Zero Geography

Oxford seminar series: Media and Governance in Developing Countries: Networks of Power and Strategic Narratives

2012-01-16T13:30:00.000Z

My friend Iginio Gagliardone is organising a seminar series on media and governance in developing countries. The talks look great, and I'd encourage anyone in the area to come along.

Wednesdays – 17:00-18:30 – Seminar Room D – Social Science Building – Manor Road, Oxford

This seminar series explores the role the media play as political actors in developing countries and fragile states. It gathers scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how old and new media are used to support different political agenda: from foreign countries trying to win the hearts and minds of a local population to local governments aiming at increasing their ability to communicate with, but also exercise control over, their citizens. Particular attention will be paid to understanding how flows of information can be mapped in contexts characterized by an increasing media density, resulting from the liberalization of the airwaves, the diffusion of mobile phones and new media, and the persistence of traditional modes of communication.

The seminar series is part of a year-long programme of events organized by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR) at the University of Cambridge, the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Politics (PCMLP), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford and the Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP) at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Week 2

Wed 25 January

The Use of ICTs for Political Mobilization and Participation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Round Table: Dr Sharath Srinivasan, Dr Florence Brisset-Foucault, University of Cambridge, Dr Iginio Gagliardone, University of Oxford

Week 3

Wed 1 February

The eParticipation Ecology of Kenya

Dr Vincenzo Cavallo, Cultural Video Foundation, Nairobi

Week 4

Wed 8 February

The Conditions of Strategic Narrative Effectiveness: Infrastructure, Intention, Experience

Dr Ben O’Loughlin, Royal Holloway, University of London

Week 5

Wed 15 February

China's International Outreach: Soft Power and the Soft Use of Power

Professor Gary Rawnsley, University of Leeds

Week 6

Wed 22 February

Broadcasting the State: Tribe, Citizenship and the Politics of Radio Drama in Afghanistan

Professor Marie Gillespie, Open University

Week 7

Wed 29 February

An Anthropological Analysis of the Use of the Media for Political Mobilization

Dr John Postill, Sheffield Hallam University

All are welcome, please email iginio.gagliardone@csls.ox.ac.uk for further information

Mapping Wikipedia Article Quality in the Middle East

2012-01-05T12:00:00.000Z

"Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases" - John Wilbanks

Few would disagree with the above quote, but a key issue is that the production of knowledge is far from evenly distributed. The maps below visualise article length of Wikipedia articles (in English) about the Middle East. The first graphic shows a few unexpected patterns.

First, we actually don't see that many articles created about the region - compared to content created about many other parts of the planet.

Also noticeable is the fact that we see a thick layer of information that has been created over most of Azerbaijan. As mentioned in a post that I wrote a few weeks ago, Azerbaijan has the lowest average word count per article out of any country in the world (159 words per article). This is most likely the case because of both the thousands of stubs that have been created in the country (i.e. articles containing little or no content) and the fact that there are only very few articles containing a lot of text in the country.

Looking at non-stubs, we see clusters of content in many of the large cities on the Persian Gulf (e.g. Kuwait City, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai) and an even bigger cluster of articles over Sana'a in Yemen. A series of relatively long articles about places in Iraq are also noticeable along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

But maybe the most visible cluster of user-generated information sits over Israel and the Palestinian Territories in the far-western side of the map. There are significantly more high-quality (i.e. long) articles about that area than the rest of the region.

The cluster of information over Israel and the Palestinian Territories can be even more clearly seen in the map above. Amazingly, content about Cairo - the Middle East's largest city - is barely noticeable compared to the glowing dots that represent information that has been created about the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.

Wikipedia Article Quality in Africa

2012-01-03T12:00:00.000Z

Out of all of the parts of the world in which we've looked at the geographies of Wikipedia articles, it is Africa that is characterised by some of the most interesting patterns.

The most obvious fact is that there is simply a lack of information about much of the continent. The glow of content in Southern Europe at the top of the map stands in stark contrast the absence of any information about most parts of Africa.

Regional differences are then apparent in Africa. Articles within Madagascar and Ethiopia tend to be quite long; whereas those about Tanzania and Algeria are on average much shorter.

The reasons for these differences are unclear. It is doubtful that features, places and events in Ethiopia in need of more detailed description than those in South Africa or Ghana. I'm also not convinced that Ugandans or the Malagasy are more verbose than Tanzanians and Kenyans.

How are these regional differences then be explained? It is likely that (as we've seen before), regional patterns can largely be explained by a few diligent editors that have an interest in describing certain parts of the world.

But how do we move towards encouraging participation from and about the parts of the continent that are left out of these virtual representations? Visualising the presences and absences of information and knowledge is obviously the first step: allowing people to see what is, and isn't, represented.

After that, there is also a clear need for plans like Wikimedia's new collaboration with the Qatar Foundation in order to put into place concrete policies and strategies that will boost content. Our team is also beginning a similar initiative that will start with two workshops in April 2012 (in Cairo and Amman). The workshops will bring together local Wikipedians and allow us to understand the most significant barriers contributors face to creating content about their cities, regions and countries. I'll post more details about the workshops on this blog as we begin to finalise our schedules and strategies.

Wikipedia Article Quality in East Asia

2011-12-26T13:00:00.000Z

The map below visualises the article length of every English-language Wikipedia article in Japan, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and eastern China.

It is Japan that really stands out on this map. The country glows with content in contrast to its neighbours which have much sparser layers of information defining them. The yellow dots in linear patterns that crisscross the country suggest that some diligent editors have been creating a lots of short articles about the entirety of the Japanese railway system (e.g. the list of every station in the country).

Even ignoring the prominence of information about the Japanese rail system on the map, you can see that the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan region is represented by a thick cloud of information that is much broader than the equivalent layers of articles about Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Some of this can be explained because Tokyo is a larger city, but it also remains that there is simply more information created about Japan than any other country in the region.

As always, more maps soon...

Hilary Term "Society and the Internet" lecture series (open to the public)

2011-12-19T20:51:00.003Z

I am happy to be hosting the next batch of talks in the Oxford Internet Institute's "Society and the Internet" lecture series. The series of lectures run every Tuesday afternoon at 4pm and bring together the most important and ground-breaking scholarship produced by OII faculty, visitors and associates.

Anyone is welcome to attend. Please just click on the individual links below for abstracts and sign-up details.

Hilary 2012

17^th Jan: Laura Mann: "Information Technologies and Marginalization in African Market Economies"
24^th Jan: Grant Blank and William Dutton: "Next Generation Internet Users: Digital Divides, Choices, and Inequalities"

31^st Jan: Bernie Hogan: "Online Social Networks and Everyday Life"

7^th Feb: Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon: "Online Networks and Bottom-Up Politics"

14^th Feb: Greg Taylor: "The Attention Economy and the Economics of Search"

21^st Feb: Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder: "New Threads in the Global Web of Knowledge"

28^th Feb: Yorick Wilks: "The Internet, Web, and Beyond"

6^th Mar: Miriyam Aoragh: "Constructing Identity: Palestine Online"

Technology as an Agent of Economic and Social Change in Africa? Connecting Historical and Contemporary Debates (call for participation)

2011-12-19T20:19:00.000Z

Call for participation

CAS@50 : Cutting Edges and Retrospectives,
Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh
6th June 2012 09:00 – 8th June 2012

This panel aims to address some of the ahistoricity of the Information and Communication Technologies for Development field (ICT4D). It does so by focusing on experienced, enacted, and imagined changes in African economic relationships and positionalities due to technologies of connectivity in a contemporary and historical perspective.

ICT4D is a term used to denote a collection of activities that have framed electronic technologies as being useful for socio-economic development. Such technologies (and technologically mediated practices) may incorporate computers, mobile phones and the Internet, and may be used for a variety of developmental ends including health, education and economic activities. Much of the ICT4D literature tends to depict these technologies as ‘revolutionary’ and frames the changes that they engender as unique to our current age. This outlook neglects the longer history of the notion that economies in Africa can be ‘revolutionised’ through technologies – ideas which have been seminal both to the ‘civilising missions’ of the European colonial empires and in the development programmes of colonial and post-colonial states.

This dialogue between historical and contemporary perspectives has a number of approaches and theories to draw upon, including among others Kapil Raj’s ideas about ‘Relocating Modern Science’, Helen Tilley’s notion of ‘Africa as a Living Laboratory’, David Edgerton’s use orientated approach to technological development and Timothy Mitchell’s contributions to post-colonial theory. What these approaches have in common is that they forcefully challenge any simplistic notion of technological diffusion and economic development. As Timothy Mitchell writes, "the practices that form the economy operate, in part, to establish equivalences, contain circulations, identify social actors or agents, make quantities and performances measurable, and designate relations of control and command". This panel will use these theories as building blocks on which to understand how technological change reshapes our understandings about how the economy operates, the way in which the economy is measured and the way in which economic space is territorialised, both socially and spatially. It will therefore look critically at how contemporary ICT diffusion compare with earlier technological and economic ‘revolutions’.

Themes may include:

past and current aspects of control over and use of new technologies of connectivity
the relations between newly introduced technologies and existing technologies and material culture
shifting perceptions of the benefits and beneficiaries of new technologies
patterns of communication and imagined social, economic and political identities within, between and beyond African border
changing ideas and conceptualisations of technology as a driver of economic change and development
comparative studies of different forms of technologies in relation to economic development and economic theory
the role of technologies in the territorialization and de-territorialization of economic space
shifting roles of state and non-state agents in contemporary ICT4D and its historical predecessors
the diffusion of technology as a justification of wider political or social projects

In order to best provoke discussion, we would like participants to prepare short papers (4-5000 words) that will be circulated ahead of time and to prepare short presentations (5-10 minutes) so as to maximize discussion and debate during the roundtable. We ultimately hope for participants to expand their papers into contributions for an edited volume.

Panel Organizers:
Casper Andersen, Department of Culture and Society/Aarhus University, Laura Mann and Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute/University of Oxford

If you are interested in taking part, please send abstracts to Laura Mann (lauramann82@gmail.com) by February 31st, 2012.

Article Quality in English Wikipedia

2011-12-10T17:14:00.000Z

Expanding on the maps of Wikipedia quality (i.e. the maps of South Asia and the Swahili version of Wikipedia) posted earlier on this blog, I want to offer a visualisation of all articles on the planet shaded according to the number of words in each article. In the map below, yellow dots represent the location of relatively short articles (such as the "Jericho Tavern") in the English version of Wikipedia, while red dots indicate the location of relatively long articles (for instance, "Penzance"). A high-res version is also available here (I highly recommend downloading it and exploring in some detail).

Interesting patterns emerge: the average word length of articles in the US is 750, while many European countries have lower means: e.g. Italy (550), Germany (439), Spain (397), France (260), and Poland (233). But it is also noteworthy that a few European countries do have means more similar to the US. Articles in the UK and Ireland they average 687 and 749 words respectively. The immediate conclusion here should be that it is easier for editors in English speaking countries (all of which tend to have high averages) to expand articles than editors in countries in which English isn't the native language.

But the native language of a country clearly isn't the only factor at play. The countries with the highest average word counts to their articles are (this list excludes small islands and city states): Iraq with an average of 1091 words in its 538 articles, the Philippines with an average of 1085 words in 2736 articles, and North Korea with an average of 947 words in its 292 articles.

That's right: out of a list of over 200 countries, North Korea has one of the highest average word counts for its Wikipedia articles!

On the bottom end of the scale we have Azerbaijan (159), Estonia (209), and Kenya (223).

The results tell us that there are apparently a lot of stub articles written about Azerbaijan, Estonia and Kenya (e.g. the Bukhungu stadium). Whereas there are very few stubs in places like Iraq and North Korea: a finding that makes a lot of sense. It must be very hard for English speaking editors to create articles (even stub articles) about things like small stadiums in provincial towns in North Korea and Iraq. But uploading this sort of information about the equivalent type of place in Estonia or Kenya is far less of a problem.

There are clearly a lot of (locally-specific) factors at play here that will explain some of the patterns that we are seeing, and we are looking at how a range of metric (e.g. literacy, computer access etc.) correlate to these data. In the meantime, any thoughts or comments are welcome in the comments field below.

More regional maps will also be up on the blog soon...

The Geography of Wikipedia: Article Quality in South Asia

2011-12-05T22:07:00.001Z

The maps of Wikipedia posted on this blog offered useful insights into the geographies of one of the world's largest platforms for user-generated content. They reiterated some of the massive inequalities in the layers of information that augment our planet.

But not all articles are created equally, and those maps didn't give us much of a sense of the quality of articles. "Quality" is obviously a slippery word and there are infinite ways of measuring it, but for the purposes of this post, we'll crudely use the term to refer to article length (future maps will employ a variety of other metrics).

You see a range of interesting patterns here. Notice the thick cloud of content over Nepal and Kerala (see the map below for a zoomed-in version) ; the glowing lights that signify agglomerations of content over Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, and Karachi; and then, perhaps more unexpectedly, the dense layers (of relatively short articles) over central Sri Lanka and parts of Myanmar. Cities tend to have higher-quality (longer) articles, while surrounding regions have shorter articles. The layer of content blanketing Nepal isn't made up of tiny articles, but closer inspection reveals that many of these pages are also stubs of villages (e.g. Budhakhani).

What explains these patterns of intense focus on some parts of the region and lack of interest in others? This question won't be answered with a simple map, but I would be curious to hear any interpretations of these patterns, so please let me know in the comments section below if you have any thoughts about the graphic. I'm also happy to create either a higher-res version or larger-scale maps zoomed into specific parts of the region if anyone has any requests.

Drilling down into maps of Swahili Wikipedia

2011-11-30T19:55:00.001Z

The global scale map of Swahili Wikipedia posted on this blog a few weeks ago (also reproduced below) sparked a lot of discussion about what exactly was going on in Turkey. There aren't many articles in the Swahili version of Wikipedia. But, of the articles that have been written, it seems that people really have a lot to say about Turkey.

However, that map only tells part of the story. All articles are treated equally and represented by bright yellow dots. What if we instead shade each article by the number of words that it contains?

The map above tells quite a different story. We see that the great mass of Swahili-language articles about Turkey are almost all stubs. In fact it is likely that most of these entries were created by one very committed Tanzanian editor.

