New paper accepted in Landscape and Urban Planning!

We're very happy to announce that three-fifths of the collective have recently had a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, as part of a special issue on critical visualization edited by Annette Kim, Katherine Foo, Emily Gallagher and Ian Bishop. Taylor, Ate and Matt's paper, "Social media and the city: rethinking urban socio-spatial inequality using user-generated geographic information", builds on our earlier calls to go 'beyond the geotag' in order to develop alternative conceptual and methodological approaches for the use of geotagged social media data, drawing attention to the variety and complexity of socio-spatial processes embedded in such data.

Using Louisville, Kentucky as a case study, our paper examines the socio-spatial imaginary of the '9th Street Divide', separating the city's largely poor and African-American West End from its more affluent and predominantly white areas to the east.

While a more conventional analysis of these inequalities as reflected in geotagged tweets might look a bit like the map above, we argue that such maps of isolated, atomistic dots do little to reveal the nature of inequality between places, and do a disservice to the data itself by stripping it of much of its context. So, rather than just arguing that the West End seems to have a relative lack of tweeting activity compared to other parts of the city -- and thus deducing that the digital divide is persistently reflected in this data -- we put these different areas of the city in comparison to one another in order to understand how both individuals and groups move through the city and (re)produce landscapes of segregation and inequality through their everyday practices and mobilities.

Using a novel method for analyzing this data, we attempt to demonstrate how the idea of the West End as a separate and apart from the rest of the city is challenged by the realities of people's everyday movements. Rather than being isolated, West End residents are actually much more spatially mobile within the city, while East End residents tend to be much more confined to their own neighborhoods.

So while the 9th Street Divide remains a key way of understanding and highlighting the spatial dimension of urban inequality in Louisville, we tend to think that this framing actually reinforces the understanding of the West End as a kind of 'problem area'. And while only a partial contribution to this argument, we hope that understanding the West End through its relations with, and connections to, other spaces and places ameliorates the vilification and pathologizing that is so common in discussion of racial and socio-economic inequality in highly segregated cities.

Ultimately, we hope this paper can allow for an alternative conceptualization of urban inequality in Louisville and the West End, while also demonstrating the utility of a situated and contextualized, mixed methods approach to the study of geotagged social media data, emphasizing the full range of socio-spatial processes embedded in this data that can't be captured in just a single point on a map.

The full citation for our paper is below:

Shelton, Taylor, Ate Poorthuis, and Matthew Zook. (Forthcoming) Social media and the city: rethinking urban socio-spatial inequality using user-generated geographic information. Landscape and Urban Planning.

Geographies of Grits

Throughout the history of this blog, we’ve mapped any number of geographically-specific social phenomenon. But often times, we’ve been drawn to mapping things associated with the American South, whether because it’s arguably the most distinctive cultural region in the United States or because all of us have lived on its outskirts for some time or another, we’re not quite sure. But if you had to choose just one region to map using social media data, the South is probably a good place to start.

Continuing this persistent obsession, we decided to map one of the South’s most prominent culinary traditions: grits. As such, we collected all geotagged tweets in the United States from June 2012 to September 2014 mentioning the strange (read: awesome) ground-corn porridge-like dish, totaling around 64,000 tweets. Keeping in mind that geotagged tweets still represent only around 2-3% of all tweets, this figure represents a breakfast table conversation of several thousand tweets per day, and highlights the ability of this kind of social media data to provide insight into a particular cultural phenomenon that is relatively more difficult (though certainly still possible) to measure through more conventional means.

The map below represents a normalized visualization of grits-related tweeting throughout the continental United States. Using a grid of hexagonal cells, the number of grits tweets were normalized using an odds ratio by a random sample of tweets from the same time period. In this measure, a value of 1 signifies that there are exactly as many grits tweets in a given location as one would expect according to the baseline measures of tweeting, with values greater than 1 indicating that there is a greater predominance of grits tweets than one would otherwise expect. In effect, this analysis cuts out the potential for these maps to simply reproduce maps of population density, honing in on the actual phenomena at hand.

