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.

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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.

Online representations of places are becoming pivotal in informing our understanding of urban life. Content production on online platforms is grounded in the geography of their users and their digital infrastructure. These constraints shape place representation, that is the amount, quality, and type of digital information available in a geographic area. In this article, we study the place representation of user-generated content (UGC) in Los Angeles County, relating the spatial distribution of the data to its geo-demographic context. Adopting a comparative and multiplatform approach, this quantitative analysis investigates the spatial relationship between four diverse UGC datasets and their context at the census tract level (about 685,000 geo-located tweets, 9,700 Wikipedia pages, 4M OSM objects, and 180,000 Foursquare venues). The context includes the ethnicity, age, income, education, and deprivation of residents, as well as public infrastructure. An exploratory spatial analysis and regression-based models indicate that the four UGC platforms possess distinct geographies of place representation. To a moderate extent, the presence of Twitter, OpenStreetMap, and Foursquare data is influenced by population density, ethnicity, education, and income. However, each platform responds to different socio-economic factors and clusters emerge in disparate hotspots. Unexpectedly, Twitter data tends to be located in more dense, deprived areas, and the geography of Wikipedia appears peculiar and harder to explain. These trends are compared with previous findings for the area of Greater London.

Gazetteers are dictionaries of geographic placenames that have important implications far beyond the worlds of geographers and cartographers. By containing 'definitive' lists of places, gazetteers have the ontological power to define what will and won't be geocoded and represented in databases, maps, search engines, and ultimately our spatial understandings of place. This paper focuses attention on GeoNames, which is the world's largest freely available and widely used gazetteer. We illustrate how content in GeoNames is characterised by highly uneven spatial distributions. There are dense clusters of placenames in some parts of the world and a relative absence of geographic content in others. These patterns are related to not just the wealth and population-size of a country, but also its policies on internet access and open data. The paper then traces some of the specific implications of this information inequality: showing how biases in gazetteers are propagated in a variety of geographic meaning-making.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory quantitative analysis of gendered contributions to the online mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM), in which previous research has identified a strong male participation bias. On these grounds, theories of representation in volunteered geographic information (VGI) have argued that this kind of crowdsourced data fails to embody the geospatial interests of the wider community. The observed effects of the bias however, remain conspicuously absent from discourses of VGI and gender, which proceed with little sense of impact. This study addresses this void by analysing OSM contributions by gender and thus identifies differences in men's and women's mapping practices. An online survey uniquely captured the OSM IDs as well as the declared gender of 293 OSM users. Statistics relating to users' editing and tagging behaviours openly accessible via the 'how did you contribute to OSM' wiki page were subsequently analysed. The results reveal that volumes of overall activity as well editing and tagging actions in OSM remain significantly dominated by men. They also indicate subtle but impactful differences in men's and women's preferences for modifying and creating data, as well as the tagging categories to which they contribute. Discourses of gender and ICT, gender relations in online VGI environments and competing motivational factors are implicated in these observations. As well as updating estimates of the gender participation bias in OSM, this paper aims to inform and stimulate subsequent discourses of gender and representation towards a new rationale for widening participation in VGI.

There is a growing interest in using OpenStreetMap [OSM] data in health research. We evaluate the usefulness of OSM data for researching the spatial availability of alcohol, a field which has been hampered by data access difficulties. We find OSM data is about 50% complete, which appears adequate for replicating findings from other studies using alcohol licensing data. Further, we show how OSM quality metrics can be used to select areas with more complete alcohol data. The ease of access and use may create opportunities for analysts and researchers seeking to understand broad patterns of alcohol availability.