Cape Town Cyberscapes: Khayelitsha and the digital divide

For a recent project with Professor Stan Brunn, we updated and expanded our visualization on the cyberscape of Cape Town, South Africa (the original version from 2009 is here). Again this map was based on the amount of geo-coded material indexed in Google Maps using a fine grid of points approximately 1/10 of a mile apart.

This time around we were particularly interested in Khayelitsha, an informal (and fast growing) township in the Cape Town area. You can see it in the lower right of the map below (it is highlighted and vaguely boomerang shaped). The main take away from the map is the clear difference in amount of geo-coded material in Khayelitsha versus other richer, whiter parts of the region.

Map generated by Jeff Levy

Based on our previous work, this is entirely unsurprising. Nonetheless, it remains useful to visualize these inequalities at the metropolitan level in order to demonstrate that the digital divide in user-generated content operates at a variety of scales, and that even the most populated areas in terms of content are surrounded by areas with very little.

Metropolitan Level Maps of Cyberscapes

Over the next weeks we will begin to post a range of metropolitan level maps of user generated Google placemarks. These maps illustrate one of the "cyberscapes" of these cities, i.e., the cloud of geo-coded data in cyberspace which provides an additional layer for human interaction.

Cyberscapes, consist of multiple layers, e.g., Google placemarks, Wikipedia articles, geotagged Flickr, Twitter Tweets, etc., but the metro maps are limited to user generated placemarks.

The examples of New York's and Capetown's cyberscapes below illustrate how these cyberscapes vary over location and topic. The white box in each map indicates the area for which we have data. Stay tuned....




All User Generated Placemarks
New York City, January 2009


User Generated Placemarks Referencing Crime
New York City, January 2009


All User Generated Placemarks
Cape Town, South Africa, January 2009

User Generated Placemarks Referencing Crime
Cape Town South Africa, January 2009

Upcoming Cites: Baghdad, Beijing, Buenas Aires, Cape Town, Chicago, Dublin, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Lagos, Lexington (KY), London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, New Orleans, New York, Pyongyang, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Tallinn, and Washington D.C.