I’m happy to report the release of a new report that comes our of a multi-year project to student the Internet and the Business Process Outsourcing sector in East Africa. This work has, in many ways, informed the research design and framing of our current Geonet project. Mann, L., Graham, M. and Friederici, N. 2015.… Read More »
We are happy to announce that we are going to represent our agenda on connectivity, virtual/digital global production networks, and digital production/innovation at this year’s Global Conference for Economic Geography (GCEG) in Oxford. The planned sessions will serve to further hone and deepen our understanding of Digital Economies at Global Margins, following more exploratory sessions… Read More »
Some colleagues (Shilad Sen, Heather Ford, Dave Musicant, Oliver Keyes, Brent Hecht) and I have put together a paper for CHI on Barriers to the Localness of Volunteered Geographic Information. The paper asks important questions about both the geographies of information, and the factors that explain those geographies. This work forms an important part of our… Read More »
I am very happy to announce a new paper: ‘Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya’s Outsourcing Sector.’ A pre-print is available below. Graham, M. 2015. Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya’s Outsourcing Sector. Environment and Planning A. (in press). Abstract East Africa has traditionally been characterised by stark barriers to… Read More »
The previous post demonstrated not only that Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa are net-importers of content on Wikipedia (Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, receives 10.7 more edits from the rest of the world than it commits to the rest of the world), but it also showed where those edits come from. This… Read More »
The previous posts about the geography of contributions to Wikipedia showed the varying types of local engagement that different regions have, the primary reason that Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, has such a low proportion of locally created content, and some of the ways that Sub-Saharan Africa’s already extremely low proportion of local contributions is inflated… Read More »
The publisher has kindly allowed us to freely share three chapters of our new book (that I co-wrote with colleagues Dan Hammett and Chasca Twyman): ‘Research and Fieldwork in Development.‘ The book draws on our experiences of doing fieldwork about development and explores both traditional and cutting edge research methods, from interviews and ethnography to… Read More »
During the interviews I conducted in Zimbabwe last October, many participants asked me: “Why pick Harare as a case study? Why not Nairobi or Lagos?” Indeed, Harare’s “ecosystem” is nascent, and the few tech startups that exist are hampered by fundamental market and skill constraints, as discussed in my last post. At the same time,… Read More »