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 »
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 »
Stefano and I have put together a short paper that will be forthcoming in Environment and Planning A. The paper focuses on the geography of geographic information, and builds on our work into the uneven geographies of information. It highlights how the very information systems that we use as ‘ground-truth’ are themselves characterised by significant biases. Abstract Gazetteers are… Read More »
I’m happy to report the release of a new report that comes our of a multi-year project to student the Internet and the Business Process Outsourcing sector in East Africa. This work has, in many ways, informed the research design and framing of our current Geonet project. Mann, L., Graham, M. and Friederici, N. 2015.… Read More »
Some colleagues (Shilad Sen, Heather Ford, Dave Musicant, Oliver Keyes, Brent Hecht) and I have put together a paper for CHI on Barriers to the Localness of Volunteered Geographic Information. The paper asks important questions about both the geographies of information, and the factors that explain those geographies. This work forms an important part of our… Read More »
I am very happy to announce a new paper: ‘Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya’s Outsourcing Sector.’ A pre-print is available below. Graham, M. 2015. Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya’s Outsourcing Sector. Environment and Planning A. (in press). Abstract East Africa has traditionally been characterised by stark barriers to… Read More »
The previous post demonstrated not only that Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa are net-importers of content on Wikipedia (Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, receives 10.7 more edits from the rest of the world than it commits to the rest of the world), but it also showed where those edits come from. This… Read More »
The previous posts about the geography of contributions to Wikipedia showed the varying types of local engagement that different regions have, the primary reason that Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, has such a low proportion of locally created content, and some of the ways that Sub-Saharan Africa’s already extremely low proportion of local contributions is inflated… Read More »