Location! The Importance of Geo-Data: Mark and Monica at SXSW

For any of our fans who might be in Austin this weekend for SXSW, be sure to check out the panel that Mark and Monica organized this Tuesday. You can check out more info about their panel (along with some visual evidence that they're having fun) below...

What: Location! The Importance of Geo-Data
Where: Sheraton Austin, Capitol ABCD
When: Tuesday, March 12, 11am-noon
Who: Mark and Monica will be joined by Catherine D'Ignazio of MIT and Devin Gaffney of the Oxford Internet Institute. 

The proliferation of location-aware devices and geo-tagged data raises important questions: what will happen as more and more of the content we create online is automatically tagged with locational data? What can we learn from this profusion of geographic information? With this data we can find restaurants, friends and sex partners (a la Grindr.com), visualize inequalities in media attention, develop epidemiological models to predict the spread of diseases, find dissident safe houses in times of political upheaval and coordinate crisis response. But who is contributing data and who is not on the map? How are our social relationships being transformed? What about privacy? What about civic participation? Serious questions are mounting - this panel aims to raise several of them, and explore the transformative power this shift may bring.

New Special Issue of E&PA: Situating Neogeography

The new special issue of Environment and Planning A on neogeography edited by Matthew Wilson and Mark Graham, and featuring a handful of pieces by members of the Floatingsheep team and other friends of the sheep, is now out and available to download. The complete table of contents is below:

Theme issue: Situating neogeography

Guest editors: Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Guest editorial
Situating neogeography
Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Neogeography and volunteered geographic information: a conversation with Michael Goodchild and Andrew Turner
Matthew W. Wilson, Mark Graham

Crowdsourced cartography: mapping experience and knowledge
Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin

Situating performative neogeography: tracing, mapping, and performing “Everyone’s East Lake”
Wen Lin

Neogeography and the delusion of democratisation
Mordechai (Muki) Haklay

Commentary: Political applications of the geoweb: citizen redistricting
Jeremy W. Crampton

Augmented realities and uneven geographies: exploring the geolinguistic contours of the web

Mark Graham, Matthew Zook

Featured graphic: Mapping the geoweb: a geography of Twitter
Mark Graham, Monica Stephens, Scott Hale

p.s. feel free drop Mark a note if you don't have institutional access to journal and would like email copies of any of the articles. 

SheepCamp 2012: Ate Poorthuis on the DOLLY Project

Ate Poorthius provides the first look at an extremely early version of the DOLLY project (Data on Local Life and You) under development at the University of Kentucky. The project is designed to provide a website to map geographic social media and official data to enable users to analyze their local communities.

SheepCamp 2012, Ate Poorthius from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

The DOLLY Project: http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25545876923/the-dolly-data-on-local-life-and-you-project

SheepCamp 2012: Kristen Grady on Mapping Emotion and Experience

The talk by Kristen Grady is Mapping Emotion and Experience and explores the idea of using the geoweb as source material for efforts to map perceptions of local neighborhoods.

SheepCamp 2012, Kristen Grady from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

Kristen's website: http://about.me/Kristen.Grady
On Twitter: @kg_geomapper

SheepCamp 2012: Taylor Shelton on User-Generated Political Geographies

Taylor Shelton's talk, From Online Politics to User-Generated Political Geographies, explores how the geoweb is broadening the kinds of online political action that can take place, in particular the idea that geotagging is a means through which it is possible to more directly engage with particular places.

SheepCamp 2012, Taylor Shelton from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

On Twitter: @jts_geo

SheepCamp 2012: Matt Wilson on Counting Sheep

Matt Wilson's talk, Beyond Counting Sheep, is a wildly amusing review of how studies of actual sheep are conducted, which he then brings back to how we might establish a research agenda for the geoweb.

SheepCamp 2012, Matt Wilson from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

Matt's website: http://www.uky.edu/~mwwi222/
Life After GIS blog: http://lifeaftergis.blogspot.com/
Critical GIS blog: http://criticalgis.blogspot.com/
On Twitter: @wilsonism

Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code

We are very happy to report that a paper that that Mark, Matt, and Andrew Boulton have been working has just been accepted for publication in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

The paper is titled Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code and the abstract is below:

With the increasing prevalence of both geographic information, and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities,’ this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmentations realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised, and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Please send Mark an email if you would like a pre-publication copy. We would welcome any thoughts and comments you have about the paper.

(we'll leave it to you to work out what nyancat has to do with anything in this post)

The geolinguistic contours of digital content in Spain

Following up on our post about augmented realities and uneven geographies, we wanted to post a few more maps that came out of the project.