Mapping the 'Grits Belt'

Indeed, here you can see that while the South in general demonstrates a general preference for grits over the rest of the country, it is actually a relatively small number of coastal localities in the low country that have the strongest connection to grits through social media. While New Orleans represents something of an outlier in the far corner of the South, there is also a consistent band of concentrated grits tweeting stretching from just north of Charleston, South Carolina down through Beaufort (though seemingly skipping over Hilton Head, a popular tourist destination that might be understood as relationally disconnected from much of the rest of the distinctly southern culture surrounding it) and Savannah, Georgia, all the way to Brunswick.

In general, this map demonstrates the general potential of this kind of method to locate geographically-specific cultural practices in space, as well as the notion that these kinds of maps can reinforce the persistent connectedness between virtual representations of the world and people’s everyday lives and material practices. But there is more that we can do with this data by putting it into relation with other datasets. The map below does just that, by comparing our existing dataset of tweets mentioning ‘grits’ with all geotagged tweets during the same time period that mention ‘oats’. We again employ the odds ratio measure, but rather than comparing using a baseline population of tweets, we use the oats-related tweets to normalize our values. In this analysis, values less than 1 signify a preference for oats, while values greater than 1 represent a tendency towards grits. Not only does this comparison continue to affirm the identification of a ‘grits belt’ in the South, but it also highlights other areas of the country – an ‘oats oval’ stretching from the Northeast to the Midwest – that stand in stark contrast to the southeast in terms of digital porridge discourse.

Grits vs. Oats: The Emergence of the 'Oats Oval'

Thus a key avenue for analysis of digital social datasets is examining the relationships between individual users or individual messages. It is also possible to identify relationships between places, based on visits or tweets made by the same person in these different places. While we’ve already identified the South as the key locus of grits-related tweeting in the United States, it’s important to not simply ignore all of the other data points available to us that are just not quite as spatially clustered. Indeed, given the strong connections between the cultural practice of grits preparation and consumption and the vernacular region of the South, we might hypothesize that even those people tweeting about grits outside of the South are likely to have some kind of connection to the South, perhaps as a kind of diasporic community now living in other parts of the country, or even just traveling for a short period of time.

Relational 'Gritspace'

To examine this relationship, we begin by looking for users in our original dataset that have tweeted about grits more than once – yielding a total of 8,958 users – then drawing a line from the tweet locations in chronological order. The resulting map below clearly shows that there is a strong relational connection with the South for those who tweet about grits from other places, even for cities like Los Angeles that are quite distant in absolute space, as well as in terms of cultural identity. Indeed, the gravity of grits appears quite strong, as of the users tweeting about grits from outside the South, approximately 55% of these also sent tweets from inside the cluster identified in the first map in this post. So even for those grits-obsessed tweeters outside of the South, the pull of porridge remains strong… and, we would expect, even stronger when you throw a bit of cheese and jalapenos in, too.

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If you’re interested in reading more about the methods used to make these maps, and about the utility of mapping geotagged social media data more generally, you can check out the following pre-publication version of a forthcoming book chapter from which this work was drawn:

Poorthuis, A., M. Zook, T. Shelton, M. Graham and M. Stephens. Forthcoming. "Using Geotagged Digital Social Data in Geographic Research". In Key Methods in Geography, eds. N. Clifford, S. French, M. Cope and T. Gillespie. London: Sage.

Abstract: 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.

New Book Chapter on the Geographies of Beer on Twitter

We're pleased to announce a new publication by members of the Floatingsheep team. Just released is "Offline Brews and Online Views: Exploring the Geography of Beer on Twitter", a new book chapter written by Matt and Ate that analyzes the geographies of beer-related tweeting activity. Published in a new edited collection from Springer appropriately- and straightforwardly-entitled The Geography of Beer, Matt and Ate's paper -- the latest in Floatingsheep's long line of investigations into the geographies of beer -- shows that geotagged tweets about beer, and other alcoholic beverages for that matter, are reflective of people's offline consumption preferences.

Using a database of one million geotagged tweets from June 2012 to May 2013 containing the keywords "wine", "beer" or the names of a range of light or cheaper beers within the continental US, some clear regional variations in alcoholic beverage preference are detected. For instance, when comparing tweets referencing "wine" to those referencing "beer", wine-related tweets tend to be more dominant along both the east and west coasts of the US. But this kind of variation is present even when comparing different brands of light beer. While Bud Light is more popular in the eastern and southeastern US, Coors Light tends to dominate the west coast, with Miller Lite and Busch Light being preferred in the midwest and Great Plains. The dominance of these brands in virtual space is no surprise, as they also dwarf the competition in actual sales.

