The relative cost of being connected to the internet underpins the global digital divide. This visualization illustrates the unevenness of the geographies of broadband affordability, the ramifications of which can be seen in some of the other visualizations created by our project, such as the cartogram of the world online and the archipelago of disconnection.… Read More: Mapping Broadband Affordability in 2016 »
The two previous blog posts in this small series discussed Internet population and growing Internet access worldwide. In this post we turn our eyes to territories that are largely left out of global digital connectivity. We look at these areas in terms of Internet penetration (i.e. the share of their population that have “used the Internet… Read More: The Archipelago of Disconnection »
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: Changing Internet Access »
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 World Online »
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.
The first stage of the Geonet project aiming to broadly understand the diversity of new practices in Sub-Saharan Africa’s knowledge economy is off to a good start. Beyond collecting data about the quaternary sector, IT-enabled services, and knowledge production in the region, we have started drafting the first articles. We will start by reviewing the… Read More: First Geonet Publications Start Taking Shape »
Visualisation of the global submarine fibre-optic cable network
Findings This visualization speaks to one of the core themes of the global digital divide: the relative cost of being connected to the Internet. The geographies of the phenomenon could hardly be more clear, and its consequences are illustrated in many other visualizations published on our website, from the cartogram of the Internet population to… Read More: Broadband affordability »
Google doesn’t seem to be characterised by the massive geographic inequalities that characterise many other types of digital information, but it still presents a very selective representation of our planet
Data This graphic illustrates the 2013 Open Data Index published by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The index has been calculated for 70 countries, based on 700 datasets, concerning 10 different topics, ranging from public transport to government spending. Each country has been evaluated on each topic, which in turn has been assessed on nine criteria,… Read More: Open Data Index »