This first one compares content indexed in Spanish (Castilian) to content in Catalan. Throughout much of the Catalonian region in the Northeast coastal areas there is considerably more content in Catalan than in Spanish.

The second compares content containing the word "love" in English and Spanish. The map reveals that while the Spanish term is much more predominant overall, there are clusters of locations along the Mediterranean coast at which there are more references to the English word.

These agglomerations are centered in tourism regions of Costa Brava, Costa Blanca, and the Andalusian coastline and closer inspection reveals that these concentration of hits are tied primarily to tourism related references to hotels, restaurants and other activities that are target to non-Spanish visitors.

One key thing that this map does then is reveal how the audiencing of augmentations can be alternately directed to a range of groups: ranging from the highly local (e.g. interpersonal relationships) to the global (e.g. tourist sites).

You can read more about the methods we used and our full conclusions in our new paper: "Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web."

Geoweb Density in Israel and Palestine

With the ending of the Spring semester, the Floating Sheep collective is shifting gears for the summer as we attend conferences and engage in fieldwork. Monica is off to Florence, Italy and Paris, France, Mark is heading to Kenya, Matt has a trip to Seoul and Taylor will be going to Worcester, MA. Guess who drew the short straw? :-)

We're also working on completing a number of papers and projects which we'll be highlighting here. One project works on linguistic dimension of the geoweb and user generated content and involves a high resolution examination of differences in language uses specific places. One of our case studies is Israel and Palestine and will analyze the differences in availability of content in Hebrew, Arabic and English.

An initial look at the map is compelling. A preliminary version above shows the locations with at least one result, found using a fine grid of search locations within Google Maps. Note the much smaller number of hits within the West Bank, as compared to the neighboring regions of Israel. More to come as we work through this project...

Note: Our search was limited to the territories of Israel and Palestine as well as a border region surrounding them. This is why there are some grid points in Jordon, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. But because the search did NOT include the entirety of these countries, interpret with care. This is a preliminary map.

Mapping Wikipedia

The following maps are the first of a series that will be made in order to map out the distinct geographies of Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles (about half a million) are either about a place or an event that occurred within a place, and most of these geographic articles handily contain a set of coordinates that can be imported into mapping software.

The map below displays the total number of Wikipedia articles tagged to each country. The country with the most articles is the United States (almost 90,000 articles), while most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterised by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia).

When examining the data normalised by area, an entirely different pattern is evident. Central and Western Europe, Japan and Israel have the most articles per square kilometre, while large countries like Russia and Canada have low ratios of Wikipedia articles per area.


Finally, the data were also mapped out against population. Here countries with small populations and large landmasses rise to the top of the rankings. Canada, Australia and Greenland all have extremely high levels of articles per every 100,000 people. Smaller nations with many noteworthy features or geotaggable events also appear high in the rankings (e.g. Pitcairn or Iceland).

Presences and absences play a fundamental role in shaping how we interpret and interact with the world. The fact that the geographies of Wikipedia content are so uneven therefore leads to worrying conclusions. As we increasingly rely on peer produced information, large parts of the world remain a digital 'terra incognita' (in a similar manner to the ways in which many of those same places were represented on European maps before the 19th Century).

More maps examining the distribution of content in specific languages, and looking in more detail at specific regions will be uploaded soon.

Where in the world is Barack Obama? (and John McCain, too!)

To follow up on our previous map showing the difference in the number of mentions between Barack Obama and John McCain in user-generated Google Maps content prior to the 2008 US Presidential Election, we figured an alternative visualization might be beneficial. The following maps represent the absolute number of mentions of Obama and McCain, respectively, in user-generated placemarks, a disaggregation of the map in our previous post.
This map, much like the previous iteration, shows the vast concentration of user-generated placemarks mentioning Obama in the nation's urban centers. The nation's largest cities - New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago - all appear prominently in this map. Although many of the notable points in both the Obama and McCain maps can be attributed to the large populations (and thus, presumably, a greater level of connectedness), a number of other explanations remain necessary. Despite being the 3rd largest city in the United States, Chicago is also the home of Barack Obama, and it houses the highest concentration of placemarks that mention his name. Significant events also seem assert their presence spatially, as Denver, Colorado, the site of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, is another relatively well-represented area, along with Portland, Oregon, where 70000+ rallied for Obama in May 2008.
Mirroring the already established pattern of urban primacy, much of McCain's presence is concentrated in the nation's urban centers, again including both New York City and the Washington, DC metro area (where McCain has the highest concentration). Unlike Obama, the places McCain is best represented in Google Maps were not necessarily the places he fared the best during either the primary or general election. For example, both Iowa and Michigan, in which McCain receives a nearly uniform number of mentions across the state, voted against him in both the primary and general elections.