But these regional variations are even more distinct when one looks at locally- or regionally-specific brands. While some of these cheaper (which is not to say less delicious!) beers have reached a national or even international market, others remain popular in only a very limited region, owing either to local tradition or simply limited distribution outside of their home-markets. Nonetheless, by mapping the concentrations of geotagged tweets referencing each of these brands, we're able to uncover these regional particularities, as is shown in the map below, taken from Matt and Ate's chapter.

Aggregated Geographies of Tweets referencing Regional 'Cheap' Beers

From Sam Adams in New England to Yuengling in Pennsylvania to Grain Belt and Schlitz in the upper Midwest, these beers are quite clearly associated with particular places. Other beers, like Hudepohl and Goose Island are interesting in that they stretch out from their places of origin -- Cincinnati and Chicago, respectively -- to encompass a much broader region where there tend to be fewer regionally-specific competitors, at least historically. On the other hand, beers like Lone Star, Corona and Dos Equis tend to have significant overlap in their regional preferences, with all three having some level of dominance along the US-Mexico border region, but with major competition between these brands in both Arizona and Texas.

Beer, like many other social practices, may be millennia-old, but the socio-spatial practices associated with it – checking into a brewery, posting a review, geotagging a photo – continue to evolve with technological change. As such, this kind of data provides an important way to capture these socio-spatial practices and preferences, while demonstrating how even in an era of supposed globalization and homogenization, regional histories and cultures continue to be reflected online in important ways.

If you don't have access and would like to read more about this, please contact Matt at zook [at] uky [dot] edu for a pre-publication version of the chapter. Bottoms up!

The full citation for Matt and Ate's chapter is below:

Zook, M. and A. Poorthuis. 2014. "Offline Brews and Online Views: Exploring the Geography of Beer Tweets". In The Geography of Beer, eds. M. Patterson and N. Hoalst-Pullen. Springer. pp. 201-209.

Mapping Zombies Book Chapter Now Available!

Not often do we get to write about zombies, internet geography, German Wikipedia articles, cats, and goatse.cx all in the same chapter. But that is precisely what we got to do when working on our newest book chapter "Mapping Zombies".

Feel free to download a pre-publication version of the paper below:

Graham, M., Shelton, T., and Zook, M. 2013. Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Pre-Apocalyptic Analysis and Post-Apocalyptic Survival. In Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education. Eds. Whelan, A., Walker, R., and Moore, C. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Abstract:

Zombies exist, though perhaps not in an entirely literal sense. But the existence, even the outright prevalence, of zombies in the collective social imaginary gives them a ‘realness’, even though a zombie apocalypse has yet to happen. The zombie trope exists as a means through which society can playfully, if somewhat grimly and gruesomely, discover the intricacies of humanity’s relationship with nature and the socially constructed world that emerges from it. In this chapter, we present an analysis of the prevalence of zombies and zombie-related terminology within the geographically grounded parts of cyberspace, known as the geoweb (see also Haklay et al. 2008 and Graham 2010). Just as zombies provide a means to explore, imagine and reconstruct the world around us, so too do the socio-technical practices of the geoweb provide a means for better understanding human society (Shelton et al. 2013; Graham and Zook 2011; Zook et al. 2010; Zook and Graham 2007). In short, looking for and mapping geo-coded references to zombies on the web provides insight on the memes, mechanisms and the macabre of the modern world. Using a series of maps that visualize the virtual geographies of zombies, this chapter seeks to comprehend the ways in which both zombies and the geoweb are simultaneously reflective of and employed in producing new understandings of our world.

New Article Published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science

We're happy to report that our article -- Beyond the geotag: situating 'big data' and leveraging the potential of the geoweb -- has been published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science as part of a special issue on "Mapping Cyberspace and Social Media", edited by Ming-Hsing Tsou and Michael Leitner. The article was written collaboratively amongst the five sheep, as well as Jeremy Crampton and Matt Wilson of the University of Kentucky. The abstract and full citation for the paper are below:

This article presents an overview and initial results of a geoweb analysis designed to provide the foundation for a continued discussion of the potential impacts of ‘big data’ for the practice of critical human geography. While Haklay's (2012) observation that social media content is generated by a small number of ‘outliers’ is correct, we explore alternative methods and conceptual frameworks that might allow for one to overcome the limitations of previous analyses of user-generated geographic information. Though more illustrative than explanatory, the results of our analysis suggest a cautious approach toward the use of the geoweb and big data that are as mindful of their shortcomings as their potential.