Interestingly, the map at the top didn't spark much debate about why so many Swahili articles have been written about Western Europe. Likely because most of us are simply used to these sorts of North-South informational inequalities.

Another thing that we notice is the cluster of articles in continental Europe (in particular Belgium and the Netherlands) that each contain hundreds of words (indicating that few of them are stubs).

Also worth pointing out is the fact that once you filter out all of the relatively short articles (as in the map above), you see that the Swahili Wikipedia has a core focus on East Africa (as well as Africa more broadly) and England (and to some degree, Western Europe more broadly).

Article length is obviously only one measure of quality, and we've pulled out a range of other metrics such as number of references, images, hyperlinks, contributors and many many other things that we'll be sharing over the next few months.

Ultimately, all of these metrics allow us to get beyond the (very important) question of which parts of our planet are being annotated, and move towards asking how they are being represented.

AAG session: Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice - schedule announced

2011-11-19T10:32:00.001Z

The Association of American Geographers hasjust released the preliminary program for the 2012 Annual Meeting in New York.

Below are the details of the session that Iam co-organising with Matt Zook. The good news is that it is on a Saturday (Feb25, 2012) and we have some great talks lined up for the session. The bad newsis that it is at 8am. We hope that the interesting abstracts below are stillappealing enough for you to brave the early morning start.

Session: Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice

Saturday, 2/25/2012,from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Regent Parlor, Second Floor, Hilton New York City

8:00am Creating an image: Cape Town's tour operators' self-representation on the Web
Bjorn Surborg (Trinity College Dublin)

This paper investigates which electronic media are utilised by tour operators and other actors in the South African tourism sector to gain access to potential clients and how the content is chosen, generated and placed. The web sites of tour operators, hotels or official tourism promotion agencies are often a visitor's first experience with a new a place, but there are increasingly many diverse choices for gaining access to place based information through social media (e.g. Facebook), map sites (e.g. Google maps, including street view), travellers' blogs and others. These are relatively new ways of communicating an image of a place, but in which ways have these new information and communication technologies (ICTs) changed the perception of a place and the way in which it is reproduced? Based on a survey amongst tour operators in Cape Town, South Africa, the paper will explore, if those providing content cater towards the stereotypes and pre-conceived images of Africa or if there is a conscious attempt to provide a more nuanced picture, especially given the diverse independent sources of information that potential tourists can access parallel to a tour operator's web-site. While the paper will focus on content providers, it will also touch upon the question of what on-line tools are being used by tourists to access information about a place before, during and after a visit.

8:20am Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the Web

Mark Graham (Oxford) and Matt Zook (Kentucky)

Digital geospatialinformation is layered throughout our urban landscapes; it is invisible to thenaked eye, but is a central component of the augmentations and mediations ofplace enabled by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, computers, and otherdigital technologies. We not just produce, access, and use all of thisgeospatial information about place, but also access it whilst we are in thosevery places. Moreover, due to advances in mobile technology, many people nowquite literally have access to this information in the palms of our hands. But far from uniform and ubiquitous, these digital dimensions of placesare fractured along a number of axes such as location, language and socialnetworks.

This paper analyzes how these fractures differ across space and language toboth highlight the differences and begin the process of explaining the factorsbehind them. While some of the disparities conform to longstandingoffline patterns, others highlight the changing fortunes and positions ofplaces in a globalizing economy and highlight the increasingly finer scale ofdifferentiation in which understandings of places are constructed.

8:40am Citizen Cartographers: Tools, Challenges, Opportunities

Jens Riegelsberger (Google), Brent Hecht (Northwestern), Matt Simpson (Google) and Michelle Lee (Google)

Current developmentsin digital cartography closely mirror the evolution of 'citizen journalism'.The rise of social networking, micro-blogging, and mobile phones that double asvideo cameras enabled everyone to act as a journalist - either accidentally bybeing at the right place at the right moment - or by building up an audienceand bypassing traditional media organisations.

In cartography, lay people are now actively participating in the creation ofmaps - a domain that has a long history of being tightly regulated andcontrolled. Today 'citizen cartographers' add points of interest to public mapsusing the contribution features available on many online mapping sites.

There are numerous motivations for these contributions: some may want to showtheir neighbourhood in the best possible light; others may realize that theirprivate annotations can be of use to a wider audience; and others yet may wantto give visibility to areas they feel are not sufficiently represented.

These developments raise questions similar to those that were brought up withthe rise of citizen journalism. Where does this leave the trainedprofessionals, the cartographers? How can, in this new world, quality beassured - and more fundamentally how can it be defined?

A second question is how, as creators of systems that enable 'citizencartography', we communicate the unique qualities of this data, e.g. uncertaintyor potential bias. Are there ways to help contributors avoid bad cartographicchoices or automatically choose good ones for them?

9:00am 'Nobody wants to do council estates' - digital divide, spatial justice and outliers

Muki Haklay (University College London)

The understanding ofthe world through digital representation (digiplace) and VGI is frequentlycarried out with the assumption that these are valid, comprehensive and usefulrepresentations of the world. A common practice throughout the literature onthese issues is to notice the digital divide, and while accepting it as asocial and not natural phenomenon, either ignoring it for the rest of theanalysis or expecting that it will solve itself over time through technologicaldiffusion. The almost deterministic belief in technological diffusion absolvesthe analyst from fully confronting the political implication of the divide.

However, what VGI and social media analysis is revealing is that the digitaldivide is part of deep and growing social inequalities in Western societies.Worse still, digiplace amplifies and strengthen them.

In digiplace the wealthy, powerful, educated and mostly male elite is amplifiedthrough multiple digital representations. Moreover, the frequent decision ofalgorithm designers to privilege those who submit more media, and the level of'digital cacophony' that more active contributors are creating mean that a verysmall minority - arguably outliers in every analysis of normal distribution ofhuman activities – are super empowered. Therefore, digiplace powerrelationships are arguably more polarised than outside cyberspace due to thelack of social check and balances. This makes the acceptance of thedisproportional amount of information that these outliers produce as realityhighly questionable.

The paper highlights the mass silencing and call for a more critical engagementwith digiplace and VGI.

9:20am Spooks, Scholars and Secrets: Geographies of"Volunteered" and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)

Jeremy Crampton (Kentucky)

In 2010 for the firsttime ever the USA disclosed its total intelligence budget: $80.1 billion. Bycontrast the Department of Homeland Security budget is $42.6 billion and theState Department $48.9 billion. Intelligence expenditures have more thandoubled since 2001, with $3.5 billion being spent on Iraq intelligence alone.In response the intelligence community (IC) has increasingly exploited opensource or unclassified intelligence (OSINT). It has done this in two ways.First, by extending its tradition of using scholarly scientific sources andexperts, and second, by exploiting the internet and social media.

This paper examines these developments. On the one hand, we need to improve ourunderstanding of the relationship between intelligence and science. Canscholarly work, traditionally open, co-exist with intelligence, traditionallyclosed? Will the IC become more transparent or science less so? Can scholarsexploit "counter-intelligence" such as WikiLeaks?

On the other hand, what are the geographies of the intelligence landscape--the"alternative geography of the United States" (Priest 2010)? How isthe IC exploiting social media and especially the geoweb for intelligence? Doesthis constitute an extension of surveillance into the everyday, an"infra-power" (Foucault 1977), and if so, to what extent is(geographic) information truly "volunteered"? To ask these questionsis to recognize the extent of the information asymmetries of the modernsecurity state: we still know very little about it even as it collects evermore information about us.

Mapping Wikipedia at the global-scale in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew and Persian

2011-11-16T09:00:00.000Z

Building on the maps posted a few days ago which mapped Wikipedia in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Persian and Swahili, I wanted to present a few alternate visualisations of the same data.

In the maps below, the number of articles was grouped by country in order to better understand national-level inequalities in Wikipedia's augmentations of our world. The data were all taken from November 2011 Wikipedia data dumps. Our project team wrote a script to search for coordinate representations in every article (taking into account the language variations between the dumps and the varying ways in which geo-coordinates are expressed). We improved the quality of our coordinates by doing things like eliminating or fixing erroneous coordinates, grabbing coordinates (where sensible) from not just structured infoboxes, and making sure to remove irrelevant coordinates (Wikipedia actually contains a lot of coordinates for extra-terrestrial entities like lunar craters!). We then did some post-processing to make sure each country also contained articles for entities like lighthouses, coastal shipwrecks and piers that sometimes fell just outside of the coastal boundaries of the country-boundary file that we were using.

And after all of that, we're able to tell you how many Wikipedia articles are in each country!

The map above (click the image to enlarge it) displays the number of articles in English. There are a staggering number of articles in the United States (over 180,000 of them) and tens of thousands in many European countries, Japan, Australia and India. As we saw in our last post, there are also far fewer in much of the rest of the world. In fact, there are only a few countries in Africa that contain more than 1000 articles.

Below are the Arabic, French, Hebrew, and Persian Wikipedias. Rather than discussing each individually, I will discuss some key themes at the end of this post.

The most striking pattern that you probably notice in these maps is the significant amount of self- or inward- focus of some languages (including English) (an observation that is supported by the work of Brent Hecht and Darren Gergle). There are more Hebrew articles about Israel, French articles about France, and Persian articles about Iran than anywhere else.

The same pattern, however, doesn't hold true for the Arabic Wikipedia. In fact, in the top-10 list of total number of articles by country in the Arabic version of Wikipedia, there are only two countries (Algeria being 8th on the list and Syria bring 9th) that can be considered to be predominantly Arabic-speaking (the rest of the list is: #1 USA, #2 Spain, #3 Russia, #4 UK, #5 France, #6 Italy, #7 Greece, and #10 Iran).

The lack of focus on, and contributions by, the Arab world is particularly striking in all of these maps. Arabic is the world's fifth most spoken language and yet only has the 25th largest Wikipedia. There are just over 24,000 geotagged Arabic Wikipedia articles whilst there are over 691,000 geotagged articles in English.

The scale of these difference ultimately results in some almost implausible comparisons. For instance, there are more articles in English about North Korea than articles in Arabic about Saudi Arabia, Libya, the UAE and many other countries in the region!

But, perhaps most interesting is the question alluded to above. Why is there such a (relatively) large number of Persian articles about Iran, but so few Arabic articles about places like Saudi Arabia (the country in which more than a quarter of all Arabic edits originate) and the UAE? A key goal of our research project is to answer this very question and better understand the barriers to participation.

In future posts, we'll begin to move beyond these raw data counts and explore patterns of participation and representation in the region. In the meantime, any observations and questions are welcome.

Feodor Vassilyev and Wikipedia's Gender Imbalances

2011-11-13T12:54:00.001Z

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Wikisym 2011 conference and am in the process of writing a conference report with Han-Teng Liao. Doing so made me want to flag up an interesting debate that happened during the meeting.

There has recently been a lot of talk in the media about gender imbalances in Wikipedia (for instance, the often cited statistic that less than 15% of Wikipedia editors are female), and luckily this was also a major theme at the conference. Two papers in particular demonstrated the gender imbalances not only exist, but also significantly influence the types of information that exist in Wikipedia (the papers were titled ‘An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance’ and ‘Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of these imbalances came during a talk by Jen Lowe when she brought up the Wikipedia article on Feodor Vassilyev.

Feodor is apparently notable enough for a Wikipedia article because his wife sets the record for the most children birthed by a single woman. Just to reiterate, it is Mr. Vassilyev and not Mrs. Vassilyev who is deemed notable enough to have a Wikipedia article here!
Given the fact that the Vassilyevs were alive in the eighteenth century, the masculinist biases that shaped how this story was recorded are perhaps not surprising. However, what is more important is for contemporary information creators on Wikipedia to become aware of such biases and actively work to not reproduce them. In other words, while we of course need to make efforts to make Wikipedia editors more representative of the general population, we need to recognise that addressing imbalance is only the first step. The issue is not just a lack of female editors, but also gender biases embedded into the ways in which we discuss and represent subjects in Wikipiedia.

Mapping Wikipedia's augmentations of our planet

2011-11-10T17:46:00.000Z

We all know that Wikipedia is an immense project. It is an incredibly impressive coming-together of human labour on a scale that the world rarely sees. Over the last few years, we've also seen a few maps of the encyclopedia (including my own) which have shown that the project is far from complete (whatever that might mean).

That doesn't mean we should stop mapping the project though, and as part of our efforts to answer the first of our research questions looking at Wikipedia in the Middle East, North Africa, and East Africa, I'll present these global-scale maps of every article in the November 2011 versions of the Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Persian, and Swahili Wikipedias.

First, the English project. This encyclopedia is by far the largest, and currently hosts almost 700,000 geotagged articles (click on the image for a larger and more detailed version):

Each one of these yellow dots represents human effort that has gone into describing some aspect of a place. The density of this layer of information over some parts of the world is astounding. Some of our future posts will look more closely at measures of inequality in Wikipedia, but it is still hard not to be awed by this cloud of information about hundreds of thousands of events and places around the globe.

The French Wikipedia, with almost a quarter of a million geotagged articles, is much smaller than the English version, but nonetheless still another impressive collection of human labour. There are much denser augmentations of information are much denser over some parts of the planet than others, but it remains that there is simply a lot of content about a lot of the world.

However, when looking at some of the smaller Wikipedias like Arabic (and Egyptian Arabic), Hebrew, and Persian, we don't see that same glowing cloud of information over much of the world.

In the maps above we instead saw limited global focus. This is perhaps not that unexpected given the relatively small size of these encyclopedias (in terms of total numbers of geotagged articles, Arabic has 24,000, Hebrew has 15,000, Persian has 21,000, and Egyptian Arabic has only slightly more than 1000 [these are all approximate figures]).

But it remains that if your primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world inevitably looks very different to you than if you were accessing knowledge through the English Wikipedia. There are far more absences and many parts of the world simply don't exist in the representations that are available to you.

However, one thing that should be pointed out are some of the strange patterns on parts of these maps. If you look closely at the Arabic or Persian maps you might see some interesting patterns (for instance look closely at the patterns in the US). You see a similar sort of unexpected spatial distribution of articles in the map of Swahili Wikipedia below (i.e. why are there so many articles in Turkey?). The answer is simply a few dedicated editors creating stub articles about relatively structured topics such as cities in Turkey (in the Swahili Wikipedia) or every county in the US state of Georgia (in the Arabic Wikipedia).