Despite some of these patterns of user-generated content merely confirming the primacy of urban areas in virtual representations of the material world, others depart significantly from the predicted spatial clustering. Some areas that voted for McCain feature more prominently in the user-generated representations for Barack Obama, and vice versa, with the number of mentions for Barack Obama being more than double the number of mentions for John McCain. Although not all of the patterns displayed can be easily attributed to a particular causal factor, they only further complicate the relational geographies of the virtual and material world.

Google Mapping the 2008 US Presidential Election

Despite being highly contentious, the 2008 US Presidential Election resulted in an overwhelming electoral college victory by President Barack Obama. This map shows the difference in the number of mentions of Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain in user-generated placemarks indexed by Google. This peer-produced representation is remarkably similar to more official cartographic representations of the final election results, with a couple of notable exceptions.

Because placemark concentration is correlated with large urban populations, even the states that overwhelmingly voted for Senator McCain seem to favor Obama. This concentration of placemarks in urban areas show a significant advantage for Obama, mirroring his successes during the election. Another anomaly is the red clustering in New Hampshire, a state in which Obama defeated McCain 54%-45%. However, this cluster can be explained by McCain's momentum-building primary win in the Granite State, which eventually propelled him on to the GOP nomination.

Following J.B. Harley (1988), we should also take interest in the silences of this map. Here the primarily rural areas contain either no user-generated placemark information or an equal number of mentions for both Obama and McCain, but nonetheless appear uniformly devoid of content.

The Virtual ‘Bible Belt’

The size of the dots in this map represents the relative number of mentions of the word “church” in placemarks uploaded to Google. Results for the word “church” have been divided by the "0" and "1" baseline measure (see the last two blog posts), thus highlighting the parts of North America in which mentions of the word “church” are over- and under- represented. Interestingly, while the “bible belt” in the physical world is often talked about as being synonymous with the American South, the virtual “bible-belt” additionally incorporates large parts of the Midwest. Less surprising is the fact that the Northeast and the West have relatively low scores. The GeoWeb is in many ways a mirror (albeit a distorted one) of the physical places that it represents.

Information Inequality

Following on from the last post, here are some examples of Google placemark inequality:

First of all, China offers perhaps one of the most striking examples of regional disparities. Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta Region all are characterized by heavy information densities. In other words, a lot of information has been created and uploaded about these places. However, much of the rest of the country has very little cyber-presence within the Google Geoweb. In the map below, the height of each bar is an indicator the number of placemarks in each location.

The U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande river offers a similarly striking contrast between high and low information densities.

The border between North and South Korea offers another example of placemark density not being correlated to population density. For obvious reasons, very little information is being created and uploaded about North Korea. In the map below (top), each dot represents 100+ placemarks. Interestingly, there are strong similarities between the map of placemarks on the Korean Peninsula, and satellite maps of lights visible from the Peninsula at night (bottom).

image source: globalsecurity.org

Information inequalities are clearly a defining characteristic of the Geoweb. Some places are highly visible, while others remain a virtual terra incognita. In particular, Africa, South America, and large parts of Asia are being left out of the flurry of mapping that is happing online (e.g. the Tokyo/Yokohama metro region has almost three times as many 0/1 placemark hits (923,034) as the entire continent of Africa (311,770)). Some of the geographical implications of cyber-visibility and invisibility have been examined in part (e.g. here and here), but there is clearly a lot more to be discussed. In particular, because Google allows any keyword to be searched for (not only "0" and "1"), we are able to explore not only the raw amounts of information attached to each place, but also the contents of that information.

Global Placemark Intensity

The following map shows the intensity of google placemarks on a global scale. Using custom-designed software, a dataset was created based on a 1/4 degree grid of all the land mass in the world (roughly 250,000 points). For each point a search was run on the numbers “0” and “1” in order to create a baseline measure of the amount of online geo-referenced content in each place. In the below map, every place with more than 100 placemarks is highlighted with a yellow dot.

The same method was used to create a map that highlights every place on the globe containing more than 1000 placemark hits:

When compared to a map of population density (see the map below), the distinct geographies of placemarks become apparent.

Image source: NASA

These maps suggest that the GeoWeb is far from being a simple mirror of population density or human activity. Online representations of the physical world are highly concentrated in North America, Western Europe, and the more affluent parts of East Asia and Australasia. Maps displaying placemark density on regional and local scales will be explored in more detail in the next post.