With the rise of online work platforms like Odesk, Elance, and Freelancer, a lot of work can, in theory, be done from anywhere on the planet. This has led to a lot of hopes that digital work can be used as a tool of development: bringing jobs (and income) to parts of the world where… Read More: Mapping the geographies of digital work »
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: New paper – Mapping Information Wealth and Poverty: The Geography… »
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: The Internet and Business Process Outsourcing in East Africa »
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: New paper: “Barriers to the Localness of Volunteered Geographic Information” »
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: New paper: ‘Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in… »
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: Informational Magnetism on Wikipedia: mapping edit focus »
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: Informational Magnetism on Wikipedia: geographic networks of edits »
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: Sample chapters available from new book ‘Research and Fieldwork in… »
The previous two posts about the geography of contributions to Wikipedia showed both the different types of local engagement that different regions have, and the primary reason that Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, has such a low proportion of locally created content. However, while the graphic in our previous post (also included above) gives a… Read More: Digging deeper into the localness of participation in Sub-Saharan African… »
An earlier post showed how different parts of the world have very different levels of engagement with local content in Wikipedia. The data presented there showed that a majority of content about North America and Europe are created in those regions, whilst only a small minority of content about Latin America, the Middle East and… Read More: Explaining locally-contributed content in Wikipedia about Sub-Saharan Africa »