What is perhaps most interesting about the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Swahili Wikipedias is that it isn't the Global North that vanishes from the map. It is rather other parts of the South that become absent: an observation that seem to simply imply an entrenchment and a reproduction of the visibility of the already highly visible.

Cyberspace

2011-11-03T10:42:00.000Z

I've just returned from a conference about Internet unlike any other I've been to before. The London Conference on Cyberspace, organised by William Hague and the Foreign Office, was a meeting that attracted huge names (David Cameron, Joe Biden, Helen Clark, Carl Bildt, Jimmy Wales and many others). The ambitious goal of the meeting was "to develop a better collective understanding of how to protect and preserve the tremendous opportunities that the development of cyberspace offers us all."

The meeting was quite stimulating, and it was interesting to hear people like Cameron and Biden outline their visions for the future of the Internet (even if those visions contradicted some moves by both UK and US governments). But the thing that struck me the most was the constant use of the word 'cyberspace.' People just wouldn't stop saying it.

David Cameron told us that "we can't leave cyberspace wide open to criminals." Joe Biden called it "a new realm." The Russia's Minister for Communications was worried enough that he asked that the Internet be made to respect borders and state sovereignty. Continuing the use of the spatial metaphor, Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, speculated that light would be brought to even the most hidden corners of the Internet by asserting that "there will be no dark spaces for dark acts any more." I could go on with examples, but you probably get the idea.

As I've argued before (in my article on "The Spatialities of the Digital Divide"), the 'cyberspace' metaphor is an inherently geographical concept. It allows the virtual to take on an ontic role. 'Cyberspace,' in this sense, is conceived of asboth an ethereal alternate dimension which is simultaneously infinite andeverywhere (because everyone with an Internet connection can enter), and asfixed in a distinct location, albeit a non-physical one (because despite beinginfinitely accessible all willing participants are thought to arrive into thesame marketspace, civic forum, and social space). 'Cyberspace,' in this sensetruly becomes a global village.

The ontic role assigned to cyberspace is likely also reinforced by the grammatical rules associated with the Internet in the English language. Common prepositions associated with Internet use (e.g. to go to a website, or to get on the Internet) imply a certain spatiality associated with the Internet. In other words, the need to move to a cyberspace that is not spatially proximate to the Internet user. Similarly, it is common practice to treat the word “Internet” as proper noun (hence the capitalization of the word). In doing so, the notion of a singular virtual entity or place is reinforced.

Evenbefore the coining of the term, commentators were speculating thatsynchronous communication technologies like the telegraph would bring humanitytogether in some sort of shared space. For instance, in 1846, in a proposal to connectEuropean and American cities via an Atlantic telegraph, it was stated that oneof the benefits would be the fact that “all of the inhabitants of the earthwould be brought into one intellectual neighbourhood and be at the same timeperfectly freed from those contaminations which might under other circumstancesbe received” (Marvin, 1988: 201). Twelve years later after the completion of the Atlantictelegraph, The Times proclaimed that“the Atlantic is dried up, and we become in reality as well as in wish onecountry” (quoted in Standage, 1998: 80). In the 1960s, MarshallMcLuhan’s philosophy of media posited a future not too different fromproclamations about the power of communication technologies a century earlier.He noted that “electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and“space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously concerns of all other men.It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale...“Time” has ceased, “space”has vanished. We now live in a global village” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 63).

Such ideas were prevalent in the earlydays of the Internet. John Barlow, for example, in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, boldly asserts that“cyberspace does not lie within your borders” and “ours is a world that is botheverywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”

Most of us have moved beyond such ideas and recognise the hybrid and augmented ways in which the internet is embedded into our daily lives. We recognise that there is no singular ontic entity of 'cyberspace' that we can enter into to transcend our material presences. And that is probably why few of us actually imagine a movement into 'cyberspace' when we access Wikipedia, log into Facebook, or watch a video on YouTube. So why do the global leaders present at the London conference insist on using this term that is so rarely used by everyone else? Or more broadly, why do they continue to employ a spatial metaphor to imagine a network?

I suspect that part of the reason lies in the fact that states, and their representatives and leaders, are naturally concerned with unregulated activity that is hard to geographically place. When thinking about warfare, hackers, pornography, fraud, and other threats to the rule of law, it is challenging to fully understand the complex geographies of these processes and practices. It is much easier to imagine that they simply happen 'out there' in Carl Bildt's dark spaces of the Internet.

Another reason is likely the extensive literature on the ‘information revolution’ and the 'networked society.' Most national governments have departments, task forces, plan and policies set up to address issues of digital exclusion. Because of the existence of the ‘global village’ ontology of cyberspace, there is often a pollyannish assumption that once the material ‘digital divide’ is bridged, the many problems attributed to ‘digital divides’ will also vanish. Or, in other words, once people are placed in front of connected terminals, the ‘digital divide’ becomes bridged and the previously disconnected are consequently able to enter 'cyberspace.'

As such, those without access to 'cyberspace' and the ‘global village’ are therefore seen to be segregatedfrom the contemporary socio-economic revolution taking place. This idea of exclusion is powerful, and some, such asformer US secretary of State Colin Powell,and the chief executive of 3Com, have on separate occasions gone so far as toterm this exclusion “digital apartheid.”

In contrast to these imaginations of a digital global village and an ontic entity of 'cyberspace,' my talk at the London conference argued that there isn’t some sort of universallyaccessible cyberspace that we are all brought into once we log onto the Internet. The Internetis not a space, but rather a network that enables selective connections betweenpeople and information. It is a network that is characterized by highly unevengeographies and in many ways has simply reinforced global patterns ofvisibility, representation and voice that we’re used to in the offline world.

Imagining the Internet as a distinct, immaterial, ethereal alternate dimension ultimately makes it more challenging to think through the contingent and grounded ways in which we consume, enact, communicate and create through the Internet. The Internet is characterised by complex spatialities which are challenging to understand and study, but that doesn't give us an excuse to fall back on unhelpful metaphors which ignore the Internet's very real, very material, and very grounded geographies.

London Conference on Cyberspace Presentation

2011-11-01T21:34:00.000Z

"The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed" - William Gibson.

Slides from my talk at the London Conference on Cyberspace are now available below. The session, on "cyberspace and international development," also included talks from Helen Clark (UNDP), Barbara Stocking (Oxfam), Christele Delbe (Vodafone), and Sarah Jordan (Oxfam) and was moderated by Michael Anderson (DFID).

The talk began by arguing that it is important to not forget the revolutionary and empowering promises and potentials of the Internet for the developing world. People use the Internet to notjust non-proximately connect with friends and family, but learn, shareinformation, check market prices, trade, and bypass exploitative economicrelationships.

But it is equally important to remember –first - that despite a rapid growth in internet access for much of the world, mostpeople on our planet are still entirely disconnected. And – second - evenamongst those two billion that are now online, a significant number are stillleft out of global networks, debates and conversations.

This may seem like an odd point to make at a conference with the word "cyberspace" in its title, but there just isn't any sort of universallyaccessible cyberspace that Internet users are transported into. The Internetis not a space, but rather a network that enables selective connections betweenpeople and information. It is a network that is characterized by highly unevengeographies and in many ways has simply reinforced global patterns ofvisibility, representation and voice that we’re used to in the offline world.

The issue isn’t just that some people inthe developing world are disconnected, but also that many of the benefits ofthe Internet don’t automatically arrive into the developing world once Internetconnections do. In other words, while the internet isclearly a pre-requisite for a lot of economic development and participation in the 21st century knowledge economy, it is by no means a determinant.

As always, I'm happy to hear any questions and thoughts on the presentation.

Presentation at the Wikimedia Foundation

2011-10-07T15:00:00.000+01:00

After three days at the Wikisym conference in Mountain View, Han-Teng Liao and I had the opportunity to present our work to members of the Wikimedia foundation in San Francisco.

We'll be working on a Wikisym conference report and sharing that soon, but in the meantime my slidedeck is embedded below:

p.s. we'd both like to thank Wikimedia UK for kindly sponsoring our trip.

Oxford Internet Institute: Society and the Internet Lecture Series

2011-10-05T18:36:00.000+01:00

The Oxford Internet Institute will be hosting the "Society and the Internet" lecture series in the upcoming Michaelmas and Hilary Terms. The series of sixteen lectures that will run every Tuesday afternoon at 4pm will bring together the most important and ground-breaking scholarship produced by OII faculty, visitors and associates.

Anyone is welcome to attend. Please click on the individual links below for abstracts and sign-up details:

Michaelmas 2011

11^th Oct: Bill Dutton: "The New Internet World: Shifting Patterns of Adoption, Attitudes and Behaviour"
18^th Oct: Ralph Schroeder: "Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments"

25^th Oct: Robert Rogers: "Investigating the Risk Factors for Internet Gambling-related Harm"

1^st Nov: Pekka Himanen: "The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age"

8^th Nov: Monica Bulger: title coming soon

15^th Nov: Nic Newman: title coming soon

22^nd Nov: Cristobal Cobo: "Rethinking the Role of the University in the Internet Era"

29^th Nov: Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon: "Online Networks and Bottom Up Politics"

The Hilary term schedule will also be added soon.

Zombies and Massively Multiplayer Augmented Reality games

2011-10-05T06:32:00.001+01:00

Last week I was trying to run away from a horde of zombies. I ran faster than I had ever run before. I ran until my chest hurt and I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. I knew they were close and I knew that if I slowed down they would get me. But the adrenaline and fear kept me moving. It wasn't enough though. I was still miles from home and knew that it was impossible to keep up the pace. There was nowhere to hide and ultimately I had to slow the pace of my sprint. I lost hope; I gave up, and that's when they got me.

This all started when I was running on my typical route: across Oxford's Port Meadow, up the Thames, and then towards the village of Wytham and the forest on the hill behind it. It was a sunny day and a peaceful run. A combination of the music on my smartphone and the sunny weather put me in a great mood, and I easily made it to the forest without thinking about muscle tiredness, warm showers or the pizza waiting for me at home. The way back, however, was much more of a challenge.

On the way home, I activated an app on my phone called Zombie, Run! I boldly set the outbreak level to 'total pandemic' and set the zombie speed to "28 Days Later" (the other options were Night of the Living Dead and Resident Evil) (Wired has an interesting article on zombie speed here for those of you unfamiliar with the finer details of undead taxonomies). This was clearly a mistake.

The app displays a map containing your own position and the location of the zombie horde infesting the space that you're in. Most zombies show up as green icons, but turn red once they notice you. This is when you start getting into trouble.

Once they sense you, you need to run as fast as you can to escape. This wouldn't be a huge problem with normal Romero-style slow zombies. But 28 Days Later speed zombies are an entirely different story: especially when you're faced with a massive outbreak. They will get you.

This playful way of augmenting reality is still in its early stages and could undoubtedly take on a number of exciting forms. There is already a multiplayer option that I haven't had a chance to try yet (why don't I have more smartphone owning zombie obsessed friends who like to run?).

Imagine this sort of platform turned into a massively multiplayer augmented reality role-playing game (MMARRPG - for comparison see also MMORPGs). Games could be organised involving hundreds, or even thousands, of players. Zombie walks that happen in cities around the world are fun enough to attract thousands of participants, and there is no reason why a zombie-themed MMARRPG couldn't also draw huge crowds.

There are interesting possibilities here, and augmented versions of tag, ghost hunting and more traditional role playing are already available. Zombies are clearly only the beginning (or in a different sense I suppose they could also be the end) of a new wave of augmented gaming.

In any case, if you see someone sprinting through the streets, out of breath and clutching a phone, remember that they may well be interacting with something that is innocuously invisible to the naked eye, ephemeral, and comprised of lines of computer code, but ultimately (and terrifyingly) trying to devour their brains.

Mapping Arabic Wikipedia

2011-09-30T22:12:00.001+01:00

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

2011-09-30T15:28:00.000+01:00

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)

2011-09-28T15:00:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-24T18:22:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-12T19:55:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-09T09:38:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-01T19:04:00.009+01:00

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.

Our 'Mapping Marijuana' graphic featured in Wired

2011-08-29T20:25:00.004+01:00

After much hard work by the Floatingsheep team, our map on "The Price of Weed" has been featured in the print version of Wired. Check out the spread below, or head over to floatingsheep for the full article. We're still putting the finishing touches on a related academic paper, but will post a draft version soon.

Global Conference on Economic Geography Wish List

2011-06-27T06:36:00.002+01:00

The Third Global Conference on Economic Geography is being held this week in Seoul, and I'm excited to be participating in the meeting. Following a similar post that Matt Wilson put together for the AAG, I've compiled a wish list of sessions that I hope to attend. Please let me know there is anything that I've overlooked related to development, knowledge, ICTs, social theory, value chains, or clustering. Day 1 is below, and I'll be adding the other days soon…

Wednesday June 29

Clusters and Development Ⅰ | June 29, 8:30-10:00 AM | COEX 318A
Chair: Byung-Min Lee (Konkuk University)
§   Raja Bashir (University of Birmingham) Clusters and economic development advantage in a knowledge-based economy
§   Martin Wrobel (Institute for Employment Research) Do regional clusters and networks protect firms in the German mechanical engineering industry against the fallout of the economic crisis?
§   Younghun Lim (Seoul National University) New industrial development path based on regional policy: a case study on the photonics industry’s growth in Gwangju, Korea

Plenary | Opening / Invited Lecture | June 29, 10:20-11:50 AM | COEX Inter-Continental Hotel Harmony Ballroom
Opening Address: Sam Ock Park (President, Institute of Space & Economy)
Welcome Address: Se-hoon Oh (Mayor, Seoul Metropolitan Government)
Congratulatory Address: Un-Chan Chung (Chair, Commission on Shared Growth for Large and Small Companies, Former Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea)
Invited Lecturer: David Angel (President, Clark University)
§   Strengthening the practice and the profession of economic geography: Where next?

Actors in Innovative Clusters | June 29, 1:30-3:00 PM | COEX 308A
Chair: Javier Revilla Diez (Leibniz University Hannover)
§   Michela Lazzeroni (University of Pisa) and Andrea Piccaluga (Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa) University-industry relations and firms’ performances at regional level: empirical evidence from the Tuscan innovative system in Italy
§   Jerker Moodysson (Lund University) and Lars Coenen (Lund University) Regional innovation systems and institutional transformation: The case of “biorefinery of the future”, North Sweden
§   Wenying Fu (Leibniz University Hannover), Javier Revilla Diez (Leibniz University Hannover) and Daniel Schiller (Leibniz University Hannover) An emerging innovative milieu in the Pearl River Delta, China? The role of social and organizational proximity for product innovation
§   Richard Shearmur (Université du Québec) and David Doloreux (Ottawa University) Collaborative behaviour and the geography of innovation in P-KIBS and T-KIBS

Clusters and Knowledge | June 29, 3:20-4:50 PM | COEX 318A
Chair: Päivi Oinas (University of Turku)
§   Kaiyuan Long (Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development) Collective efficiency and external knowledge search
§   Caterina Marchionni (University of Helsinki) and Päivi Oinas (University of Turku) The explanatory puzzle in the interdisciplinary literature of spatial industrial clustering
§   Eirik Vatne (Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) The spatiality of knowledge flows. Learning and adaptation of process technologies.
§   Veronique Schutjens (Utrecht University), Sierdjan Koster (University of Groningen) and Peter Vaessen (Radboud University Nijmegen) Spin-offs, local knowledge diffusion and cluster policy

The (Re)Production of Difference in Cultural Industries | June 29, 5:10-6:40 PM | COEX 327C
Organizer: Norma Rantisi (Concordia University)
Chair: Sally Weller (Victoria University)
§   Norma Rantisi (Concordia University) Gendering Fashion, Fashioning Fur: The Reproduction of a Gendered Industry in Montreal, Canada
§   Iris Dzudzek (Goethe University Frankfurt) Welcome to DiverCity! Difference and diversity as urban mode of governance and accumulation
§   Lech Suwala (Humboldt-University of Berlin) The production process of cultural creativity from a spatial perspective
§   Dominic Power (Uppsala University) The difference principle? Regions, differentiation and difference machines

Thursday June 30

Agenda 2020: Rethinking Economic Geography ①: Panel Session | June 30, 8:30-10:00 AM | COEX 307A
Organizer: Yuko Aoyama (Clark University) and Dariusz Wójcik (Oxford University)
Chair: Yuko Aoyama (Clark University)
§   Yuko Aoyama (Clark University)
§   Christian Berndt (University of Zurich)
§   Ewald Engelen (University of Amsterdam)
§   Peter Lindner (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
§   Dominic Power (Uppsala University)
§   Matthew Zook (University of Kentucky)
§   Dariusz Wójcik (Oxford University)

Agenda 2020: Rethinking Economic Geography ② | June 30, 10:20-11:50 AM | COEX 307A
Organizer: Yuko Aoyama (Clark University) and Dariusz Wójcik (Oxford University)
Chair: Dariusz Wójcik (University Of Oxford)
§   Andrew Jones (University of London) and James Murphy (Clark University) After relationality: Future directions for economic geography
§   Matthew Zook (University of Kentucky), Dominic Power (Uppsala University) and Yuko Aoyama (Clark University) In defense of the firm: Digital warriors, do-gooders, and reinvention of the firm-centric approach in economic geography
§   Chris Benner (University of California) Creating just growth: Regions, epistemologies and new economic paradigms
§   Stefan Ouma (Goethe University Frankfurt) Creating, maintaining and rethinking global connections: Multinational agrobusiness and the precarious making of agri-export markets in the Global South
§   Dariusz Wójcik (University Of Oxford) Rethinking economic geography after the global financial crisis: Towards a positive and normative agenda

Spatial Aspects of Value Chain | June 30, 1:30-3:00 PM | COEX 308B
Chair: Jerry Patchell (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
§   Jerry Patchell (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) The geographic value cycle
§   Ermann Ulrich (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography) Value in economic geography: considerations on perspectives of subjectivist and consumer-orientated concepts
§   Knut Bjørn Lindkvist (University of Bergen, Finnmark University College) Conventions and value chain development in a Norwegian – Spanish seafood trade
§   Boris Braun (University of Cologne) Environmental governance in global value chains – the example of trade with shrimps from Bangladesh and Indian leather goods

Geography of Knowledge Creation and Diffusion | June 30, 3:20-4:50 PM | COEX 308B
Chair: Johannes Glückler (University of Heidelberg)
§   Johannes Glückler (University of Heidelberg) and Ingmar Hammer (University of Heidelberg) Organized networks and the creation of network goods
§   Alejadro Mercado (Metropolitan Autonomous University) When spatial proximity in clusters is not enough for competitive learning; The segmentation of information flows from multinational corporations among regions
§   Chris Van Egeraat (National University of Ireland) and Declan Curran (Dublin City University) Social networks and actual knowledge flow in the Irish biotech industry
§   Konrad Czapiewski (Polish Academy of Sciences) Channels of knowledge transfer to Polish farmers

Contested Power in Global Supply Chains | June 30, 5:10-6:40 PM | COEX 318C
Organizer: Peter Dannenberg (Humboldt-University of Berlin) and Martin Franz (Philipps-University Marburg)
Chair: Peter Dannenberg (Humboldt-University of Berlin) and Martin Franz (Philipps-University Marburg)
§   Amelie Bernzen (University of Cologne) Impact of institutions on quality management in organic food imports
§   Peter Dannenberg (Humboldt-University of Berlin) The impact of cross regional influences in international value chains – The case of horticultural value chains between Kenya and the EU
§   Martin Franz (Philipps-University Marburg) Resistance and strategic responses in food supply networks: Metro Cash & Carry in Bangalore

Friday July 1

Geography of the Internet and the Mobile | July 1, 8:30-10:00 AM | COEX 308B
Chair: Edward J. Malecki (Ohio State University)
§   Mark Graham (University of Oxford) Broadband internet and expectations of altered development trajectories for Kenya
§   Krzysztof Janc (University of Wrocław) Geography of hyperlinks – local government websites in the region of Lower Silesia, Poland
§   Edward J. Malecki (Ohio State University) Clouds in boxes: The infrastructure of the new internet
§   Gernot Grabher (HafenCity University Hamburg) and Oliver Ibert (Leibniz-Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning) Distance as asset? Knowledge collaboration in hybrid online communities

Hiring a Research Assistant (or Postdoc) to work on a Project to Study the Impact of Broadband Internet in East Africa

2011-06-16T10:48:00.013+01:00

I am currently hiring a 28 month Research Assistant (or Postdoctoral Research Fellow) to work on an ESRC-DFID funded project titled "The Promises of Fibre-Optic Broadband: A Pipeline for Economic Development in East Africa."

Employing case-studies, interviews, surveys and textual analysis in 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, ecotourism, and business process outsourcing.

Applicants should have a graduate or postgraduate qualification in one of the social sciences, experience of social science research, and be willing to conduct extended fieldwork in East Africa. The successful candidate will be able to take a lead in project management, data collection and analysis, and the dissemination of results.

Based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, this position is available from 1st October 2011 for 28 months in the first instance, with the possibility of renewal thereafter funding permitting. It may be possible to hire at Postdoctoral Research Fellow level given the right candidate.

Full job details and online application are available at this link.
Salary £25,751 - £30,747 p.a.
More details about the project available here.

Please share this position widely and feel free to get in touch with any questions about the position or the application procedure.

New publication - Visualizing Global Cyberscapes: Mapping User Generated Placemarks

2011-05-27T16:26:00.004+01:00

A special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology on information technologies and urban networks has just been published. It contains a great series of articles that I'm looking forward to reading. It also includes a paper that I've co-authored with Matt Zook:

Graham, M. and M. Zook. 2011. Visualizing Global Cyberscapes: Mapping User Generated Placemarks. Journal of Urban Technology. 18(1). 115-132.

Call for Papers: Search! Navigating the World’s Information

2011-05-19T14:41:00.005+01:00

Special issue edited by:

Mark Graham (Oxford Internet Institute, Univ. of Oxford)
Ralph Schroeder (Oxford Internet Institute, Univ. of Oxford)
Greg Taylor (Oxford Internet Institute, Univ. of Oxford)

We invite submission of original, unpublished articles for a proposed special themed issue of New Media & Society on the topic of Internet search. Abstracts of 500 words length are invited in the first instance. Selected authors will then be included in a full proposal to be submitted to the editors of New Media & Society. Final papers should be around 8000 words (inclusive of abstract and references) and will be subject to the full New Media & Society review process.

About the Special Issue’s Theme:

Never before have so many people engaged in practices of information search. Hundreds of millions of searches are performed every day through the Internet. Searches connect us to information that helps us find the best route through a city, allows us to learn about a debilitating illness, and links us to videos of cats playing pianos. We can now search for words, numbers, images, videos, pictures, sounds, places, maps, directions, people, stories and products.

Search is a process of separating the visible from the invisible, the relevant from the irrelevant, and the knowable from the unknowable. Search also entails power: the power to access and shape information. Digital searches mediate our interactions with both an enormous, networked store of knowledge, and with the material places that we inhabit. Practices, algorithms, and rules of search govern the content, ideas, places, and opportunities to which users are exposed.

In order to begin a more inter-disciplinary discussion on the role of Internet search in contemporary society, this special issue aims to bring together a range of contributors that analyze how search works from various social science perspectives, including law, geography, political science, sociology of science, and economics. It will bring these to bear on understanding the most significant social, economic, political, geographic and ethical transformations that have been brought about by widespread practices of search. This special issue seeks qualitative and quantitative studies as well as discourse and policy analyses of information and Internet search in the broadest sense. Examples of topical issues in this area include, but are not limited to:

· How is indexing, optimizing, sorting, coding and ranking altering the ways in which we access information?
· How do people, places and groups benefit from a world in which search is a central means of information access, and who is left out of those benefits?
· How does search influence offline interactions?
· Are widespread practices of search facilitating shifts in political, economic and social power?
· How does search shape consumer and producer product market outcomes?
· How does the nature of search shape the competitive landscape of the Internet search industry?
· What are the social implications of the organisation of sponsored search markets?
· Are search engines a force for democratisation?
· What are the subversive potentials and possibilities of search?
· What are the politics of search engine censorship?
· What are the distinct cultural practices and geographic biases of search?

Deadline for abstracts: Jul 20, 2011
Deadline for submission of full papers: Jan 15, 2012

For more information, or to submit an abstract, please contact:

Mark Graham – mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk
Ralph Schroeder – ralph.schroeder@oii.ox.ac.uk
Greg Taylor – greg.taylor@oii.ox.ac.uk

Wikichains

2011-05-11T16:54:00.003+01:00

The Wikichains website has been taken down due to constant spam attacks. A new version of the site is currently being developed (using the Semantic MediaWiki framework) and will be launched very soon.

In the meantime, for more information contact wikichains@oii.ox.ac.uk or read the paper on ethical consumption, user-generated content and transparency.

New publication about Wikipedia: Palimpsests and the Politics of Exclusion

2011-05-07T11:18:00.004+01:00

The Critical Point of View: Wikipedia Reader has just been published and is available for free electronically. My chapter in the volume deals with some of the embedded bias in the encyclopaedia and is the starting point for some of the more recent work on geography, power and politics in Wikipedia that I working on.

Have a read, and feel free to get in touch with any comments and thoughts.

Mapping the Internet: Presentation at SameAs

2011-04-08T00:42:00.009+01:00

A video of my talk at the SameAs meeting on visualiston is available below. The talk was titled "mapping the internet" and was a brief overview of how and why the geographies of the internet matter (drawing heavily on some of our floatingsheep maps). Now I just need to remember to not give future talks holding a bottle of beer.

New paper published: Transparency and Development: Ethical Consumption through Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things

2011-03-11T08:27:00.003Z

A paper that I co-wrote with Håvard Haarstad has just been published in a special issue of ITID on Open Development.

Commentators are now pointing to the potential for a globalization of knowledge and transparency that will harness the power of the Internet to allow consumers to learn more about the commodities they buy. This article discusses the potential for emergent Web 2.0 technologies to transcend barriers of time and space, both to facilitate flows of information about the chains of commodities, and to open up potential politics of consumer activism, particularly to influence the way goods that originate in the Global South are produced. We argue that these prospects are ultimately tempered by a number of persistent barriers to the creation and transmission of information about commodities (infrastructure and access, actors’ capacities, the continued role of infomediaries, and intelligent capture and use by consumers).

You can download a copy of the paper from the link below:

Transparency and Development: Ethical Consumption through Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things

Mapping Twitter Globally

2011-03-04T09:38:00.006Z

Thanks to the crit-geog mailing list, I just came across Chris McDowall's brilliant visualisation of 24 hours of tweets:

The geographic concentration of information production through the Twitter platform is to be expected (i.e. Western Europe and the US coasts glowing brightly, and much of the rest of the world left out of these processes), but nonetheless amazing to watch in action.

As Chris points out, we can see Indonesia (particularly Java) producing an unexpected amount of content. Well, at least unexpected until we realise that Twitter is hugely popular in Indonesia. The country has world's highest proportion of internet-users on Twitter.

You can read Chris' full post here. Also crossposted to floatingsheep.org.

Video from ICTD2.0 and Peer Production Session at ICTD 2010

2011-02-27T23:06:00.002Z

Thanks to Isabella Wagner and the ICT4D.at team, a short video of some of our session on ICTD2.0 and Peer Production is available below:

Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of the Internet

2011-02-07T14:04:00.003Z

I've just received final proofs for my chapter, "Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of the Internet." This chapter, which will appear in the book titled "Engineering Earth," has gone through a few incarnations (and indeed titles). But this version will absolutely, certainly, be the final draft.

The full citation is below, and I welcome any feedback.

Graham, M. 2011. Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of the Internet. In Engineering Earth. ed. Brunn, S. New York: Springer, 67-83.

New paper published: "Disintermediation, Altered Chains and Altered Geographies: The Internet in the Thai Silk Industry"

2011-02-01T15:41:00.003Z

My paper on disintermediation and altered geographies in the Thai silk industry has just been published. The paper can be downloaded from the link below:

Disintermediation, Altered Chains and Altered Geographies: The Internet in the Thai Silk Industry

Abstract
The Thai silk industry is in a worrying position. For centuries the industry has provided economic support to hundreds of thousands of people in the northeast of Thailand and become a part of the region’s cultural heritage. However, the industry is now dying largely because of uncompetitive nature of the silk being produced. This paper therefore examines one of the most widely touted development strategies: the use of the internet to both expand markets and disintermediate commodity chains. Using surveys and interviews, this study examines the geographic and topological effects that the internet has had in the value chains of Thai silk.

Hiring Part-Time Research Assistant

2011-01-10T10:19:00.005Z

I am hiring a part-time Research Assistant to work on our Wikipedia project.
Details are below. Please forward widely and get in touch if you have any questions.

Grade 6: Salary £25,751 - £30,747 p.a. (pro rata)

We are a leading international research and policy Institute looking for a part-time (50% FTE) Research Assistant to work on a range of programming and database administrative tasks on a Wikipedia-related research projects with Drs Mark Graham and Bernie Hogan. The current offer is for a half time position with a likelihood of expansion to full time, funding permitted.

The research will involve a substantial array of computer science skills applied to questions of social science interest. The application does not necessarily need to have social science training, but should be interested in how contemporary technologies can address new and novel research questions.

This part-time post (50%FTE) is available immediately for 12 months in the first instance, with the possibility of renewal thereafter funding permitting. Some flexibility over the number of hours worked per week may be possible.

Download: Application Pack for Part-Time Research Assistant

The closing date for applications is 12:00 GMT on Thursday 27 January 2011. Interviews are currently planned for Monday 7 February 2011.

ICTD 2.0, Peer Production and Open Development - ICTD 2010 Workshop Final Report

2010-12-28T13:30:00.008Z

Organisers: Mark Graham, Maja Andjelkovic, Matthew Smith and Ugo Vallauri

ICTD 2.0, Peer Production and Open Development - ICTD 2010 Workshop Final Report

The workshop entitled ICTD 2.0, Peer Production and Open Development attracted over seventy participants at the recent ICTD 2010 meeting at Royal Holloway. We would like to use this document to outline some of the outcomes of the workshop and begin a broader discussion between all participants.

Even though the title of the workshop was “ICTD 2.0,” it is clear that the 2.0 moniker is an overused phrase. It has been applied to a whole range of practices, tools, websites, and projects. However, irrespective of what “2.0” specifically means, we know that there have been some quite rapid changes in how people around the world are able to communicate and access information. Today almost a third of the world has Internet access and about two thirds have mobile phone access.

We have to then ask whether ICTs will foster openness, participation and the creation and sharing of user-generated content, information and knowledge; whether changes in connectivity, access and, in theory, participation will alter how development is both practised and conceptualised; and, more broadly, whether ICTs will offer potentials for development to become more open and inclusive.

In order to address these themes, the workshop was framed around four questions with participants dividing into smaller groups in order to discuss the four most appropriate responses to each question. The remainder of this document details each question and the outcomes of each group debate.

Question One: What does the fact that 30% of the world's population has access to the Internet and 68% can access a mobile phone mean to policies and practices of development? Is "ICTD 2.0" an over-reaching idea, or are these shifts significant and powerful enough to warrant an entirely new model of development?

This group agreed on four primary responses:

• The term ICTD2.0 represents a moment of optimism and real potential. There are huge leaps in “access” thanks to mobiles and lower cost computing that change what is possible with ICTD. We, as ICTD practitioners, can seize this.

• On the other hand, the term itself is rather empty. It merely signals “change” or “progress” without much explanation about what is different. More importantly, the term begs, implies, cajoles and rewards us to leave behind what we already know, …which is more than we may think we know. We have got to build upon what is already known to work in ICTD, rather than throw it out.

• The deep questions of unequal access, unequal use and power/hierarchy/centrality do not disappear simply because of the shift to 2.0. These remain in new guises and ICT4D theory and practice should continue to address them.

• The 2.0 shifts re-emphasize the “C” in ICT, rather than the traditional “I”. Participatory processes and coordination are the order of the day

Two key points of disagreement in this group’s discussion were:

• Where there is a lasting difference between the pc and the mobile (how soon will mobile Internet be relevant for resource-constrained communities)

• Whether policymakers have enough, or enough high quality materials and resources to guide them.

Question Two: How can systematic exclusions of people/ideas/voices from peer production and crowd-sourcing of development practices be countered? How should these exclusions inform the ways in which economic, social and political development is enacted?

Two groups of participants addressed these questions. The first group’s discussion centred around four responses:

• Identifying who is excluded and the context in which they are embedded (governing structures, tools (and goal of process/tool), forms of participation, access, etc.)

• Creating ways to involve those identified (through intervention work, capacity building, participatory design/modification of tools, understanding/offering incentives, increasing/creating access points, and etc.)

• Communicating progress in order to raise awareness of the benefits/possibilities to others

• Ensuring change is mutual (i.e. adapting methods/tools back through to the origin based on experience with participants)

The second group first identified a series of reasons behind exclusion: lack of access to technological infrastructure, lack of access to technological tools, lack of access to skills/knowledge about technological tools, lack of time, lack of financial resources, censorship, peer group dynamics and inability to 'break in', lack of diversity in issues covered, apathy, self-exclusion (i.e. “we don't want these tools”). The group then agreed on four ways of countering these types of exclusion (two being research-based and two being more practical):

• Understand the nature of exclusion - we can then better understand if peer production/crowd-sourcing tools are appropriate to solve development problems.

• Define the architecture of participation - who is excluded and why? Which organisations need to be approached to cover the excluded groups?

• Extend access in the community - find community spaces (libraries, telecentres) that provide access to technology, tools and organisational capacity

• Awareness raising (that the tools exist and could serve community members) and training (in how to use the tools)

Question Three: What are some of the most and least successful cases of harnessing the power/wisdom of the crowd for development work and why?

This group agreed that the success of a specific case is not necessarily linked to the technology employed. For example, while sms was key in the Philippines in the campaign to depose Estrada in 2001, it was also powerfully used in the 2007 Kenyan elections to distribute hate messages. Similarly, while Wikipedia is seen by many in the group as a very successful case of wisdom of the crowd, a participant from Syria explained that in her country it is not successful, as anonymous participation is not considered trustworthy. The role of Twitter in the 2009 Iran elections was also controversial, as according to the group it contributed to both the organising of the activists and in making them more easily traceable by the Iranian authorities. Everyone agreed on the role played by Ushahidi in successfully providing up-to-date information after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. Another successful example is the use of social media by the Obama campaign in the US elections.

The reasons behind a success story include the local appropriateness of a specific platform, as the Wikipedia example suggests. Another factor is the presence of local feedback: whether local users can directly benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, as opposed to providing information only to be used elsewhere. The Ushahidi story also hints at the power of the open source ethos of specific projects in bringing together inclusive communities.

Question Four: What is the role of online social networks or online communities of practice in ICTD 2.0? What are some examples of successful and failed networks and communities? Why did they or didn’t they work? What does it take, in a development context, to make the online tools available useful enough for those who want to and can contribute content to do so?

Three groups of participants tackled the issues raised by these questions.

Group A identified three main requirements for the functioning of any social network for development: a) low barriers to entry via systematic, not spontaneous, processes; for instance, this may involve finding people through wider networks already in existence, like Facebook; b) motivation; in other words, the network must fulfil a community need; and c) cultural awareness; in particular, the group felt it important to recognise cultural differences in what may appear to be a monoculture at first glance. As models of networks to study further, this group highlighted a teachers' support group in Nigeria, a Ukrainian Facebook group for librarians, and the Food and Agriculture Organizations' highly successful online community of practice, e-agriculture.org.

Group B identified the role of networks and communities of practice to be knowledge production and exchange and named Mobile Active and the ICT4D Twitter community as examples of effective networks, citing good community builders as key reasons for success. Similarly to group A, this group noted that value is created when a community comes together around a joint purpose, making it valuable for new members to subscribe. In terms of characteristics that make a network useful for development work, the group cited adaptability, which results from a community led design process, as the top reason.

Group C concluded that the role of online networks is representation and bridging of different approaches to development, and focused in particular on the potential of communities of practice to improve research theory. The group agreed that networks provide a platform for social support, and that this is often their most valuable aspect. Some successful uses of online networks were found in lobbying, building critical masses around political causes and emergency responses, and the mobilization of resources.

We would like to thank all of the participants for participating in the workshop and contributing their thoughts. Please feel free to direct any questions or comments about this document or our session at ICTD 2010 to Mark Graham (mark [_at_] geospace.co.uk). Please also let us know if we have omitted any important points that were raised in the workshop. We look forward to continuing the debate.

p.s. Thanks to Isabella Wagner and the ICT4D.at team, a short video of some of the session is available below:

Call for papers: Geographical perspectives on ICT and Development Discourse, Policy and Practice (RGS Conference 2011)

2010-12-10T14:35:00.000Z

We are seeking papers for the following session that will be held at the 2011 RGS-IBG International Conference:

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), in particular mobile phones and the Internet, are affecting people’s social and economic offline realities in much of the world. The Internet is a sphere of cultural expression, political and economic struggles and social interaction. Due to the potentially highly significant social, economic, and political changes that can be brought about by the Internet, development scholars and practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds are increasingly interested in the potential of ICTs to support development initiatives. “E-learning,” “e-agriculture,” “m-development,” “telecenters,” “e-villages,” and “development 2.0” are some of the many terms used to signify uses of ICTs to enable new types of social, economic and political development.

Extensive human and financial resources have been spent on work framed by the “ICT for development” (ICTD/ICT4D) umbrella. Supported by large technology companies, national governments and key international donors, the ICTD/ICT4D community of practice has promised much, but not all the hype has been translated into reality. This session will bring together the theoretical and empirical expertise of geographers to critically examine ICTD/ICT4D policy and practice. This can be done though qualitative and quantitative studies as well as discourse and policy analyses of information and communication technologies in the widest sense. Specifically, we seek papers that ask:

• Which development paradigms are being invoked in ICTD/ICT4D discourses?
• What are the key discourses used to frame ICTD/ICT4D projects?
• Which patterns of uneven development are being reinforced or countered by ICTs?
• How do social exclusions in offline and online space compare?
• Can ICTs facilitate real shifts in political, economic and social power?
• How do ICTs affect relationships between labour and capital in chains of production and consumption?
• Why are ICTs becoming (or not becoming) integrated into the everyday lives of people in the global South (and North)?
• What are some of the key critiques that should be levelled at ICTD/ICT4D policy and projects?
• Where multi-stakeholder partnerships with businesses are appropriate, how should these be framed for ICTD/ICT4D?
• What potential is there for not-for-profit, open access or subversive uses of ICTs?

This session is sponsored by both the Economic Geography Research Group (EGRG) and the Developing Areas Research Group (DARG).

The organisers intend to bring together the best papers from this session in a special issue.

If you are interested in participating, please send 250 word abstracts to Mark Graham (mark.graham [at] oii.ox.ac.uk) and Dorothea Kleine (Dorothea.Kleine [at] rhul.ac.uk) by Feb 20, 2011.

A New Kind of Globalisation? User-Generated Content and Transparent Production Chains

2010-12-10T13:15:00.004Z

The Guardian has just published my article titled: "A New Kind of Globalisation? User-Generated Content and Transparent Production Chains." The article discusses the possibilities for user-generated content and the Internet of Things to reshape how commodities are both produced and consumed.

The article is based on the following academic paper due to be published early next year:

Graham, M. and H. Haarstad. 2011. The Globalization of Transparency: Ethical Consumption in a Web 2.0 World. Information Technologies and International Development

Feel free to email me if you'd like a pre-publication copy.

See also:

The Wikichains project

Justifying Virtual Presence in the Thai Silk Industry: Links Between Data and Discourse

2010-12-09T20:39:00.004Z

I am happy to report that my paper titled "Justifying Virtual Presence in the Thai Silk Industry: Links Between Data and Discourse" has just been published in the latest edition of Information Technologies & International Development. Download the paper at the link above, or take a look at the abstract below:

This article examines some of the discourses being put forward as justifications for Internet use and altered commodity chains in the Thai silk industry. Those discourses are then compared to data on the relationship between the Internet and prices and wages. The article specifically looks at claims about who is benefiting from value chain reconfigurations, and then it compares those claims to insights about the Thai silk industry collected using a series of surveys and in-depth interviews. The article demonstrates that claims are put forth that altered commodity chain topologies will necessarily result in an accrual of economic and cultural benefits for producers and/or consumers. However, there is little empirical proof that the integration of the Internet into the Thai silk industry is having any noticeable effect on prices or wages.

A visualisation of the Wikileaks "vital locations" cable

2010-12-07T17:22:00.010Z

My colleagues at Floatingsheep and I have created a map of one of the most controversial Wikileaks cables: a list of locations deemed vital to US security. I should point out that the locations highlighted in this map are only the cities in which these critical facilities are located, and not the actual facilities themselves.

These data offer a fascinating insight into the ways that the national security priorities of the United States span the entire globe. Head over to Floatingsheep for the full post and a downloadable KML file of the data.

See also:
* A choropleth map depicting the number of facilities in each country, made by some folks at University College London.
* My map of all the Wikileaks cables.
* And, a user-generated effort to plot the cables.

ICTD 2.0, Peer Production and Open Development - Workshop at ICTD 2010

2010-12-01T15:26:00.003Z

****
Edit: Final report from this session is available at the following link:
ICTD 2.0, Peer Production and Open Development - ICTD 2010 Workshop Final Report
****

Maja Andjelkovic and I are organising a session on "ICTD 2.0, Peer Production and Open Development" at the upcoming ICTD 2010 Conference.

We have designed the session to allow for a sharing of experiences with the policy, practice and theory of ICTD 2.0. We plan to ask participants to join one of four discussion groups, each exploring one of the following questions:

- What does the fact that almost 30% of the world's population has access to the internet and 68% can access a mobile phone mean to policies and practices of development? Is "ICTD 2.0" an over-reaching idea, or are these shifts significant and powerful enough to warrant an entirely new model of development?

