Jun 26
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Philip Leverhulme Award: Internet Geographies
I am extremely happy to report the news that I have been awarded one of the 2016 Philip Leverhulme prizes!
I hope to use the resources offered by the Leverhulme Trust to extend my research into information and internet geographies. This line of research asks who and where is made more powerful and given more voice by the new digital layers of place that augment the places that we live in, and who and where tends to get silenced and excluded. In previous research we have seen some of the ways in which the digital can amplify and strengthen those already in global informational cores. But, as ever more people get connected to the internet, we need to know more about what sort of change we're seeing over time.
Going forwards, this will mean hiring a postdoc trained in some flavour of computational social science/ GIS/ big data/ quantitative geography to work with me I'll be posting a job ad soon, but in the meantime please get in touch if you're interested in working with me on such topics.
It really is a massive honour to have this award and to have the opportunity to use it to further some of our ongoing work. None of this would have been possible without the help of some of my brilliant and smart collaborators over the last few years. As part of the immediate group of researchers that I've supervised at the OII, I've had the luck to work closely with Sanna Ojanpera, Nicolas Friederici, Amir Anwar, Isis Hjorth, Alex Wood, Chris Foster, Stefano De Sabbata, Ralph Straumann, Heather Ford, Joe Shaw, Nisa Haji Ibrahim, Devin Gaffney, Charlotte Smart, Caludio Calvino, Ahmed Medhat, David Palfrey, Richard Farnbrough, Ning Wang, Tessy Onaji, and David Peter Simon: all of whom have played an important part in designing, carrying out, and publishing our scholarship. I also have a broader network of collaborators that I've also had the fortune to directly research and publish with: Matt Zook, Monica Stephens, Taylor Shelton, Ate Poorthuis, Bill Dutton, Bernie Hogan, Vili Lehdonvirta, Helena Barnard, Tim Waema, Charles Katua, Casper Andersen, Shilad Sen, Andrea Ballatore, Grant Blank, Scott Hale, Taha Yasseri, Illhem Allagui, Andrew Boulton, Jaz Choi, Han-Teng Liao, Felix Akorli, Grace Illah, Claude Bizimana, Havard Haarstad, Ralph Schroeder, Greg Taylor, Matt Wilson, Jeremy Crampton, Stann Brunn, Sean Gorman, Eduardo Lopez, Iginio Gagliardone, Emmanouil Tranos, Jim Thatcher, Dorothea Kleine, Richard Heeks, Padraig Carmody, and Rina Ghose (apologies if I have missed anyone out).
Just typing out that list of names made me realise how truly incredible the last few years have been, and what a privilege it is to get to work with so many people from such a diverse range of backgrounds. And this list doesn't even include all of the other people who have helped along the way (such as the ever-helpful support staff at Oxford).
I didn't intend for such a long post about this award, but once I started to write it became clear that there is no way to say 'thanks' for this award without thanking all of the people in my network who actually made it possible.
Mark
The geography of Wikipedia edits
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 the number of edits to every language version of Wikipedia coming from all countries and territory in the last quarter of 2014 (the most recent full set of data available), the above maps show that the geography of participation on Wikipedia is highly uneven.
Stark inequalities are readily apparent: Europe and North America contribute 35.2% and 23.6% of Wikipedia’s edits respectively. In contrast, Africa contributes only. 1.3% of the world’s total (although it is worth noting that a few years ago, Africa’s contribution was consistently less than 1%). In fact, contributions from Africa are so low that there are actually more edits that originate in the Netherlands than the whole continent combined.
While some of these disparities can be explained by the total number of Internet users in a country, even normalizing by the percent of the population online (the second map) results in Africa still registering far fewer edits than would be expected (see our paper on this topic for detailed statistical analyses).
These geographies of Wikipedia edits because they represent how people from different parts of the world get to represent each other. Some people and places continue to have little voice and continue to be left off the map.
For more on this topic, see:
Graham, M., Straumann, R., Hogan, B. 2016. Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 105(6) 1158-1178. doi:10.1080/00045608.2015.1072791.(pre-publication version here)
Graham, M. 2015. Information Geographies and Geographies of Information New Geographies 7 159-166.
Graham, M., De Sabbata, S., Zook, M. 2015. Towards a study of information geographies:(im)mutable augmentations and a mapping of the geographies of information Geo: Geography and Environment.2(1) 88-105. doi:10.1002/geo2.8
Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K., and Medhat, A. 2014. Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 104(4). 746-764. (pre-publication version here)
Or a recent talk I gave:
New paper: Provenance, Power and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital Geographies
Heather Ford and I have a new commentary coming out in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. As places are ever-more augmented by digital content, and the internet becomes ever-more structured by linked data and the semantic web, we ask what this means for the ways in which people interact with everyday places. Specifically, we highlight our concern that non-specialists will have ever-less control over the cities and towns in which they live.
Full citation
Ford, H. and Graham, M. 2016. Provenance, Power, and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. doi:10.1177/0263775816668857 (pre-publication version here).
Abstract
Places are not only material but are also informational. Place is made up of memories, stories, information and histories. What is Johannesburg? It is a city of trees and buildings, concrete and sand. It is also constituted by a myriad statements made by multiple actors, some of which are represented by information in books, in census reports, in tourism leaflets and photographs (Graham et al., 2015). Today, much of that information is digital and available on the Internet. Spatial information is either digitized from analogue sources or in increasingly “born digital” (created as digital data rather than scanned or translated into digital formats) and can take a range of forms such as geotagged images on Instagram, hashtags on Twitter, annotations on Google Maps and Wikipedia articles, in addition to official data from government and corporate sources.
In addition to the enhanced ability of ordinary people to contribute to the digital representations of cities (Goodchild, 2007; Graham, 2013; Hacklay et. al., 2008), we have also seen a growing centralization in the control of platforms that mediate everyday life. Silicon Valley-based Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia have become the most-used websites and digital platforms in most countries, and some scholars (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000; König, 2014; Morozov, 2013) warn of the dangers of increasing centralization and commercialization of the guiding forces of the Internet.
The power yielded by search engines, in particular, has come under increased scrutiny by researchers in recent years. Introna and Nissenbaum (2000: 1), for example, have shown how search engines “systematically exclude... certain sites, and certain types of sites, in favor of others”. Eli Pariser (2012) argues that search engines drive the construction of “filter bubbles” that only show users information that they agree with. Our increasing reliance on search engines like Google constitutes what Siva Vaidhyanathan (2012) refers to as an “outsourcing” of judgement to Google, particularly because search engines have become critical to the public health of the Internet (König, 2014). As place becomes increasingly digital and the digital becomes increasingly spatialized, Graham and Zook (2013) have shown that informational filter bubbles can manifest into material divisions and barriers.
The goal of this paper is to highlight a new problem. As digital data becomes increasingly abstracted into short data statements that can be shared and interconnected according to logics of “the semantic web” or “linked data, the concentration of power in the hands of search engines has been enhanced still further. We argue that the increased control of search engines over human knowledge has been garnered due to the loss of provenance, or source information, in data sharing algorithms. When the links between information and their sources are severed, users’ capabilities to actively interrogate facts about the world are significantly diminished. Paul Groth (2013) has noted that the loss of provenance information in semantic web projects is a significant challenge (c.f. Groth, 2013) but we explore the socio-spatial implications of this technological change by focusing on what the loss of provenance information means for how people experience and represent place.
We highlight the origins and consequences of the loss of provenance information in the context of the contemporary moment in which the web is being significant re-engineered. What first appears to be merely a simple engineering problem turns out to be indicative of the growing commercialization of the web, a problem that stems from the dominance of an epistemology that sees knowledge about the world as essentially reducible to depoliticized data that is natural and obvious, rather than what it actually is: a re-constructed representation that obscures the origins of information and, in so doing, reduces the ability of ordinary users to interrogate that data. Despite the promise of the move towards a more semantic web (Egenhofer, 2002) for more precise digital representations of place, there has been a parallel decrease in the capabilities of people to interrogate and control that data.
