The Importance of Being Connected The Internet is ever more important to contemporary economic, social, and political activity. Thus, it is important to map who and where is (and isn’t) connected and can (or cannot) participate. Changing Internet Penetration by World Region In our last post, we primarily discussed how the number of people with Internet… Read More »
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 »
[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 »
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 »
Our previous post contained a few maps that shed light on the geographies of online work. But what we didn’t do there was explore the spatial variance of wages. The cartogram in this post depicts each country as a circle and sizes each country according to dollar inflow to each country during March 2013 (on… Read More »
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 »
The Guardian has just published a long piece about The Digital Language Divide. It features a lot of our work into internet and information geographies. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this many academic Geography journals referenced in a newspaper piece. Head over there and check out the piece.
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 »
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 »
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 »