disproportionally fewer of the contributions to articles about the region?

3) Are the contributions of local contributors undervalued?

The two maps below are the first in our series and depict the total number of Arabic articles in Wikipedia throughout the region as well as the number of Arabic articles per square kilometre (actually every 1000 km²).

The data were derived from the Wikimedia Foundation's regular XML dumps of the Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, English, French and Hebrew Wikipedias in March 2011.  The article source was analysed coordinate templates or recognisable coordinate parameters in other templates, such as "Infobox settlement." In cases where this method didn't reveal any coordinates, we then used interwiki links to obtain coordinates from other language versions of the same article. This gave us a much more useful set of points, particularly for the smaller wikis.

Once this was done, all parameter values were converted to a common format.  Our dataset still contained some coordinates that didn't make much sense for us to keep, notably coordinates of features on the moon and other planets, so we then had to make sure all non-Earthly articles were deleted from the dataset.

The maps above are then the result of counting the number of articles in the top-level subdivision in each of our areas of interest.

When looking at total counts (the top map), you can see that it is Israel/Palestine and parts of the Arabian Peninsula that tend to have the highest counts. However, to get a better sense of the density of layers of information over any given place, it is more useful to look at the number of articles per square kilometre. This is what the second map does.

Here you see that the densest layers of information in Arabic are again over Israel and Palestine. Much of the Mediterranean coast in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria as well as the Nile valley and parts of the UAE also have relatively dense clouds of content about them.

Obviously not all of these places are home to native Arabic speakers, and one of the stories we want to tell in future posts is how the geolinguistic contours of Wikipedia differ over different parts of the region.

We also aim to more closely examine the factors that might explain these uneven geographies of content. Is it internet access? GDP? Education levels? These data will be supplemented by in-depth focus groups that we aim to hold in Egypt and Jordan next year.

These initial mappings provide us with many more questions than answers, but this only means we have much to do over the next few months.

Feel free to comment with any questions or observations.

Augmented realities and uneven geographies

I've finally had a chance to upload my presentation (co-authored with Matt Zook) from last week's iCS-OII symposium. I'd love any feedback on the maps. The paper is still work in progress, but we should have a shareable draft ready in a couple of months (at the latest).

Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice (AAG session preview)

The deadline for submission of papers to the AAG 2012 meeting in New York is now closed, and I'm happy to share details of a session that Matt Zook and I are organising. Titles and names of presenters are below, and I'll upload full abstracts as the conference draws closer.

Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice
Organised by Mark Graham and Matt Zook

The geography of information matters. The ways that we consume, produce, and reproduce codified knowledge shapes how we enact and re-enact the spaces that we live in and move through. Everyday life in urban places is increasingly experienced in conjunction with, and produced by, digital and coded information. While not an all pervasive cloud that is ubiquitously accessible to all, geographically-grounded digital information is imbricated with other sensory inputs into the urban experience. The specific forms that these mediations take - the processes and politics in and through which content and code work socially and spatially – are complex and multifaceted.

The recent rapid growth in both virtual representations of place and the technologies to access those representations from almost anywhere on Earth calls upon scholars to think through the ways in which virtual representations and digital content, in conjunction with myriad digital and non-digital codes, layerings and discourses, are implicated in the production and experiences of place. That is, as indeterminate, unstable, context dependent and multiple realities that emerge and are brought into being through the subjective coming-togethers in time and space of material and virtual experience.

Because the mediations and re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which digital information is fixed, ordered, stabilized, and contested, this session aims to place a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce how place is understood, enacted and experienced.

Talk 1:

Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geolinguistic Contours of the Web

Mark Graham (Oxford); Matt Zook (Kentucky)

Talk 2:
Citizen cartographers: Tools, Challenges, Opportunities
Jens Riegelsberger (Google); Brent Hecht (Northwestern); Matt Simpson (Google); Michelle Lee (Google)

Talk 3: 'Nobody wants to do council estates' - digital divide, spatial justice and outliers
Muki Haklay (UCL)

Talk 4: Spooks, Scholars and Secrets: Geographies of "Volunteered" and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
Jeremy Crampton (Kentucky)

The zombie map of the world

Our zombie map of the world has been featured on the Guardian's data blog. The crucial quote in the article:

The results either provide a rough proxy for the amount of English-language content indexed over our planet, or offer an early warning into the geographies of the impending zombie apocalypse

Check it out below:

Geographies of the World's Knowledge

Our project titled "Geographies of the World's Knowledge" has just gone live on the new Oxford Internet Institute data visualisation site. In the project, we use a range of visualisation techniques to map literacy, Internet penetration, the world's newspapers, academic knowledge, Flickr, Wikipedia, and user-generated content indexed in Google. A sample of three of our maps are below, or a full PDF of the publication can be downloaded at the following link:

Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World's Knowledge. London, Convoco! Edition.

