In a previous blog post, we’ve mapped the availability of online labour in 2016 [1] using the data provided by the Online Labour Index (OLI) measuring the utilization of online labour platforms [2]. The OLI is based on tracking all projects and tasks posted into a selected sample of platforms, using API access and web scraping.… Read More »
The previous post in this mini-series, Who can access the internet?, looked at internet penetration in country context. In this post, we compare world regions and their access to the internet. This box plot visualization shows the distribution of per-country internet penetration, i.e. the percentage of the population of countries that has accessed the internet… Read More »
This map shows internet penetration, i.e. the percentage of the population of countries that has accessed the internet within a 12 month period, from any device (click for full size). It is an update of our earlier visualizations on this topic. Digital connectivity is often viewed as a vital resource for successful participation in the… Read More »
I am hiring a Digital Geographer to work with me at the Oxford Internet Institute for two years on a full-time contract (we’ll also consider part-time options for the right person). My existing research (much of it with wonderful collaborators) has uncovered highly uneven digital geographies: with some parts of the world far more like to… Read More »
I have a new paper out in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers with Andrea Ballatore and Shilad Sen. In it, we ask (and empirically answer) questions about the the local-ness versus foreign-ness of content that Google serves up to people around the world. You can access the full paper below. Ballatore, A., Graham,… Read More »
We have a new publication out: Ojanperä, S., Graham, M., Straumann, R. K., De Sabbata, S., & Zook, M. (2017). Engagement in the knowledge economy: Regional patterns of content creation with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Information Technologies & International Development, 13, 33–51. It is open access, so please navigate to the journal site to download the… Read More »
We are recruiting a full-time Researcher to work with us at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) on a project that critically assesses the changing landscape of digital entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Researcher will conduct a grounded, comparative empirical study of digital entrepreneurship in African cities. We are interested in the practices of digital entrepreneurship,… Read More »
I’ve been working with Antonello Romano to update some of our older research into the geography of Twitter. Above you can see some maps from a sample of about 2.5 million tweets collected worldwide over 48 hours in October 2016. These are collected using the Twitter streaming API (at most a 1% sample). Because of the… 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 »
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 »