My colleagues Nicolas Friederici, Sanna Ojanperä, and I have recently finished a paper in which we analyse ‘Grand Visions’ of how Internet connectivity affects development in Africa. In the paper, we contrast these visions with the actually available empirical evidence to support those claims. You will be able to read our full conclusions in the paper below: Friederici, N.… Read More »
Flickr is one of the world’s most popular photo sharing websites, and represents a key way in which people form impressions about different parts of our planet. In other words it is an important part of the digital augmentations of places. Antonello Romano has been doing some great work mapping content from the site, and… Read More »
Wikipedia has a geography. This is something that my colleagues and I have explored previously in a variety of scholarship. For a new book on ‘Open Development’, my colleague Stefano De Sabbata and I decided to update our most recent paper about information geographies with the above maps of Wikipedia. The basic underlying inequalities haven’t changed. Using… Read More »
We live in a world in which it is increasingly possible to use online labour markets to outsource work directly to any corner of the planet. Millions of new jobs are thus available for workers in some of the poorest parts of the planet. But the fact that we now have millions of people around… Read More »
Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. April 5-9, 2017, Boston, MA The proposed Digital Geographies Working Group of the RGS/IBG and the proposed Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG would like to invite submissions to a series of paper sessions and panels for the 2017 meeting of the American Association of… Read More »
A short video interview that I did about digital labour markets at the ETUI conference on ‘Shaping the New World of Work’.
In this year’s Development Studies Association Conference, we will present a paper titled ‘Measuring the Hidden Contours of the Global Knowledge Economy with a Digital Index’. In this paper we propose a Digital Knowledge Economy Index, which combines traditional data sources with bespoke data on capacities and skills (measured via content-creation and participation on digital platforms)… Read More »
Factories can’t run, farms can’t produce, mines can’t be mined, supermarkets can’t be stocked, and call centres can’t accept calls if workers don’t go to work. Even though the decks are often stacked against workers, the basic fact that workers can withdraw their labour with strikes, and encourage others to do so with picket lines,… Read More »
This chapter outlines how one might utilize the massive amounts of web-based, geographically-referenced digital social data for geographical research. Because much of these data are user-generated and produced through social media platforms, we also focus on the pitfalls associated with such sources and the benefits of a mixed methods approach to these data. Not only… Read More »
For decades, large firms have been outsourcing and offshoring jobs. Work flowed from developed economies to developing ones, where wages were lower and regulations were of a lighter touch. Europeans and North Americans lost jobs, and Asians, South Americans, and Africans gained them. But the nature of these processes meant that business activities had to… Read More »