- What are some of the most and least successful cases of harnessing the power/wisdom of the crowd for development work and why?

- How can systematic exclusions of people/ideas/voices from peer production and crowdsourcing of development practices be countered? How should these exclusions inform the ways in which economic, social and political development is enacted?

- What is the role of online social networks or online communities of practice in ICTD 2.0? What are some examples of successful and failed networks and communities? Why did they or didn’t they work? What does it take, in a development context, to make the online tools available useful enough for those who want to and can contribute content to do so?

Following an open discussion, we then aim to have four rapporteurs summarize conclusions for the entire group.

Hopefully this exercise will allow us to achieve three goals: (1) begin a critical discussion about ICTD 2.0, peer production and open development; (2) form a network of academics, policy makers and practitioners interested in the topic (we hope to collect email addresses and distribute a short summary document of the session to all participants); and (3) allow us all to contribute and learn from each other’s perspectives and experiences.

We would invite anyone at the ICTD conference to participate in our session (Monday the 13th of December), and would welcome any thoughts or suggestions in advance of the workshop.

Wikipedia in the UK

2010-11-30T11:47:00.000Z

After a lot of data cleaning and number crunching, here are three maps of the geographies of Wikipedia in the UK using brand new November 2010 data. Looking at the first map (total number of articles in each district), we see some interesting patterns. With a few exceptions, it is rural districts in Scotland, Wales and the North of England that are characterised by the highest density of articles.

What we're likely picking up on is that fact that large districts simply have more potential stuff to write about. If we normalise the map by area we see an entirely different pattern. The map below displays the number of articles per square KM.

We see that most of the large urban conurbations in the UK are covered by a dense layer of articles. Most sparsely populated areas in contrast have a much thinner layer of virtual representation in Wikipedia. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Parts of Cornwall, Somerset and the Isle of Wight all have a denser layer of content than might be expected for such relatively rural parts of the country. One might expect a higher density in the districts surrounding Belfast (in fact almost all of Northern Ireland is characterised by very low levels of content per square KM).

Finally, we can look a the number of articles per person in each district:

Here some more surprising results are visible. All major urban areas have relatively low counts of article per person (with the exception of central London). In contrast, many rural areas (particularly areas containing national parks) have high counts per person.

There are obviously a range of ways to measure the geographies of Wikipedia in the UK. We see that some areas are blanketed by a highly dense layer of virtual content (e.g. central London and many of the UK's other major conurbations). These maps also highlight the fact that some parts of the UK are characterised by a paucity of content irrespective of the ways in which the data are normalised. Northern Ireland in particular stands out in this respect.

I'll attempt to upload similar analyses of other countries in the next few months. In the meantime, however, please offer thoughts on these maps either below or on the cross post at the Floatingsheep blog.

p.s. many thanks to Adham Tamer for his help with the data extraction.

Map of Wikileaks US Embassy Cables

2010-11-28T21:34:00.000Z

The release of over a quarter of a million US embassy cables by Wikileaks has raised a lot of important questions, and journalists and researchers will undoubtedly spend the next few weeks closely analysing the dataset. In the meantime, here is a quick map that I put together using data from the Guardian's data store.

It is important to point out that the dataset released by Wikileaks does not contain all cables sent by all US embassies and consulates. It is unclear whether the data in the release were selected according to any specific criteria or if they are a random sample (all of the cables were sent between 1966 and 2010).

In either case, and as one might expect, we see that there are a relatively large number of cables originating in the Middle East. We should therefore expect to hear much more about controversies from the region over the next few days.

Cognitive Surplus and the Levelling Effects of the Internet in the Connected Kingdom

2010-11-23T12:37:00.000Z

I just got back from a meeting at Google, London on "Expanding the Connected Kingdom: policies and strategies for stimulating the UK Internet economy." The meeting aimed to draw on the recent Connected Kingdom report in order to come up with useful policy recommendations.

My short position paper is titled "Cognitive Surplus and the Levelling Effects of the Internet in the Connected Kingdom" and is available at the following link.

Internet access as a human right

2010-11-17T13:12:00.000Z

Five countries have now declared internet access as a fundamental human right. Four of these countries are in Europe (Estonia, Finland, France and Greece) and one is in Central America (Costa Rica). Interestingly, there is quite a range of internet penetration rates between these countries:

Costa Rica: 43%
Estonia: 75%
Finland: 85%
France: 69%
Greece: 46%

It is likely that there will soon be other additions to this list. There is actually a strong push for universal internet access by major international organisations. The secretary-general of the ITU, for example, stated that governments should "regard the internet as basic infrastructure - just like roads, waste, and water." A recent BBC World Service poll found that 79% of people, in a poll of 27,000 people conducted across 26 countries, consider internet access to be a fundamental right. It will therefore be interesting to see how this map changes over the next few years. Please provide feedback on any changes that should be made to this list.

Want to use Web 2.0 to make the world better?

2010-11-01T09:25:00.000Z

Thanks to a grant recently awarded by UnLTd and Nominet Trust and to the collaboration of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA),Wikichains.com will redesign its site interface and introduce some new features.

In order to select people to develop and implement the redesign, we are launching a competition that will allow designers and programmers to submit bids to work on these changes. We are looking for proposals that will provide us with an approximate image of the final product. Feel free to suggest improvements with regard to any aspect of Wikichains.com. In addition to innovation and visual attractiveness, the jury will also positively value proposals by the following criteria:

• access to the site by means of mobile devices,
• connections with UPC codes and bar codes,
• integration of other external services that may be useful for the aims of the project,
• facilitating visualization of commodity chains (for example through use of maps).

Submissions will be judged by an international panel and the selected proposal will be awarded a prize of €3000. Our official flyer can be accessed here. Please spread this call as widely as possible!

Will broadband internet establish a new development trajectory for east Africa?

2010-10-07T11:21:00.000+01:00

My article titled "Will broadband internet establish a new development trajectory for east Africa?" has just been published in the Guardian's Global Development section.

Mobile price wars and disposable income in Kenya

2010-09-12T10:27:00.001+01:00

This is an interesting time to be in Kenya. A price war has erupted in the mobile market (instigated by Zain) and tariffs have dropped dramatically. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of people are switching, and planning to switch, their providers. This is particularly significant because Kenyans spend a huge amount of their disposable income on communications services (I've seen estimates of averages between 50 and 75 percent). Last week I had the opportunity to speak with both Alex Gakuru, Chairman of Kenya's ICT consumer society, and Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Communications. Both agreed that cheaper mobile services will likely result in a significant increase in the amount of disposable income available to your average Kenyan. We'll have to wait a while to see what the precise effects of this intense competition in the mobile sector will be, but there will undoubtedly be some transformational effects.

See also:

Our project to understand the effects of the new fibre-optic cables in Kenya.

Irish Times article: "Silicon Valley looking to Kenya for view of the future"

Technologies of Development: Policy, Practice and Discourse

2010-09-01T11:38:00.000+01:00

Annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Seattle, Washington, 10-16 April 2011 (http://www.aag.org/cs/annual_conference).

Organizers:
Mark Graham, University of Oxford
Padraig Carmody, Trinity College Dublin
Jim Murphy, Clark University

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have shifted development policy and practice in much of the world. “E-learning,” “e-agriculture,” “m-development,” “telecenters,” “e-villages,” and “development 2.0” are just some of the many terms used to signify uses of ICTs to enable new types of social, economic and political development. Countless human and financial resources have been spent on work framed within the “ICT for development” (ICTD) umbrella, and technologies like the mobile phone, laptop computer, and the Internet are frequently seen as an integral to development projects. However, while ICTD has promised much to the Global South, the potentials of new technologies and technological practices have often not translated into realities. This session will explore the differences that ICTs make within the contexts of development. Specifically, we seek papers that ask:

• How are ICTs altering positionalities of actors in the Global South?
• How do ICTs shift political, economic and social power?
• How do ICTs alter relationships between labor and capital in chains of production and consumption?
• How and why are ICTs becoming (or not becoming) integrated into the everyday practices of businesspeople and households in the Global South? And with what socioeconomic consequences?
• What are the key discourses used to frame ICTD debates and projects?
• How are ICTD projects and technologies altering or countering patterns of uneven development?
• What are some of the key critiques that should be levelled at ICTD projects?
• Are ICTD projects socioeconomically feasible and inclusive given the often expensive technological infrastructures they require?

Papers may be selected for a themed journal issue after the conference.

If you are interested in participating, please send 250 word abstracts to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk), by October 15, 2010.

New paper published: Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth

2010-08-17T12:10:00.000+01:00

A paper that I submitted to The Journal of Economic and Social Geography (TESG) has just been published in the latest issue.

Places have always been palimpsests. The contemporary is constantly being constructed upon the foundations of the old. Yet only recently has place begun to take on an entirely new dimension. Millions of places are being represented in cyberspace by a labour force of hundreds of thousands of writers, cartographers and artists. This paper traces the history and geography of virtual places. The virtual Earth is not a simple mirror of its physical counterpart, but is instead characterised by both black holes of information and hubs of rich description and detail. The tens of millions of places represented virtually are part of a worldwide engineering project that is unprecedented in scale or scope and made possible by contemporary Web 2.0 technologies. The virtual Earth that has been constructed is more than just a collection of digital maps, images and articles that have been uploaded into Web 2.0 cyberspaces; it is instead a fluid and malleable alternate dimension that both influences and is influenced by the physical world.

Those with institutional access can access the article here, otherwise a pdf can be downloaded from this link.

New paper published: Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief

2010-07-21T20:21:00.000+01:00

A paper that I wrote a few months ago (with Matthew Zook, Taylor Shelton and Sean Gorman) has just been published in World Medical and Health Policy. The abstract is below, or you can also download the full article here.

This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web-based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and GeoCommons. This analysis demonstrates that ITs were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of relief and aid agencies without actually being physically present in Haiti. While not without problems, this effort nevertheless represents a remarkable example of the power and crowdsourced online mapping and the potential for new avenues of interaction between physically distant places that vary tremendously.

Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices

2010-07-15T20:55:00.000+01:00

Ethan Zuckman gave an excellent speech on the need to listen to global voices yesterday at the TED conference in Oxford. I'm quite proud that he used some of my work to illustrate part of his argument. You can watch the whole talk below:

Augmented (hyper)Reality

2010-07-08T20:19:00.000+01:00

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Wikichains Awarded Better Net Award

2010-06-15T15:02:00.000+01:00

I'm happy to report that Wikichains has just been awarded a Better Net award. The grant will allow for a redesign and sprucing up of the website (hopefully also ultimately mobile access) and a few years of hosting. There should also be some funds left for a bit of research on some sample commodity chains. We are of course always looking for volunteers, so please let me know if you might be able to contribute in any way.

Augmented Reality Visualisations

2010-06-06T09:03:00.000+01:00

Frog design recently released some nice visualisations of what augmented realities might look and feel like in a decade. It is interesting that none of the people in the images are using any sort of visible access device. One can only assume that augmented reality equipped contacts or eye glasses that are serving as the link between the material and virtual.

I see potential parallels here to the relatively recent trend of people holding phone conversations in public through hands-free wireless headsets. The act of physically holding a mobile phone usually serves a signifier that a conversation in public space is taking place non-proximately. Without the phone (or at least the act of holding the phone), it is often unclear if the caller is speaking to me, someone else in the same place, or someone on the other side of the world.

The kinds of augmented realities offered in these images are similarly enacted without devices that can act as signifiers that the user is engaging with non-proximate, or virtual, information. Will this mean that, relatively soon, we will start to see people stop in the middle of a street and wave their arms and point their fingers (see the first image) at interfaces that are invisible to the naked eye?

Visualising the Internet

2010-05-21T10:08:00.000+01:00

The BBC has published a fascinating animated map showing the diffusion of the internet over the last decade. Definitely worth checking out.

Tools for doing research on Wikipedia

2010-05-11T17:07:00.000+01:00

Here is a list of interesting tools for research on Wikipedia courtesy of an email sent by Juliana Brunello:

http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html
Visualization from anonymous edits to Wikipedia (almost) in real-time

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/
Lists anonymous wikipedia edits from organizations. You can type in the organization you want to research about and it shows you the results.

http://www.wikimindmap.org/
Easy way of making a mind map based on Wikipedia connections.

http://www.wikirage.com/
Wikirage tracks the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits over various periods of time.

http://stats.grok.se/
Just enter a wikipedia article title and press go for the statistics on how much the page was viewed.

http://dbpedia.org/About
DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
A website with all deleted articles from wikipedia.

http://wikidashboard.parc.com/doc/faq.html
The top summary graph shows the weekly edit pattern of the article.

http://wikipediafs.sourceforge.net/
View and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files

http://similpedia.org/
Enter either a URL of the format: http://www.example.com or copy and paste a paragraph of text of at least 100 words to find similar content.

IDRC Open Development Workshop

2010-05-10T10:24:00.000+01:00

I just got home from the workshop Open Development in Ottawa. The meeting was quite stimulating and has helped me to better think through an number of not-quite-fully-formed ideas that I've been playing with.

Some of the questions that we were trying to answer are:

What is openness, and what are the theoretical and empirical connections between openness and promoting human development?
What are some implications of increasing openness in different spheres of social, economic, and political activity?
What are the participatory or collaborative activities which, enabled by ICTs, will catalyze developmental benefits and be applicable across domains?
What are the connections between openness, innovation, and development?
What is the relationship between open principles and a knowledge society?
Is more openness inevitable? When is openness a public good?
Are there differential issues that distinguish the meaning of openness in developing versus developed economies?
Do the new possibilities of openness through ICTs have any implications for development approaches?

For those that are interested, my draft paper can be accessed here. There is also a recording of an interesting panel discussion that took place on the first day (with Yochai Benkler, Sunil Abraham, Michael Geist, Anita Gurumurthy and Ron Deibert).

UK election cyberscapes

2010-05-06T12:31:00.000+01:00

I've published a long post on the Floatingsheep blog about the online geographies of some of the parties and candidates contesting the UK election. If online visibility is anything to go by, the Tories will win by a landslide. Other maps in the post show the extent of BNP and UKIP visibility throughout the country. Click here for the full post.

