Interview about the power of digital maps
Mark Graham is interviewed about the power of digital maps
Posts tagged: Representation
New publication: “Inequitable Distributions in Internet Geographies: The Global South is Gaining Access But Lags in Local Content.”
A special issue of the journal innovations has just been published. The issue focused on the topic of ‘digital inclusion’ and features a short piece that I wrote. Graham, M. 2014 Inequitable Distributions in Internet Geographies: The Global South is Gaining Access But Lags in Local Content. innovations 9(3-4). 17-34. The piece asks whether increasing Internet access… Read More »
The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia
Visualisation highlighting the fact that a majority of content produced in Wikipedia is about a relatively small part of our planet
A World’s Panorama
Building on our map of content in Flickr, this graphic tells a very similar story. Panoramio is smaller than Flickr, with about a tenth of its users, and only a fraction of its photos. Nonetheless, Panoramio plays an important role in online representations of places, as photographs on the site can be accessed as a… Read More »
The World Through the Eyes of a Search Algorithm
Data Many big technology companies have developed algorithms for providing query suggestions based on input to search fields and/or immediate feedback to users (see this, this, or this patent). These techniques are commonly referred to as autosuggest, incremental search or autocomplete. Google uses the latter name for its implementation in their Web search interface. Google… Read More »
Geographic Knowledge in Freebase
Visualisation of geographic knowledge in Freebase, a core ingredient in the informational menu presented to us by Google search
World-wide News Web
Findings The map restates the United States’ position as a core geographical focal point of the collection. There are seven location pairs that are characterized by over 100,000 events happening between them. Every one of these seven pairs has one location outside of the United States and one inside the country. The brightest lines connect the… Read More »
Geographic intersections of languages in Wikipedia
Description This graph illustrate the percentage of geo-referenced articles in the twenty editions of Wikipedia containing the larges number of geo-referenced articles. Data The Terra Incognita project by Tracemedia investigates how Wikipedia has evolved over the last decade, mapping geographic articles, and date of creation, for over 50 languages. The maps highlight geolinguistic biases, unexpected… Read More »
Geographic coverage of Wikivoyage
Findings The visualisation shows us that, in all four languages, extensive coverage exists of countries in which those languages are spoken. Wikivoyage — one of the world’s most used travel guides — therefore presents us with a very selective picture of the world. The United States accounts for a large portion of the content included… Read More »
Geographies of Google Search
Google doesn’t seem to be characterised by the massive geographic inequalities that characterise many other types of digital information, but it still presents a very selective representation of our planet