Investigating virtual production networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia

by Mark Graham 03/11/2014

This mass connectivity has been one crucial ingredient for some significant changes in how work is organised, divided, outsourced, and rewarded.

by Mark Graham 03/11/2014

Ed: You are looking at the structures of ‘virtual production networks’ to understand the economic and social implications of online work. How are you doing this? Mark: We are studying online freelancing. In other words this is digital or digitised work for which professional certification or formal training is usually not required. The work is monetised or monetisable, and can be mediated through an online marketplace. Freelancing is a very old format of work. What is new is the fact that we have almost three billion people connected to a global network: many of those people are potential workers in virtual production networks. This mass connectivity has been one crucial ingredient for some significant changes in how work is organised, divided, outsourced, and rewarded. What we plan to do in this project is better map the contours of some of those changes and understand who wins and who doesn’t in this new world of work. Ed: Are you able to define what comprises an individual contribution to a ‘virtual production network’—or to find data on it? How do you define and measure value within these global flows and exchanges? Mark: It is very far from easy. Much of what we are studying is immaterial and digitally-mediated work. We can find workers and we can find clients, but the links between them are often opaque and black-boxed. Some of the workers that we have spoken to operate under non-disclosure agreements, and many actually haven’t been told what their work is being used for. But that is precisely why we felt the need to embark on this project. With a combination of quantitative transaction data from key platforms and qualitative interviews in which we attempt to piece together parts of the network, we want to understand who is (and isn’t) able to capture and create value within these networks. Ed: You note that “within virtual production networks, are we seeing a shift…

Development, Economics

Outside the cities and towns, rural Britain’s internet is firmly stuck in the 20th century

by Bianca Reisdorf 20/10/2014

The quality of rural internet access in the UK, or lack of it, has long been a bone of contention.

by Bianca Reisdorf 20/10/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. The quality of rural internet access in the UK, or lack of it, has long been a bone of contention. The government says “fast, reliable broadband” is essential, but the disparity between urban and rural areas is large and growing, with slow and patchy connections common outside towns and cities. The main reason for this is the difficulty and cost of installing the infrastructure necessary to bring broadband to all parts of the countryside—certainly to remote villages, hamlets, homes and farms, but even to areas not classified as “deep rural” too. A countryside unplugged As part of our project Access Denied, we are interviewing people in rural areas, both very remote and less so, to hear their experiences of slow and unreliable internet connections and the effects on their personal and professional lives. What we’ve found so far is that even in areas less than 20 miles away from big cities, the internet connection slows to far below the minimum of 2Mb/s identified by the government as “adequate”. Whether this is fast enough to navigate today’s data-rich Web 2.0 environment is questionable. Yes… but where, exactly? Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA Our interviewees could attain speeds between 0.1Mb/s and 1.2Mb/s, with the latter being a positive outlier among the speed tests we performed. Some interviewees also reported that the internet didn’t work in their homes at all, in some cases for 60% of the time. This wasn’t related to time of day; the dropped connection appeared to be random, and not something they could plan for. The result is that activities that those in cities and towns would see as entirely normal are virtually impossible in the country—online banking, web searches for information, even sending email. One respondent explained that she was unable to pay her workers’ wages for a full week because the internet was too slow and kept cutting out, causing her online banking session to reset. Linking villages So poor quality…

Development

Why global contributions to Wikipedia are so unequal

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others.

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. The geography of knowledge has always been uneven. Some people and places have always been more visible and had more voices than others. But the internet seemed to promise something different: a greater diversity of voices, opinions and narratives from more places. Unfortunately, this has not come to pass in quite the manner some expected it to. Many parts of the world remain invisible or under-represented on important websites and services. All of this matters because as geographic information becomes increasingly integral to our lives, places that are not represented on platforms like Wikipedia will be absent from many of our understandings of, and interactions with, the world. Mapping the differences Until now, there has been no large-scale analysis of the factors that explain the wide geographical spread of online information. This is something we have aimed to address in our research project on the geography of Wikipedia. Our focus areas were the Middle East and North Africa. Using statistical models of geotagged Wikipedia data, we identified the necessary conditions to make countries “visible”. This allowed us to map the countries that fare considerably better or worse than expected. We found that a large part of the variation between countries could be explained by just three factors: population, availability of broadband internet, and the number of edits originating in that country. Areas of Wikipedia hegemony and uneven geographic coverage. Oxford Internet Institute While these three variables help to explain the sparse amount of content written about much of sub-Saharan Africa, most of the Middle East and North Africa have much less geographic information than might be expected. For example, despite high levels of wealth and connectivity, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have far fewer articles than we might expect. Constraints to creating content These three factors matter independently, but they will also be subject to other constraints. A country’s population will probably affect the number of activities, places, and practices…

Development, Mapping

What explains the worldwide patterns in user-generated geographical content?

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

As geographic content and geospatial information becomes increasingly integral to our everyday lives, places that are left off the ‘map of knowledge’ will be absent from our understanding of the world.

by Mark Graham 08/09/2014

The geographies of codified knowledge have always been uneven, affording some people and places greater voice and visibility than others. While the rise of the geosocial Web seemed to promise a greater diversity of voices, opinions, and narratives about places, many regions remain largely absent from the websites and services that represent them to the rest of the world. These highly uneven geographies of codified information matter because they shape what is known and what can be known. As geographic content and geospatial information becomes increasingly integral to our everyday lives, places that are left off the ‘map of knowledge’ will be absent from our understanding of, and interaction with, the world. We know that Wikipedia is important to the construction of geographical imaginations of place, and that it has immense power to augment our spatial understandings and interactions (Graham et al. 2013). In other words, the presences and absences in Wikipedia matter. If a person’s primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world will look fundamentally different from the world presented through the lens of the English Wikipedia. The capacity to represent oneself to outsiders is especially important in those parts of the world that are characterised by highly uneven power relationships: Brunn and Wilson (2013) and Graham and Zook (2013) have already demonstrated the power of geospatial content to reinforce power in a South African township and Jerusalem, respectively. Until now, there has been no large-scale empirical analysis of the factors that explain information geographies at the global scale; this is something we have aimed to address in this research project on Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa. Using regression models of geolocated Wikipedia data we have identified what are likely to be the necessary conditions for representation at the country level, and have also identified the outliers,…

Development

Geotagging reveals Wikipedia is not quite so equal after all

by Mark Graham 18/08/2014

Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. But it’s starting to look like global coverage on Wikipedia is far from equal.

by Mark Graham 18/08/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content. But it’s starting to look like global coverage on Wikipedia is far from equal. This now ubiquitous source of information offers everything you could want to know about the US and Europe but far less about any other parts of the world. This structural openness of Wikipedia is one of its biggest strengths. Academic and activist Lawrence Lessig even describes the online encyclopedia as “a technology to equalise the opportunity that people have to access and participate in the construction of knowledge and culture, regardless of their geographic placing”. But despite Wikipedia’s openness, there are fears that the platform is simply reproducing the most established worldviews. Knowledge created in the developed world appears to be growing at the expense of viewpoints coming from developing countries. Indeed, there are indications that global coverage in the encyclopedia is far from “equal”, with some parts of the world heavily represented on the platform, and others largely left out. For a start, if you look at articles published about specific places such as monuments, buildings, festivals, battlefields, countries, or mountains, the imbalance is striking. Europe and North America account for a staggering 84% of these “geotagged” articles. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia, too. In fact, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica (14,959) than any country in Africa. And while there are just over 94,000 geotagged articles related to Japan, there are only 88,342 on the entire Middle East and North Africa region. Total number of geotagged Wikipedia articles across 44 surveyed languages. Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K., and Medhat, A. 2014. Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming). When…

