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 »
This is a short post about the research that I lead into digital work and the digital economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. The work that I do (in tandem with my Geonet colleagues) specifically looks at the growth of digital gig economy and the business process outsourcing activities in four African countries namely South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria… Read More »
The latest version of the Economist contains a boldly-titled piece: ‘Mobile phones are transforming Africa‘. The general sense in the piece is that, where connectivity exists, mobile phones and computers are an important contributor to economic growth. However, connectivity is uneven and Africa’s economic development is hampered by a lack of access. This is an… 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 »
Data Scientist/Data Hacker Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford Grade 7: £31,076 – £38,183 p.a. The Oxford Internet Institute is a leading centre for research into individual, collective and institutional behaviour on the Internet. We seek a full-time Data Scientist to work with Professor Mark Graham on two projects: (1) the University of Oxford… 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 »
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 »