Yearly Archives: 2015

The World Online

Description This map shows the total number of Internet users in a country (size of the country) as well as the percentage of the population that has Internet access (shade of the country). It is an update of our 2011 visualization. Data and Method The map uses 2013 data on Internet users and population that… Read More »

The Geographies of Science

[iframe src=”https://stefano.oiilab.org/interactive/scientific_documents/” width=”100%” height=”620″ scrolling=”no”] Description This graph illustrates the number of journal articles produced around the world. Data The data used in this graph are from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, which “provides access to the world’s leading citation databases” and “includes current and retrospective journal and proceedings data in the sciences, social sciences,… Read More »

Measuring the Impacts of Connectivity

Huge resources are invested into plans and projects that are designed to connect some of the billions of people who still lack any sort of digital connectivity. Yet, it is surprising that there is a relatively sparse evidence-base about how greater access and connectivity can facilitate or enable various types of economic development. As such, our research… Read More »

Incubators vs. Hubs at the Example of Accra

Use of the term “hub” has certainly been inflationary in discussions about innovation and entrepreneurship support. I believe that innovation hubs are a genuinely new (and exciting!) organizational form, but at the same time, “hub” has become a misnomer for many organizations where the label doesn’t quite fit, especially across Africa. This wouldn’t be such… Read More »

New paper: “The Domestic Turn: Business Processing Outsourcing and the Growing Automation of Kenyan Organisations”

I’m happy to announce a new paper to come out of our previous project studying Development and Broadband Internet Access in East Africa. The project was a collaboration between myself, Tim Waema, Laura Mann, and Chris Foster and aimed to look at the role that changing connectivity in East Africa was having on three sectors of… Read More »

The hidden biases of Geodata

29 April 2015 0

Geographic information underpins so much of what we do today on the internet. By knowing the location of a tweet, a profile, or any other user-entered information, we can build services and software that is micro-targeted at user needs: for example dating sites, advertising, and search results. For that reason, Stefano De Sabbata and I… Read More »

New paper – Mapping Information Wealth and Poverty: The Geography of Gazetteers

31 March 2015 0

Stefano and I have put together a short paper that will be forthcoming in Environment and Planning A. The paper focuses on the geography of geographic information, and builds on our work into the uneven geographies of information. It highlights how the very information systems that we use as ‘ground-truth’ are themselves characterised by significant biases. Abstract Gazetteers are… Read More »