Football/soccer in nine languages

2010-04-28T09:03:00.000+01:00

My Floatingsheep colleagues and I just finished a test search in Google using nine different languages. You can see some of our initial results in the map below. The map visualises which of these various ways of referring to football are most visible at any particular location in the Google Maps database.
The subject matter (football) is a fascinating case-study, but we'll be experimenting with more words in more languages in the coming weeks and months. Click over to Floatingsheep for the full post.

World Bank Frees up Development Data

2010-04-20T17:41:00.000+01:00

The World Bank is now offering free access to an enormous collection of development statistics! The measures of ICT use and access are particularly interesting. Looking forward to delving into these statistics over the next few weeks.

Here is the World Bank president speaking about the initiative:

Mapping Wikipedia over space and time

2010-04-20T17:12:00.000+01:00

Just published a series of seven maps over at Floatingsheep about the geographies of Wikipedia biographies over time. Below are two examples, but head over there for the full series.

Pre-16th Century Wikipedia Biographies

21st Century Wikipedia Biographies

Volcano network effects in Kenya

2010-04-18T21:52:00.000+01:00

While sitting stranded in Washington feeling somewhat sorry for myself about not being able to get home to England, I read the following article in the Guardian:

Iceland volcano: Kenya's farmers losing $1.3m a day in flights chaos

A volcano in Iceland harming Kenyan farmers! The article obviously puts my own grumbles into perspective, but is also a fascinating insight into the highly complex relationships that underpin many of our social and economic interactions: relationships that only really become visible when integral parts of the networked systems that we rely on fail.

RFID in everyday life: video

2010-03-25T20:05:00.000Z

A interesting and somewhat scary take on the future of shopping once RFID chips start to become ubiquitous:

New course on ICT and Development offered at the OII

2010-03-25T13:16:00.000Z

I recently put together the outline of an MSc/DPhil course on ICT and Development that I will be teaching at the Oxford Internet Institute in Hilary Term 2011.

A brief outline is below, but follow this link for the full course description. I'd be happy to hear any thoughts on how to improve it.

This course will introduce students to the debates and practices surrounding the uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in both the Global South and Global North. It will draw on resources from Anthropology, Development Studies, Economics, Geography, and History in order to examine the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that underpin development (as a practice, as a subject of research, and as a discourse). The course will also draw heavily on case-studies in order to ground theory in practice and will introduce students to a range of projects that have employed ICTs as a solution to problems in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
ICTs have the power to fundamentally transform the economic, social and political relationships in poorer parts of our planet. However, potentials often do not translate into realities, and it is important to be aware of not only the promises, but also the perils of the transformative nature of communication technologies. As such, this course will provide an opportunity to reflect on local appropriateness, social inclusion and the range of arguments for and against any ICT for development project in a variety of contexts.

Mapping the density of cyberscapes

2010-03-22T09:08:00.000Z

I just uploaded another new post to Floatingsheep. This time, the goal was to measure the total number of placemarks (kml files) in every country by using a wildcard search at 260,000 points. The general pattern confirms to other measures of information density, with highly uneven distributions and much of the world left off the map. But there are still some unexpected findings: most notably the highly visible position of China. Head over to Floatingsheep for the full post.

The Beer Belly of America

2010-03-16T20:58:00.001Z

Our work on mapping virtual references to bars and grocery stores (aka the beer belly of America map) has just been featured in the New York Times. Click over to Floatingsheep.org for the full post.

The Digital Divide of OpenStreetMap

2010-02-01T21:49:00.000Z

Last month Muki Haklay published an interesting blog post on a digital divide in OpenStreetMap data. The basic conclusion is that more affluent areas are mapped more completely that poorer areas. Perhaps even more worryingly, the data reveal that the gap in virtual representation between affluent and deprived areas is actually growing.

These results mirror my own findings on other types of user-generated content that represents place. I've found that both Wikipedia and Google display similar patterns. Following Muki, the next step will be to use measures of affluence and deprivation (GDP, levels of internet access etc.) to more precisely examine the specific relationships.

Imperialist vs. imperialist. Pirate vs. pirate.

2010-01-29T17:01:00.000Z

I've been reflecting recently on the use of old terms with long-entrenched meanings to describe different facets of the relationships between media and old socio-economic-political structures. Information imperialism is one term that has been used a lot recently to describe various sides of the conflict between China and Google. On the one hand China has been labelled an information imperialist as a result of its heavy-handed government approach to controlling the flow of information: if they disagree with it, they'll blatantly try to censor it. China, on the other hand, has hit out at the US for being an information imperialist due its strong support of Google, the idea here being that the US is trying to force a specific type of Western-centric knowledge into the heads of Chinese internet users. Then we also have Google: a company that, in many ways, relies on the free creation, flow and mixing of information. But a company that, at the same time, has been able to construct its own form of information imperialism. What other entity in the history of humantiy has had such a great degree of unsupervised power in determining what we see and what we don't? While China wants to restrict what information is visible and what information is invisible, so too does Google (albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons).

Moving swiftly on to pirates, we also see the same term applied to different groups on different sides of the same issue. Last summer, the arrival of the new East African fibre-optic cable was delayed for weeks due to the very real threat of piracy. It is interesting though that Somali pirates were blocking the potentials of a very different type of East African "pirate." It will be interesting to see how much of the East African underground economy moves from the world of guns and speed boats to the world of botnets and fraud.

The link between these two cases is more than a semantic overlap between terms that can be used to express very different meanings. In both cases, the internet introduces radical positive economic, social and political potentials. Yet it simultaneously leaves open the possibilities of new forms of control and abuse that can be defined using the same words as the systems and structures that they replace (but operate in new and often unexplored ways). Entrenched terms and metaphors can often help us to understand new processes, new contexts and new relationships, but in many cases it seems that we simply need to stop relying on so many old words in new contexts.

The Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge

2010-01-28T17:00:00.000Z

The deadline for the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge (sponsored by Google) ends tomorrow. The challenge, which lasted for a few months, offers prizes to people for creating Wikipedia articles in Kiswahili or translating English Wikipedia articles into Kiswahili.

The program is a very interesting type of outreach by Google. Not only is Google offering Wikipedia a high degree of visibility (both in terms of promoting the challenge itself and in the ultimate search rankings of the created articles [which will undoubtedly be at the top of the first page of any search]), but they are also offering prizes, and most interestingly have offered training seminars at three universities in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Google is clearly using its influence in a positive manner here, and the net outcome will likely be a greater degree of accessible information in Kiswahili. Currently the Kiswahili Wikipedia has only slightly more articles than the Low Saxon version and slightly less than the Belarusian edition. So, the move benefits seekers of information, it benefits Wikipedia, and it should not be forgotten that it also benefits Google.

As I pointed out in my recent presentation at the Wikiwars conference (and forthcoming book chapter on the topic), most Wikipedia articles are highly ranked in Google (see similar analyses here and here) and there are likely calculated reasons behind these specific orderings. Google benefits from making Wikipedia articles highly visible in two ways. First, most Wikipedia articles are a highly useful source of information and therefore satisfy the information needs of the searcher (a task that any search engine has to fulfil in order to stay popular). Second, Wikipedia articles are always non-commercial. They offer information that wouldn't necessarily be published by a for-profit source. As such, commercial pages on the same topic are pushed down in the rankings and businesses are more incentivized to purchase space in sponsored results (the primary way in which Google makes money). Therefore, Google's Wikipedia Challenge is ultimately undoubtedly a positive move for all concerned, but is also clearly a way to help some of the East African versions of Google move towards a sustainable business plan.

See also:

New York Times article on the challenge.

Google's Geographies of Religion

2010-01-27T09:49:00.000Z

Following up on an earlier floatingsheep post on the online geographies of religion, we've just uploaded a new set of maps that visualise religious cyberscapes. Below is the global-scale map, and the rest are available at floatingsheep.org.

Urban Explorers: Quests for Myth, Mystery and Meaning

2010-01-25T22:36:00.000Z

Haiti and Cloud Collaboration

2010-01-22T15:07:00.000Z

My colleague (and office-mate) Bernie Hogan recently directed me to the work being undertaken on Haiti.com. The site combines a live Twitter feed of Haiti-related posts with a map that allows the reporting (and visualisation) of information about emergencies, threats, responses etc.

There is a similar project under way at mibazaar.com/haiti.html:

View Larger Map

Hopefully these projects can make a difference to some of the on-the-ground efforts.

Pictures from the East Africa Fibre Optic Broadband Cable Landing Site

2010-01-16T15:29:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the SEACOM cable landing site in Mombasa, Kenya. The main reason for visiting is that I am at the early stages of a multi-year project to investigate the social and economic effects of the cable. Peter Ouko Odhiambo from SEACOM (pictured below) kindly showed me around. This SEACOM cable is the first of three that will carry most digital information between East Africa and the rest of the world (before the arrival of the cable all data had to travel via costly satellite infrastructure).

The photo below is the first place at which the cable emerges from the ocean after its long trip from Mumbai, Marseilles and London. The landing site is actually next door to Fort Jesus: an old Portuguese fort in the heart of old Mombasa (long a symbol of a very different kind of economic integration with the outside world).

This photo shows a discarded piece of cable in front of the landing site. Almost all of the cable is made of steel rods and other types of padding.

The actual fibre optic cables are incredibly thin. You can just make out the six thin strands to the right of my head in this photo. These strands carry almost all internet data (and international phone calls) between East Africa and the rest of the world.

See also:
New Africa broadband 'ready'
East Africa gets high-speed web (BBC)

Snap and Search: Using images to constuct links between the material and virtual

2009-12-20T19:01:00.000Z

"Our goal is for Goggles to recognize every image. This is really the beginning" - Vic Gundotra, Google vice president in charge of mobile phones.

Yesterday the NYT reported that Google has recently unveiled a new app called Goggles. The software allows anyone to upload a photo from a mobile and then be returned detailed information about the subject of the photo.

Many similar ideas to connect the material and virtual realms already exist. However, most of those technological practices rely on more complicated infrastructures (e.g. QR codes, compasses, GPS etc.). Here, all that is needed is a camera-phone and an internet connection.

The release of Goggles therefore lends a lot of support to Tim O'Reilly's argument that networked peer-produced information will increasingly be used as a way of "brute-forcing identity out of reality."

The app can also be used to locate more than just famous landmarks. It can also be employed to take photos of commodities (and any other material objects) in order to link them to virtual information. A practice that could potentially lead to a fundamentally altered politics of consumption.

The MegaChristmas Index: Looking for Santa Claus in Google Placemarks

2009-12-19T10:01:00.000Z

Examining the geographies of Google placemarks can lead to a variety of useful insights about the world. So, as Christmas draws ever closer, myself and colleagues at the floatingsheep blog wondered whether an analysis of placemarks could help us answer the age old question about "where does Santa Claus live?" To answer this question, we decided to map out the cybergeographies of Christmas in order to ultimately create a "MegaChristmas Index." More details and maps are available at the full post at floatingsheep.org. But in the meantime, here are a few of our findings - including one map displaying the world's most Christmassy places.

The peer-production of religious references

2009-12-16T23:37:00.000Z

Using data collected from a script that searches Google for keywords in user-generated kml files, I recently made a series of maps representing the geographies of four religious keywords ("Allah," "Buddha," "Hindu" and "Jesus"). In every case unique patterns emerge. As might be expected, the word "Hindu" is far more likely to appear in online representations of place tagged to the Indian Subcontinent than anywhere else in the world. References to "Allah" are similarly clustered in much of the Islamic world. The "Hindu" and "Allah" maps can be seen below, and the full set can be accessed over at the floatingsheep blog.

The directionalities of Wikipedia: Concentration in language versions

2009-12-12T15:21:00.000Z

Very distinct patterns are evident when the different language versions of Wikipedia are mapped out. Below are maps I made of the Czech and Portuguese versions of Wikipedia.

What you see is that most of the geo-related articles are perhaps unsurprisingly about places in which most of the contributors probably live. Czech articles are overwhelmingly about places and events in the Czech Republic. Similarly, if you look at articles in the Portuguese Wikipedia, there is a lot of information about Portugal and Brazil, a moderate amount about other Lusophone countries, and then very little about everywhere else.

What is somewhat unexpected is that there is so little available information about foreign subjects in most versions of Wikipedia. The Portuguese Wikipedia is the 9th largest, so you might expect to see a broader coverage of the non-Lusophone world. If you only speak Portuguese, there is a clear directionality to the available information – and indeed you see this same pattern if you map out almost any Wikipedia language version. English and German are the only notable exceptions.

The virtual cloud of information in Wikipedia is thus only a faint wisp in most places in most languages. But as a Mancunian I should be used to the idea that clouds are always thickest over your own home.

Codes on places

2009-12-08T15:53:00.000Z

The divides between material place and virtual information will start to shrink even more over the next few weeks as Google begins sending out about 100,000 QR codes to businesses in the US (as reported in the NYT).

The idea is that a user will see one of these codes on a building, scan it with an android, iPhone, Blackberry etc., and then be served up information that Google has stored about that particular place. This information could include descriptions, reviews, images, and coupons. The QR code is thus in essence a portal between the bricks-and-mortar material world that we inhabit and the (invisible to the naked eye) information about those same places scattered throughout the internet.

This isn't a new idea of course, and the technology has been quite widespread in Japan for most of this decade. However, the significance of this piece of news is Google. Given the scale of investment, the fact that Google really wants to drive adoption of this technology by subsidising some of the cost for users, and the fact that almost all new smartphones are able to read QR codes, it is quite likely that we will soon see QR codes scattered throughout our urban environments.

Virtual information really will then become an important component in the palimpsests of place. As such, a host of questions emerge. Will rival companies start creating their own bridges between the material and virtual on national or global scales? Will the practice of QR tagging the material world further entrench the power of Google to determine what we see, where we go, who we interact with and where we spend money? What will this mean for the people and places unable to make their information rise to the top of opaque ranking algorithms? And are there any potentials for an open and transparent version of this technology, in which the justifications for making some information visible and some invisible are clearly documented?

Wikipedia's Known Unknowns

2009-12-03T09:40:00.000Z

My article on Wikipedia's geographical blind spots has been published in the Guardian.