Further reading
Ford, H., and Graham, M. 2016. Semantic Cities: Coded Geopolitics and the Rise of the Semantic Web. In Code and the City. eds. Kitchin, R., and Perng, S-Y. London: Routledge. 200-214.
Graham, M. 2015. Why Does Google Say Jerusalem is the Capital of Israel? Slate.com Nov 30, 2015
Graham, M. 2013. The Virtual Dimension. In Global City Challenges: debating a concept, improving the practice. eds. M. Acuto and W. Steele. London: Palgrave. 117-139.
Graham, M. 2012. The Problem with Wikidata. The Atlantic Apr 6, 2012.
Mapping the EU Referendum on Twitter
With the British Eu Referendum vote looming, we decided to take a look at what the sentiment for the remain vs. the leave vote looks like on Twitter.
The map above takes all geotagged tweets that were sent in great Britain between April 15 and June 14 and filters them by pro-leave hashtags (#leave, #britainout, #voteleave, #betteroffout, #no2eu) and pro-remain ones (#hugabrit, #strongerin, #bremain, #pleasedontgouk, #voteremain, #yes2eu, #betteroffin, #ukineu). It was put together by myself and my Oxford Internet Institute colleague Graham McNeil.
When doing this, we see that most of Great Britain’s Twitter users are far more likely to be using leave rather than remain-related terms. Indeed Scotland is the only part of the country with more remain tweets than leave ones.
London and Yorkshire come close to parity, with only slightly more leave sentiment than remain sentiment. But the rest of the country is awash in leave tweets. Two parts of the country are even home to twice as many leave tweets as remain ones.
Because we know exactly when each of these tweets was sent, we could easily see how particular events in the last few months sparked leave and remain activity in different parts of the country (however, this is work for another day).
There are some obvious weaknesses with this approach: we may be missing some key hashtags; use of hashtags isn’t necessarily a good predictor of sentiment (although with the tags we used, I’d argue that it isn’t necessarily a terrible one); and a single tweet could be counted in both camps if it included at least one remain and one leave hashtag.
If this map does accurately predict the outcome of the forthcoming referendum, and Scotland is indeed the only part of the country favouring a remain vote, it is likely that we’ll be seeing another referendum soon.
New publication - Using Geotagged Digital Social Data in Geographic Research
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 can digital social data be mapped for visual analysis, it is also useful to use a range of quantitative methods to understand relationships between different subsets of the data. In addition, closer, systematic readings via qualitative methods of social data provides insights of particular people’s perceptions and experiences of the world around them. Thus, while making maps is often the starting point for geographers working with this kind of research, it is rarely the end point. You can see the chapter on Google Books, or download a pre-publication version below. Poorthuis, A., Zook, M., Shelton, T., Graham, M, and Stephens, M. 2016. Using Geotagged Digital Social Data in Geographic Research. In Key Methods in Geography. eds. Clifford, N., French, S., Cope, M., and Gillespie, T. London: Sage. 248-269.
Geographies of Information Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (new publication)
A new publication of ours in now out in The African Technopolitan.
Graham, M., and Foster, C. 2016. Geographies of Information Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa, The African Technopolitan. 5 78-85.
The piece draws on some of our previous empirical research to reflect on what connectivity means to inclusion in the ‘network society.’ Connectivity certainly isn’t a sufficient condition for inclusion and equity, and we need to ask whether it is a necessary one.
Connectivity, rather, tends to be an amplifier: one that often reinforces rather than reduces inequality. We therefore need to move towards deeper critical socio-economic interrogations of the barriers or structures that limit activity and reproduce digital inequality. The categorisations developed in the paper offer an empirically-driven and systematic way to understand these barriers in more detail.
The hidden biases of Geodata
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 have done some work to understand the biases embedded in the databases that we use to create geographic ground truths.
I've written up some of the findings for a post in The Guardian (Graham, M. 2015. The Hidden Biases of Geodata. The Guardian Apr 28, 2015.), and you can read more about the research in a pre-print of our forthcoming paper:
Graham, M. and De Sabbata, S. 2016. Mapping Information Wealth and Poverty: The Geography of Gazetteers. Environment and Planning A. (in press).