Development, Mapping

What is stopping greater representation of the MENA region?

by Mark Graham 06/08/2014

Negotiating the wider politics of Wikipedia can be a daunting task, particularly when in it comes to content about the MENA region.

by Mark Graham 06/08/2014

Wikipedia has famously been described as a project that “ works great in practice and terrible in theory”. One of the ways in which it succeeds is through its extensive consensus-based governance structure. While this has led to spectacular success—over 4.5 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone—the governance structure is neither obvious nor immediately accessible, and can present a barrier for those seeking entry. Editing Wikipedia can be a tough challenge—an often draining and frustrating task, involving heated disputes and arguments where it is often the most tenacious, belligerent, or connected editor who wins out in the end. Broadband access and literacy are not the only pre-conditions for editing Wikipedia; ‘digital literacy’ is also crucial. This includes the ability to obtain and critically evaluate online sources, locate Wikipedia’s editorial and governance policies, master Wiki syntax, and confidently articulate and assert one’s views about an article or topic. Experienced editors know how to negotiate the rules, build a consensus with some editors to block others, and how to influence administrators during dispute resolution. This strict adherence to the word (if not the spirit) of Wikipedia’s ‘law’ can lead to marginalization or exclusion of particular content, particularly when editors are scared off by unruly mobs who ‘weaponise’ policies to fit a specific agenda. Governing such a vast collaborative platform as Wikipedia obviously presents a difficult balancing act between being open enough to attract volume of contributions, and moderated enough to ensure their quality. Many editors consider Wikipedia’s governance structure (which varies significantly between the different language versions) essential to ensuring the quality of its content, even if it means that certain editors can (for example) arbitrarily ban other users, lock down certain articles, and exclude moderate points of view. One of the editors we spoke to noted that: “A number of articles I have edited with quality sources, have been subjected to editors cutting information that doesn’t fit their ideas […]…

Development, Mapping

How well represented is the MENA region in Wikipedia?

by Mark Graham 22/07/2014

There are more Wikipedia articles in English than Arabic about almost every Arabic speaking country in the Middle East.

by Mark Graham 22/07/2014

Image of rock paintings in the Tadrart Acacus region of Libya by Luca Galuzzi.

Wikipedia is often seen to be both an enabler and an equaliser. Every day hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on an (encyclopaedic) range of topics; writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content. This structural openness combined with Wikipedia’s tremendous visibility has led some commentators to highlight it as “a technology to equalise the opportunity that people have to access and participate in the construction of knowledge and culture, regardless of their geographic placing” (Lessig 2003). However, despite Wikipedia’s openness, there are also fears that the platform is simply reproducing worldviews and knowledge created in the Global North at the expense of Southern viewpoints (Graham 2011; Ford 2011). Indeed, there are indications that global coverage in the encyclopaedia is far from ‘equal’, with some parts of the world heavily represented on the platform, and others largely left out (Hecht and Gergle 2009; Graham 2011, 2013, 2014). These second-generation digital divides are not merely divides of Internet access (so discussed in the late 1990s), but gaps in representation and participation (Hargittai and Walejko 2008). Whereas most Wikipedia articles written about most European and East Asian countries are written in their dominant languages, for much of the Global South we see a dominance of articles written in English. These geographic differences in the coverage of different language versions of Wikipedia matter, because fundamentally different narratives can be (and are) created about places and topics in different languages (Graham and Zook 2013; Graham 2014). If we undertake a ‘global analysis’ of this pattern by examining the number of geocoded articles (ie about a specific place) across Wikipedia’s main language versions (Figure 1), the first thing we can observe is the incredible human effort that has gone into describing ‘place’ in Wikipedia. The second is the clear and highly uneven geography of information, with Europe and North America home to 84% of all geolocated articles. Almost all of Africa is…