An analysis of Wikipedia entries reveals the world's knowledge deserts – which may provide a second wave of activity for the online encyclopedia.

Are Wikipedia contributors running out of topics to write about? Recently, much has been made of the fact that the growth in the number of new Wikipedia articles has been gradually slowing and the number of volunteers apparently falling. But Wikipedia still has much to do: the map above suggests there are still whole continents that remain a virtual "terra incognita" and the next explosive growth in the online encyclopedia will come from places that have not previously been represented.

Click here for the full article.

The Internet and Activism in Africa

2009-12-01T14:22:00.000Z

This evening there's an opportunity to hear how Pambazuka, one of Africa’s most influential news and information forums uses the web to facilitate and transform activism and citizen journalism across the continent.

Along with Nicole Stremlau I'll be hosting the event. It starts at 5pm and will be at the Oxford Internet Institute (1 St. Giles).

Follow this link for more information and to register.

The Googling

2009-11-28T10:21:00.000Z

This short video makes fun of the digital panopticon that Google seems intent to bring about. It is both terrifying and funny.

This video is actually just the first of a series of five that all focus on the extraordinary potential powers of Google.

Thanks to Daniel Villar Onrubia for bringing it to my attention.

Interview with CBC about Wikipedia's blind spots

2009-11-27T22:23:00.000Z

The interview with Nora Young on CBC's Spark can be accessed at the following link. It begins at 35:20 and lasts for around six minutes. In the interview I discuss some of the uneven geographies of Wikipedia.

Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content

2009-11-12T22:39:00.000Z

The Internet surrounds us like air, saturating our offices and our homes. But it’s not confined to the ether. You can touch it. You can map it. And you can photograph it - Andrew Blum 2009

The following maps represent the first stage of a project I am embarking on to map out some of the spatial contours of Wikipedia. Data were obtained from the August 2009 Wikipedia geodata dump organised by user Kolossos. The information was then ported over to a GIS. There are almost half a million geotagged Wikipedia articles (i.e. Wikipedia articles about a place or an event that occurred in a distinct place), so the preparation time alone for the files needed to create these maps was almost a week.

The map below displays the total number of Wikipedia articles tagged to each country. The country with the most articles is the United States (almost 90,000 articles). Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged articles (4), and indeed most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterised by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia).

When examining the data normalised by area, an entirely different pattern is evident. Central and Western Europe, Japan and Israel have the most articles per landmass, while large countries like Russia and Canada have low ratios of Wikipedia articles per area.

Finally, the data were also mapped out against population. Here countries with small populations and large landmasses rise to the top of the rankings. Canada, Australia and Greenland all have extremely high levels of articles per every 100,000 people. Smaller nations with many noteworthy features or geotaggable events also appear high in the rankings (e.g. Pitcairn or Iceland).

As I've previously argued, Wikipedia is an important component of the palimpsests of place. In other words, presences and absences play a fundamental role in shaping how we interpret and interact with the world. The fact that the geographies of Wikipedia content are so uneven therefore leads to worrying conclusions. As we increasingly rely on peer produced information, large parts of the world remain 'terra incognita' (in a similar manner to the ways in which many of those same places were represented on European maps before the 19th Century). However, it is conceivable that it will only be a matter of time until the empty spaces on the Wikipedia map are filled in by Wikipedians in Zambia, Indonesia, and much of the rest of world.

These data certainly warrant a closer look, and I'll aim to get more maps (examining the distribution of content in specific languages, and looking in more detail at specific regions) uploaded soon.

Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth

2009-10-27T11:15:00.000Z

My article accepted to the Journal of Economic and Social Geography (Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie) entitled "Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth" has just been published online. The print version should appear in volume 101 or 102 of the journal early next year. A pre-publication version is available at the following link, and feel free to email me for the final version of the article. The abstract is as follows:

Places have always been palimpsests. The contemporary is constantly being constructed upon the foundations of the old. Yet only recently has place begun to take on an entirely new dimension. Millions of places are being represented in cyberspace by a labor force of hundreds of thousands of writers, cartographers, and artists. This article traces the history and geography of virtual places. The virtual Earth is not a simple mirror of its physical counterpart, but is instead characterized by both black holes of information and hubs of rich description and detail. The tens of millions of places represented virtually are part of a worldwide engineering project that is unprecedented in scale or scope and made possible by contemporary Web 2.0 technologies. The virtual Earth that has been constructed is more than just a collection of digital maps, images, and articles that have been uploaded into Web 2.0 cyberspaces; it is instead a fluid and malleable alternate dimension that both influences and is influenced by the physical world.

Talk: Ethical Consumption and the Online Peer Production of Transparency

2009-10-16T17:14:00.000+01:00

I will be giving a talk to the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford on Nov 10. The talk is titled "Ethical Consumption and the Online Peer Production of Transparency." More details here.

The Google Barcode Doodle: A Harbinger of the Internet of Things?

2009-10-07T23:26:00.000+01:00

In celebration of the 57th anniversary of the first bar code patent, Google have altered their homepage to feature a barcode instead of the familiar Google logo. This temporary redisgn (or Doodle) is actually a fairly common occurrence: past doodles have featured crop circles, Michael Jackson, Samuel Morse, Nikola Tesla, and a range of other people and things. Previous Doodles have always played with the letters that make up 'Google,' The letters have been rearranged, reshaped, and sometimes even reordered. But with enough imagination would still always form the word 'Google.'

However, today, we get vertical black lines. These lines are easily encodable using Code 128 (a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings into bar code), but absolutely meaningless to a human being without a bar code scanner. It seems that today's Google Doodle is somewhat more meaningful than the 57th anniversary of a bar code patent (who celebrates a 57th birthday anyway?). The Doodle is a harbinger of the coming Internet of Things and a machine-readable world (a topic I've previously blogged about in detail). Google is undoubtedly ready for an Internet in which it not only indexes much of the material (i.e. non-virtual) world, but also allows code to perform searches. Before long, our ovens might be Googling for recipes and cars might be Googling for mechanics, and searches performed through Google's ASCII interface could become a small part of the work that their algorithms are carrying out.

GPS Real-World Gaming in Hybrid Space

2009-10-04T09:50:00.000+01:00

A real-time, multiplayer, GPS game for mobiles is being played out in the real-world. The game, played by groups of four or five people, uses a one kilometer radius around any point on Earth to delineate spatial extents in which three or four chasers try to capture one runner. Each one of the players is tracked via a GPS phone and their coordinates are mashed onto a map that they can all see. The only twist that that the runner is always allowed to view the map, whilst the chasers only have access to the map every six minutes. The game is a fascinating way to roll elements of the physical and virtual together into an adrenaline-pumped experience.

What's next? Fast Foot Challenge is essentially a high-tech version of tag. But, more complex games combining the physical and virtual worlds are already starting to appear. A variety of shoot-em-ups in which the mobile phone is used as a gun have been designed, and it seems only a matter of time until we start seeing a lot more of the Earth and our daily lived environments being used as a setting for interactive games. Let's just hope we don't ever see Grand Theft Auto ported over into real cars in the real world.

Invisible Geographies: The Street as Platform

2009-09-26T08:43:00.000+01:00

A nicely written quote about invisible geographies, hybrid physical/virtual spaces, and urban data streams from the City of Sound blog:

"The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.
Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?
----
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."

That Time and Space ruled Man No More....

2009-09-23T10:58:00.000+01:00

The Victory (1872)....an anonymous tribute to Samuel Morse.

But one morning he made a slender wire.
As an artist's vision took life and form.
While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire
That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;
And he carried it over the Mountain's crest,
And dropped it into the Ocean's breast;
And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,
That Time and Space ruled man no more.

Taken from Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet

Closer than we Think?

2009-09-23T08:44:00.000+01:00

Closer than we think? A vision from 1959!

(courtesy of Paleo_Future)

The Aleph, Cyberspace and Google

2009-08-28T14:36:00.000+01:00

"The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe." - Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Upon reading Borges' short story, I was struck by the similarities between the Aleph and Google's mission. Google state that their mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Just like the Aleph, the Google search bar is about an inch wide, and brings the user into a space containing all spaces: streetviews, image searches, video searches, book searches, product searches, web searches, map searches, satellite images, web cams, live traffic, 3d representations of the oceans, the sky, the moon and mars, and the human body.

In the short story, Borges goes on to exclaim: "I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity."

Many of our reactions to tbe "unimaginable universe" being served up to us by Google likely mirror those experienced by Borges. How can we not feel wonder, pity, excitment, amazement, fear and hope when non-proximately doing something as intimate as exploring the alleyways of a neighbourhood on the other side of the planet?

The Aleph is not quite here, and we cannot yet see every corner of the universe. But the rapid increase in networked information shadows and the desire of one very powerful company to organise of these data, move the Aelph from the realm of fiction to the realm of the imaginable.

Visibility and Google Street View in Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Greece

2009-08-25T09:51:00.001+01:00

Why has Switzerland recently decided to ban Google's Street View service? In fact, Greece, Germany, Japan, and a number of other places have also raised objections to the service. In most of those countries people are free to take photographs in public places and are even free to set up surveillance cameras. Furthermore, as far as I know, none of those countries take issue with detailed maps or satellite images of cities being made publically avaialble on the Internet by companies like Google. So, why is Street View such a sensitive issue?

The objections seem to be related to the idea that Google is capturing a very important part of our sense of place (the visual sense of walking around a city) and making it unviersally and freely available to anyone on the planet. An important component of the places we live in goes from being just 'here' or 'there' to being 'everywhere.' Google have without a doubt pulled off an amazing feat with this project, and there are many positives to be taken away from it (for example, I just spent almost a wonderful hour 'driving' around and exploring New Zealand from my home in Oxford). But the explosion of place, and the fact that soon anywhere might be visible from everywhere is also a somewhat scary and worrying thought especially when we consider the privacy implications of a for-profit company controlling this very important information.

Twitter and Geo-tagging

2009-08-21T21:13:00.000+01:00

According to the Twitter blog, the micro-blogging service will soon allow users to add lattitude and longitude to any tweet. This development will provide people with the ability to map and measure the movement and intensity of trends, thoughts, and ideas in both real-time and real-place. Exciting possibilities. As soon as the service goes live, expect analysis both here and at the floatingsheep blog.

Everyware and Ubiquitous Computing

2009-08-18T06:59:00.000+01:00

“computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. They’re just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They’re melting into the texture of everyday life...even the word ‘computer’ sounds backward and dumb” (Greenfield 2006: 93).

I recently finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. This collection of 81 brief theses outlines how ubiquitous computing has changed and will change society, and explores the ways in which its emergence can be shaped. The term everyware refers to a paradigm of “invisible computing” that is coming into being: computing that is not linked to specific personal devices, but is everywhere, not just in all places, but also in all things.

In everyware, broad networks will link together a variety of embedded systems: “what we’re contemplating here is the extension of information –sensing, -processing, and –networking capabilities to entire classes of things we’ve never before thought of as “technology.” At least , we haven’t thought of them that way in a long, long time: I’m talking about artifacts such as clothing, furniture, walls and doorways.”

A related, and extremely useful, concept introduced by Greenfield is the idea of ambient informatics. The term signifies the “state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it, generally to support a specific decision.” In other words, information is no longer tied to physical things or places. Information instead becomes infinitely accessible from anywhere, using any tool or device. Everyware is therefore not limited to the “woodwork” of a given, bounded place. It is rather circumambient in the world.

These are far-reaching and powerful predications, and Greenfield devotes much of the book to carefully outlining the specific ways in which everyware will be brought into being. He proclaims “it is coming – and as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are nontechnical, nonspecialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know it even exists.” One reason why a state of everyware seems inevitable to Greenfield is the logic of convergence. Everything can and will connect because all things will share the common language of “on and off, yes or no, one and zero.” “Everything that can be digital, will be” and everything that is digital can be meshed, mashed, and connected. Greenfield further argues that everyware is structurally latent in several emerging technologies, and that these necessary technologies are becoming cheap and accessible.

Interestingly, the book devotes some space to a discussion of bridges between atoms and bits. Greenfield argues that ”the significance of technologies like RFID and 2D bar-coding is that they offer a low-impact way to “import” physical objects into the datasphere, to endow them with an informational shadow. An avocado, on its own, is just a piece of fleshy green fruit – but an avocado whose skin has been laser-etched with a machine-readable 2D code can tell you how and under what circumstances it was grown, when it was picked, how it was shipped, who sold it to you, and when it’ll need to be used by (or thrown out). This avocado, that RFID-tagged pallet – each is now relational, searchable, availableto any suitable purpose or application a robust everyware can devise for it.”

A number of worrying points are also made in the book:

“...everyware functions as an extension of power into public space” Thus, our notions of what counts as public cannot help but be changed.
“The passive nature of our exposure to the networked sensor grids and other methods of data collection implied by everyware implicates us whether we know it or not, want it or not.”
Everyware is problematic because it is difficult to see. We thus cease to see some tools as technology and their effects can become naturalised. This shields us from a fuller understand of the power-relations embedded into each situation and action.
The design of ubiquitous systems and everyware shapes the choices available to us in our everyday interactions with the world.
“Where everyware is concerned, we can no longer expect anything to exist in isolation from anything else.” Facts acquire immortality, but we traditionally we have relied on exformation (information leaving the world).
“With everyware, all that information about you or me going into the network implies that it comes out again somewhere else – a “somewhere” that is difficult or impossible to specify ahead of time – and this has real consequences for how we go about constructing a social self”

The book concludes with some suggestions for ways that everyware should be designed and structured in order to avoid some of the most worrying aspects of ubiquitous computing. The prescriptions are all well thought out, but it is hard not to get the sense that many of these ideas will never actually be implements by the engineers who knowingly or unknowingly are designing systems that will fundamentally alter the human experience. For example, we are told that “everyware must be deniable.” Few would disagree with this statement, but one struggles to imagine just how feasible this idea is. Isn’t the whole idea behind everyware that it is everywhere? This is perhaps then the most concerning aspect of this book. Although a clearly deterministic argument is being made, it is difficult to see how the logics of convergence and cheap and accessible information technologies, for better or worse, will not bring about some form of ubiquitous computing in the future.