Our Infographics won the Oxtalent Award

I'm happy to report that Scott Hale and I won two of the University of Oxford's "OxTalent" awards yesterday for our work submitted in the Research Infographics category. The awards are given out each year to faculty and students at Oxford for innovative research and outreach strategies. There were a range of brilliant tools, graphics, and projects receiving awards and I honoured that our work was part of the mix. Will Hutton was also on hand to speak to us about transformative technology and innovation. 

I submitted a graphic that was created with Monica Stephens and Scott Hale as part of our Geographies of Knowledge publication (available as a PDF in English or German or a free iBook). The graphic visualises the distinct geographies of knowledge in Wikipedia. The graphic won "best infographic" in the competition.

Scott also won the "best student infographic" category with his beautiful visualisation of cross-linking in the blogosphere after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake. 

You can see other also check out other examples of work we have been doing on the OII's data visualization site or, of course, this blog. 

Proposals for the Knight News Challenge

I just submitted two proposals to the Knight News Challenge, which is running a competition to look  "for new ways of collecting, understanding, visualizing and helping the public use the large amounts of information generated each day."

The proposals that I submitted are:

• Mapping Wikipedia: Understanding Uneven Geographies project aims to create interactive visualisations of Wikipedia that promote participation from under-represented cultures, inform researchers and journalists, and fascinate a general audience. We are building on our existing prototype so that we can ultimately create an easy-to-use tool to visualise Wikipedia's biases and geographies.

• Wikichains: Encouraging Ethical Consumption through Open and Transparent Data project intends to build a user-generated platform that allows people to better understand the histories and geographies of the things that they buy. We plan to employ Semantic Mediawiki technology and multi-platform mobile apps to build an open and free wiki allowing people to share information about any aspect of any commodity chain of any product. It will allow people to make more informed ethical and political decisions about how they spend their money. 

Please check them out,  comment on them, reblog them, and of course 'like' them. Thanks!

We won Educational Institution of the Year at Wikimedia UK's Annual Conference!

I'm happy to report that the Oxford Internet Institute has won Wikimedia UK's Educational Institution of the Year award.

The award is in recognition of some of the work that I've been doing with Bernie Hogan, Ahmed Medhat, Scott Hale, Monica Stephens, and Gavin Baily. We are broadly interested in understanding issues of voice, representation, and participation in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great at showing and telling us what it knows, but not great at communicating what it doesn't. We have put a lot of effort into communicating these gaps and absences and hope that they have been useful to anyone who uses or edits the encyclopaedia. I'd like to thank Wikimedia UK for recognising our work, and I hope that our research continues to be useful and informative to the Wikipedia community.


Some links to our relevant work:

• Many many maps of Wikipedia
• An interactive map of Wikipedia
• An interactive network diagram of Wikipedia
• The OII's Wikipedia research page
• Our Wikipedia is the Middle East and North Africa research page

New paper - Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code

I am very happy to report that a paper that I have been working on with Matt Zook and Andrew Boulton has just been accepted for publication in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The paper is titled Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code and the abstract is below:

With the increasing prevalence of both geographic information, and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities,’ this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmentations matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised, and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Please get in touch if you would like me to email you a pre-publication version of the manuscript (or if you have any questions or comments). 

(and in the spirit of celebration and Internet-related awesomeness, here are some cats playing ping-pong)

More Digital Divisions of Labour: a comparison of English and Arabic Wikipedias

A few weeks ago, I posted a map comparing English and French Wikipedias. We, perhaps unsurprisingly, found that there was more written in French about much of the Francophone world, more written in English about the Anglophone world, and then more written in English about almost everywhere else.  

What happens though if we compare English and Arabic Wikipedias?

What we see is that there is only one country in the world (Syria) that is layered with more content in Arabic than in English. This might not be unexpected to people who know about the paucity of information in Arabic Wikipedia, but it is still worth pointing out that countries like Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE all have more English-language than Arabic-language material written about them.

For comparison the top 5 countries in terms of content Arabic and English Wikipedia are:

Arabic: (1) USA; (2) Spain; (3) Russia; (4) United Kingdom; (5) France
English: (1) USA; (2) United Kingdom; (3) Poland; (4) France; (5) Canada

What does this all tell us? First, there just aren't that many editors to the Arabic Wikipedia and these data are likely a good reflection of that fact. Second, there also aren't that many edits that come from the Middle East or North Africa (see also this post) - so this also helps to explain why there is more Arabic content about Spain or Russia than Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

So, again, we're seeing digital divisions of labour reproducing distinct layers, practices, and augmentations of place.


See also: all the other posts about the geographies of Wikipedia

We found love in a coded space

"I am longing, shocking and unequal. Also imminent and square. I am lost."

These are the words of @shipadrift - a virtual floating boat that navigates the intersections between the material and virtual palimpsests that make up our being-in-the-world. If you haven't yet seen the project, I highly recommend you check out both the ship's current material/virtual location and its travel narrative published through a Twitter account.

The way the project works is that the ship's direction and speed are calculated based on a wind speeds in London: allowing the ship to always have movement and position in material space. This is supplemented by scraping all of the augmented layers of place that exist over the ship's particular location: Wikipedia articles, personal ads, photographs, etc. The project is simply brilliant and I can't think of a better way to visualise and explain the digital augmentations of our planet.

I actually learnt about this project recently thanks to a video sent to me by Martin Dodge. The talk, by James Bridle, discusses the 'shipadrift' project, but also delves more broadly into what it means to live in co-created spaces; spaces that we share with bots; hybrid spaces that are shared between our physical presences, our imaginations, and the broader network. There are a lot of parallels here to some of the work that Matt Zook and I have been doing on augmented realities, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have been doing into code/spaces, and Stuart Geiger has been doing into the lives of bots. Bridle nicely brings all of these themes together and I definitely suggest that you check out his talk below: