Yearly Archives: 2016

Hiring a Researcher at Oxford: Digital Entrepreneurship | Economic Geography | Sub-Saharan Africa

We are recruiting a full-time Researcher to work with us at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) on a project that critically assesses the changing landscape of digital entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Researcher will conduct a grounded, comparative empirical study of digital entrepreneurship in African cities. We are interested in the practices of digital entrepreneurship,… Read More »

Mapping Twitter

5 December 2016 0

I’ve been working with Antonello Romano to update some of our older research into the geography of Twitter. Above you can see some maps from a sample of about 2.5 million tweets collected worldwide over 48 hours in October 2016. These are collected using the Twitter streaming API (at most a 1% sample). Because of the… Read More »

Shaping the new world of work

The European Trade Union Institute has just put together a 40-page report that comes out of their conference on ‘Shaping the new world of work. The impacts of digitalisation and robotisation’, held from 27-29 June 2016 in Brussels. I spoke in the Plenary on ‘technology’, and spoke about both fears for digital workers, and potential… Read More »

Mapping the Availability of Online Labour

Digitalization and the increasing connectivity across the globe have capacitated the emergence of an online labour market. A number of platforms now facilitate transactions between employers and employees, often based in very separate locations. These platforms cater for a variety of job types, ranging from simple tasks to complex projects and services and are estimated to provide employment to tens… Read More »

The Impact of Connectivity in Africa: Grand Visions and the Mirage of Inclusive Digital Development

My colleagues Nicolas Friederici, Sanna Ojanperä, and I have recently finished a paper in which we analyse ‘Grand Visions’ of how Internet connectivity affects development in Africa. In the paper, we contrast these visions with the actually available empirical evidence to support those claims. You will be able to read our full conclusions in the paper below: Friederici, N.… Read More »

Mapping Flickr

3 October 2016 1

Flickr is one of the world’s most popular photo sharing websites, and represents a key way in which people form impressions about different parts of our planet. In other words it is an important part of the digital augmentations of places. Antonello Romano has been doing some great work mapping content from the site, and… Read More »

The geography of Wikipedia edits

28 September 2016 0

Wikipedia has a geography. This is something that my colleagues and I have explored previously in a variety of scholarship. For a new book on ‘Open Development’, my colleague Stefano De Sabbata and I decided to update our most recent paper about information geographies with the above maps of Wikipedia. The basic underlying inequalities haven’t changed. Using… Read More »