Hiring part-time research assistant to collect and analyse Twitter data

Applications are invited from for a part-time Research Assistant associated with the newly-funded project supported by a John Fell Fund grant: Using the Social Web to Map and Measure Online Cultural Diffusion.

Using data collected from Twitter, the project aims to uncover: (1) where Internet content is being created; (2) whether the amount of content created in different places is changing over time; and (3) how content moves across time and space in the Social Web.

If you have experience writing code to collect/scape online data (especially from Twitter) then please consider applying for the post. Other useful skills include the ability to statistically analyse and geographically visualise data and disseminate academic work.

The position starts in early October and runs for eight months at 0.3 FTE (one and a half days a week) (although there could be a certain amount of flexibility in start dates and working hours).

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. Otherwise, make sure to get your application submitted before Sept. 29. The full link to apply can be found here.

Project Kick-off: The Promises of Fibre-Optic Broadband in East Africa

Today is the official start-date of our project, titled "The Promises of Fibre-Optic Broadband: A Pipeline for Economic Development in East Africa?" The thirty-month project is framed by the recent landing of a series of fibre-optic cables into East Africa. Before the construction of these connections, East Africa was the world‟s last major region without fibre-optic broadband Internet access, and until the summer of 2009 had been forced to rely on slow and costly satellite connections for access. However, after years of work and massive investment, the region is (in theory) ready to take advantage of much faster Internet speeds and much lower prices.

Politicians and commentators from around the world have hailed the potential of the Internet to spark economic development and allow East African businesses and entrepreneurs to market their strengths unhindered by many of the previous limiting effects of distance. However, these projections are often made in the absence of data about current East African communications practices. This project therefore aims to examine the changing communications ecology and the effects of the region‟s newfound connectivity.

Employing case-studies in two East African countries (Kenya and Rwanda), this project examines the expectations and stated potentials of broadband Internet and compares those expectations to on-the-ground effects that broadband connectivity is having in three economic sectors: tea production (a core commodity-based export- oriented industry in both countries), ecotourism (a key element of the tourism industry in East Africa) and business process outsourcing (an emerging growth industry in both countries producing intangible products and services).

The project is based at the University of Oxford, with co-investigators based at the University of Nairobi and the National University of Rwanda. Given the diverse nature of the participants, I'd like to use this opportunity to introduce our team:

Oxford Team

Mark Graham is primary investigator of the project and is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He is particularly interested in the multiplicity of attempts to implement development and reduce a 'digital divide' by altering relative economic distance and reconfiguring commodity chains in places on the global periphery. He also has a longstanding interest in understanding the geographies of the Internet and the ways in which digital representations of urban environments have the power to redefine, reconfigure, and reorder the cities that they represent. His most recent publications can be accessed at this link.

Laura Mann will be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (starting Oct 1) and will play a key role in managing the project, conducting fieldwork, analysing the results and disseminating our findings. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, finalising her thesis on the liberalisation and globalisation of the Sudanese labour market. Prior to her work on Sudan, Laura worked as a media manager for an Egyptian public relations company and as a research assistant to the Population Council in Cairo. Her own research focuses on theories of communication in market economies and how these relate to the experience of liberalization for individuals involved in 'markets' on the ground. In particular, she is interested in how discourses about social networks and ICT have changed the construction and evolution of markets in Africa and the Middle East.

Nairobi Team

Tim Waema is a Co-investigator in the project and is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Informatics in the University of Nairobi. He lectures and does research in a variety of areas in Information Systems. Tim has a wide range of experience in consultancy in many areas of ICT and management, including strategic planning at both corporate and ICT levels, telecommunications, information systems assessment, ICT systems development and implementation, project management, change management, results-based management, and ICTs and national socio-economic development.

Charles Katua is a Research Assistant based at the University of Nairobi. Charles was previously a Software Implementer and System Developer and graduated with a Master of Science in Information Systems from the University of Nairobi.

Butare Team

Felix Akorli is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Applied Science at the National University of Rwanda. He is the coordinator of the MSc in ICT program at NUR. Felix has previously coordinated the Gasabo District Digital Community Network project funded under the Sixth Framework Programme of Research of the European Commission and worked as a lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana.

Claude Bizimana is a Research Assistant based at the National University of Rwanda. Claude has an MSc in Agricultural Economics from the University of Natal and a BSc in Economics from the National University of Rwanda. He has also taken PhD preliminary courses from the Development Research Institute at Tilburg University and has consulted for the World Bank, World Vision, and the Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture.


We all plan to provide regular updates on the project via this blog and would welcome any comments, suggestions and questions at any point in the project.

Finally, we would like to give thanks to support received from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the British Academy and the John Fell Fund.