Information has always had geography. It is from somewhere; about somewhere; it evolves and is transformed somewhere; it is mediated by networks, infrastructures, and technologies: all of which exist in physical, material places. These geographies of information about places matter because they shape how we are able to find and understand different parts of the world. Places invisible or discounted in representations are invisible in practice to many people. In other words, geographic augmentations are much more than just representations of places: they are part of the place itself; they shape it rather than simply reflect it. This fusing of the spatial and informational augmentations that are immutable means that annotations of place emerge as sites of political contestation: with different groups of people trying to impose different narratives on informational augmentations. This paper therefore explores how information geographies have their own geographic distributions: geographies of access, of participation, and of representation. The paper offers a deliberately broad survey of a range of key platforms that mediate, host, and deliver different types of geographic information. It does so using a combination of existing statistics and bespoke data not previously mapped or analysed. Through this effort, the paper demonstrates that in addition to the geographies of uneven access to contemporary modes of communication, uneven geographies of participation and representation are also evident and in some cases are being amplified rather than alleviated. In other words, the paper comprehensively shows one important facet of contemporary information geographies: that geographic information itself is characterised by a host of uneven geographies. The paper concludes that there are few signs that global informational peripheries are achieving comparable levels of participation or representation with traditional information cores, despite the hopes that the fast-paced spread of the internet to three billion people might change this pattern.
The relevance of geographic information has become an emerging problem in geographic information science due to an enormous increase in volumes of data at high spatial, temporal, and semantic resolution, because of ever faster rates of new data capturing. At the same time, it is not clear whether the concept of relevance developed in information science and implemented for document-based information retrieval can be directly applied to this new, highly dynamic setting. In this study, we analyze the criteria users apply when judging the relevance of geographic entities in a given mobile usage context. Two different experiments have been set up in order to gather users' opinions on a set of possible criteria, and their relevance judgements in a given scenario. The importance ascribed to the criteria in both experiments clearly implies that a new concept of relevance is required when dealing with geographic entities instead of digital documents. This new concept of 'Geographic Relevance' is highly dependent on personal mobility and user's activity, whose understanding may in turn be refined by the assimilation of 'Geographic Relevance' itself.
Crowdsourcing platforms and social media produce distinctive geographies of informational content. The production process is enabled and influenced by a variety of socioeconomic and demographic factors, shaping the place representation, i.e., the amount and type of information available in an area. In this study, we explore and explain the geographies of Twitter and Wikipedia in Greater London, highlighting the relationships between the crowdsourced data and the local geodemographic characteristics of the areas where they are located. Through a set of robust regression models on a sample of 1.6M tweets and about 22,000 Wikipedia articles, we identify level of education, presence of people aged 30-44, and property prices as the most important explanatory factors for place representation at the urban scale. To some extent, this confirms the received knowledge of such data being created primarily by relatively wealthy, young, and educated users. However, about half of the variability is left unexplained, suggesting that a broader inclusion of potential factors is necessary.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.