More specifically, we propose five extensions to the typical practice of mapping georeferenced data that we call going ‘beyond the geotag’: (1) going beyond social media that is explicitly geographic; (2) going beyond spatialities of the ‘here and now’; (3) going beyond the proximate; (4) going beyond the human to data produced by bots and automated systems, and (5) going beyond the geoweb itself, by leveraging these sources against ancillary data, such as news reports and census data. We see these extensions of existing methodologies as providing the potential for overcoming existing limitations on the analysis of the geoweb.

The principal case study focuses on the widely reported riots following the University of Kentucky men's basketball team's victory in the 2012 NCAA championship and its manifestation within the geoweb. Drawing upon a database of archived Twitter activity – including all geotagged tweets since December 2011–we analyze the geography of tweets that used a specific hashtag (#LexingtonPoliceScanner) in order to demonstrate the potential application of our methodological and conceptual program. By tracking the social, spatial, and temporal diffusion of this hashtag, we show how large databases of such spatially referenced internet content can be used in a more systematic way for critical social and spatial analysis.

Crampton, J.W., M. Graham, A. Poorthuis, T. Shelton, M. Stephens, M.W. Wilson and M. Zook. 2013. Beyond the Geotag: Situating ‘Big Data’ and Leveraging the Potential of the Geoweb. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 40(2): 130-139.

If you'd like the final publication version and don't have institutional access to the article, feel free to email any of us to get a copy.

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. 

New article on Religious Cyberscapes published in The Professional Geographer!

In what will go down as a shining example of need for patience when dealing with the world of academic publishing, Taylor, Matt and Mark's article on religious cyberscapes has finally been published in the print version of The Professional Geographer... and one issue earlier than expected at that!

While the online-only version has been up for just over a year already, we're happy to have this paper finally reach it's conclusion, nearly two years after its acceptance and well over two and a half years from the time we started working on it.

If you have institutional access, you can find the article on The Professional Geographer's website. If not, get in touch with one of us and we'll satisfy your sheepish craving.

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)

Slides from Floatingsheep Talks at the AAG

We've posted the talks (or, more accurately, the Powerpoint slides) of the FloatingSheep collective presented at the 2012 NYC AAG below. Many of them are image rich and text poor, so please contact the presenter if you have any questions.

The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes

And, as always, you can download the full version of this paper from the journal's website if you have access, or get a prepublication version of this paper directly from us.

Gendering the GeoWeb: Analysing demographic difference in user generated geographic information

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

Please get in touch with Mark if you'd like a pre-publication version of this paper. It will be appearing in Environment and Planning A.

Volunteered Geographic Information: Does it have a future?

Gazing on the High Line Park: The production and consumption of tourist place

Debriefing Iron Sheep

New Article on Wikileaks Published in Antipode

For those interested in Wikileaks, a new publication (co-authored with Sue Roberts and Anna Secor) based on the Wikileaks mapping we did in December 2010 is now available. Drop me a line if you don't have library access.

Critical Infrastructure: Mapping the Leaky Plumbing of US Hegemony
by Sue Roberts, Anna Secor, Matthew Zook
Antipode Volume 44, Issue 1, pages 5–9, January 2012

Geopolitical mappings of the world can say as much about the vulnerabilities of hegemony as about aspirations to power. Mappings of US geostrategic interests are no exception. Recent national security priorities, the details of which were revealed in leaked diplomatic cables, include the identification of sites around the world deemed critical to the US (US Department of State 2009). From beaches where trans-oceanic cables emerge, to factories making vaccines, to maritime routes and ports, sites of particular vulnerability are assembled. The cartographic effect of this assemblage is a partial and highly distributed mapping of the fragile material underpinnings of US power.

Geographies of the World's Knowledge

Two of the Floatingsheep collective have recently completed a project titled "Geographies of the World's Knowledge." This work, which has just gone live on the new Oxford Internet Institute data visualisation site, uses a range of visualisation techniques to map literacy, Internet penetration, the world's newspapers, academic knowledge, Flickr, Wikipedia, and user-generated content indexed in Google. A sample of three of the maps are below, or a full PDF of the publication can be downloaded at the following link:

Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World's Knowledge. London, Convoco! Edition.

Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part III: Zombies in the Academy

So you're probably wondering why we've resurrected the zombie series... we've got zombies on the brain (get it?! zombies?! resurrected?! on the brain?!). Well, we've just finished a chapter for a book called Zombies in the Academy which is scheduled to be coming out by the end of the year, is edited by Andrew Whelan, Chris Moore and Ruth Walker.

Our chapter entitled "Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Digital Pre-apocalyptic Analysis and Post-apocalyptic Survival" is relatively short (3000 words) but intellectually rich -- exactly the kind of material we like to put on FloatingSheep.

...and let's be honest, the past two weeks have been a bit slow with original posts -- almost congealing in a sticky pool of guest maps and Hungarian folk dancing.

THIS. STOPS. NOW.

The publisher and editors of Zombies in the Academy are willing to let us post some excerpts from the chapter in serialized (as opposed to cerealized form, which would actually be a nice project for our DIY readers), and somewhat adapted, form. We'll also be posting some maps and analysis that didn't end up making it into the submitted chapter. This post, however, sets the stage for the maps to come, as well as parts I and II of this series from a few weeks ago. So, gentle reader, enjoy.....

Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Digital Pre-apocalyptic Analysis and Post-apocalyptic Survival

by Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook

Zombies exist, though perhaps not in an entirely literal sense. But the existence, even the outright prevalence, of zombies in the collective social imaginary gives them a realness, even though a zombie apocalypse has yet to happen. The zombie trope exists as a means through which society can playfully, if somewhat grimly and gruesomely, discover the intricacies of the humanity’s relationship with nature and the socially constructed world that emerges from it.

In this chapter, we present an analysis of the prevalence of zombies and zombie-related terminology within the geographically grounded parts of cyberspace, known as the geoweb. Just as zombies provide a means to explore, imagine and reconstruct the world around us, so too do the socio-technical practices of the geoweb provide a means for better understanding human society. In short, looking for geo-coded references to zombies on the Internet provides insight on the memes, mechanisms and macabres of the modern world. Using a series of maps that visualize the virtual geographies of zombies, this chapter seeks to comprehend the ways in which both zombies and the geoweb are simultaneously reflective of and employed in producing new understandings of our world, albeit with a slightly more references to blood, gore and decapitation than is the norm for academic publications.

Just as the zombie metaphor has been deployed in recent years to explain everything from epidemiology to surviving graduate school, neoliberalism to colonialism, even the themes of life, death and resurrection in Christian thought. Needless to say, zombies are a flexible metaphor that can be adapted to explain any number of social phenomena. And while virtual, rather than metaphorical, the user-generated content of the geoweb represents a similarly flexible means of understanding and representing the world.

Because this content can be created by anyone connected to the internet, the geoweb is theoretically open to a myriad of representations of the world, creating palimpsests of meaning in these hybrid material/virtual spaces. Due to the mutual constitution of the material and virtual spaces in the geoweb, termed cyberscapes, these virtual representations are often reflective of elements from our material lived realities, albeit often in highly distorted ways.

To better illuminate the relationships between the material and virtual, this chapter uses the trope of the zombie as an entry point into debates about the Internet, the spatial diffusion of culture, and the hybridization of online and offline spaces. The undead offer a powerful lens for understanding the spatialities of the information age without the gory details of their material manifestations.

By mapping the virtual geographies, or ‘cyberscapes’, of zombies we are able to understand not only the digital and geographic contours of a hugely popular trope, but also the ways that those digital mappings of zombies are reflective of cultural augmentations encoded onto lived, material spaces. In addition, the cyberscapes emerging from the zombie trope itself offers a useful narrative for understanding the ways in which the publics of the Internet produce and reproduce objects of attention and bias and differentially augment lived realities.

Stay tuned for the maps....

Floatingsheep in Mapping America

As any of you who have kept up with Floatingsheep for very long may know, we get quite excited when our work appears elsewhere - on the web, in books, in journals, on t-shirts and even beer steins. Most of the time such appearances are unexpected, and we just happen to stumble across them. Other times, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and 2/3 of the Floatingsheep crew is wondering how in the world one of our maps ended up in a new book, when the other 1/3 had spent his precious summer hours making a map quasi-acceptable for said publication...

Bitterness aside, a very fresh and revised version of our map depicting the prevalence of abortion providers and abortion alternatives has been published in a new book, Mapping America: Exploring the Continent by Fritz Kessler. Thanks to Martin Dodge for taking a picture of our appearance in the book and alerting some of us to its existence for the first time.

Recent Working Papers from Floatingsheep

In addition to blog postings we have written a number of academic papers which form the Floatingsheep Working Paper Series. Email us if the links don't work for you.

**** Floatingsheep Working Paper Series ****

• Zook, M., Graham, M. and C. Wallace. 2010. Ubiquitous Information or Digital Archipelagos? Variable Geographies of User-Generated Content. (under review). Email us

• Shelton, T., Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2010. The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes. (under review) Email us

• Graham, M. and M. Zook. 2010. Visualizing the Global Cyberscape: Mapping User Generated Placemarks. Journal of Urban Technology. Forthcoming. Email us

• Graham, M. 2010. Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101(4): 422–436.

• Zook, M., Graham, M., Shelton, T. and S. Gorman. 2010. Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake. World Health and Medical Policy 2(2): 7-33

• Zook, M., Graham, M. and T. Shelton. 2010. The Presidential Placemark Poll. In Atlas of the 2008 Elections (S. Brunn Editor). Forthcoming. Email us

• Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2010. The virtual ‘bible belt’. Environment and Planning A 42(4): 763-764.

• Crutcher, M. and M. Zook. 2009. Placemarks and Waterlines: Racialized Cyberscapes in Post Katrina Google Earth. GeoForum 40(4): 523-534

• Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. GeoForum 38(6): 1322-1343

• Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. Mapping DigiPlace: Geo-coded Internet Data and the Perception of Place. Environment and Planning B 34(3): 466-482.

• Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. From Cyberspace to DigiPlace: Visibility in an Age of Information and Mobility. Chapter in Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access Eds. Harvey Miller and Howard Rheingold. 231-244. Email us

New Paper: Volunteered Geographic Information and the Haitian Earthquake

Our paper on the use of volunteered geographic information in response to the Haitian earthquake, co-authored with Sean Gorman of FortiusOne, has just been published in World Medical and Health Policy.

Be warned. This is an educational moment. You might learn something. After all it can't be all fun and correlations. The abstract and links to the paper are below.

Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake
by Matthew Zook, Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Sean Gorman
World Medical & Health Policy Vol. 2: Iss. 2, Article 2.
Available at: http://www.psocommons.org/wmhp/vol2/iss2/art2

This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web-based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and GeoCommons. This analysis demonstrates that ITs were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of relief and aid agencies without actually being physically present in Haiti. While not without problems, this effort nevertheless represents a remarkable example of the power and crowdsourced online mapping and the potential for new avenues of interaction between physically distant places that vary tremendously.

Or, if you don't have institutional access, you can find our paper here.

Also two Floatingsheep-style maps before and after the earthquake are below (and are in the paper). By the way, Haiti is on the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic is on the eastern side.

Cyberscape Before the Earthquake

Cyberscape After the Earthquake

The creative reconstruction of the Internet

One of the things we'd like to do is occasionally feature some of our academic work behind this blog. Both to review topics in more depth and also to provide folks with references to cite. :-)

The article below is focused on the role of search engines (particularly Google) in ranking and sorting the Internet; a critical "black box" of our experience on the Internet which determines what we see and what we miss. If this link doesn't work for you, email me for a copy.


Zook, M. and M. Graham. (2007). The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet. GeoForum. Vol. 38(6). 1322-1343.

Abstract: The Internet has often been portrayed as the ultimate leveler of information where existing hierarchies of power and privilege are undermined by meritocracy. Some websites and functions are, however, more equal than others. In particular, search engines such as Google have been a key means to construct meaning out of disorder. The recent incorporation of spatial elements into the Google indexing raises fresh and geographically relevant concerns. This article focuses on the construction, access and use of Google derived rankings to deploy geo-referenced information in the physical environment and the way this melding of code and place affects how people interact with place. Using the theoretical concept of DigiPlace this article analyzes how Google Maps and Google Earth are structured and shape what appears (and what does not) in cyberspace and DigiPlace.