Development, Mapping

The sum of (some) human knowledge: Wikipedia and representation in the Arab World

by Mark Graham 14/07/2014

Arabic is one of the least represented major world languages on Wikipedia: few languages have more speakers and fewer articles than Arabic.

by Mark Graham 14/07/2014

Image of the Umayyad Mosque (Damascus) by Travel Aficionado

Wikipedia currently contains over 9 million articles in 272 languages, far surpassing any other publicly available information repository. Being the first point of contact for most general topics (therefore an effective site for framing any subsequent representations) it is an important platform from which we can learn whether the Internet facilitates increased open participation across cultures—or reinforces existing global hierarchies and power dynamics. Because the underlying political, geographic and social structures of Wikipedia are hidden from users, and because there have not been any large scale studies of the geography of these structures and their relationship to online participation, entire groups of people (and regions) may be marginalised without their knowledge. This process is important to understand, for the simple reason that Wikipedia content has begun to form a central part of services offered elsewhere on the Internet. When you look for information about a place on Facebook, the description of that place (including its geographic coordinates) comes from Wikipedia. If you want to “check in” to a museum in Doha to signify you were there to their friends, the place you check in to was created with Wikipedia data. When you Google “House of Saud” you are presented not only with a list of links (with Wikipedia at the top) but also with a special ‘card’ summarising the House. This data comes from Wikipedia. When you look for people or places, Google now has these terms inside its ‘knowledge graph’, a network of related concepts with data coming directly from Wikipedia. Similarly, on Google maps, Wikipedia descriptions for landmarks are presented as part of the default information. Ironically, Wikipedia editorship is actually on a slow and steady decline, even as its content and readership increases year on year. Since 2007 and the introduction of significant devolution of administrative powers to volunteers, Wikipedia has not been able to effectively retain newcomers, something which has been noted as a concern by…

Development, Interviews

The economic expectations and potentials of broadband Internet in East Africa

by David Sutcliffe 13/03/2014

Were firms adopting internet, as it became cheaper? Had this new connectivity had the effects that were anticipated, or was it purely hype?

by David Sutcliffe 13/03/2014

Ed: There has a lot of excitement about the potential of increased connectivity in the region: where did this come from? And what sort of benefits were promised? Chris: Yes, at the end of the 2000s when the first fibre cables landed in East Africa, there was much anticipation about what this new connectivity would mean for the region. I remember I was in Tanzania at the time, and people were very excited about this development—being tired of the slow and expensive satellite connections where even simple websites could take a minute to load. The perception, both in the international press and from East African politicians was that the cables would be a game changer. Firms would be able to market and sell more directly to customers and reduce inefficient ‘intermediaries’. Connectivity would allow new types of digital-driven business, and it would provide opportunity for small and medium firms to become part of the global economy. We wanted to revisit this discussion. Were firms adopting internet, as it became cheaper? Had this new connectivity had the effects that were anticipated, or was it purely hype? Ed: So what is the current level and quality of broadband access in Rwanda? ie how connected are people on the ground? Chris: Internet access has greatly improved over the previous few years, and the costs of bandwidth have declined markedly. The government has installed a ‘backbone’ fibre network and in the private sector there has also been a growth in the number of firms providing Internet service. There are still some problems though. Prices are still are quite high, particularly for dedicated broadband connections, and in the industries we looked at (tea and tourism) many firms couldn’t afford it. Secondly, we heard a lot of complaints that lower bandwidth connections—WiMax and mobile internet—are unreliable and become saturated at peak times. So, Rwanda has come a long way, but we expect there will be more…

Development, Mapping, Methods, Social Data Science

Who represents the Arab world online?

by Mark Graham 01/10/2013

The Middle East and North Africa are relatively under-represented in Wikipedia. Even after accounting for factors like population, Internet access, and literacy, we still see less contact than would be expected.

by Mark Graham 01/10/2013

Editors from all over the world have played some part in writing about Egypt; in fact, only 13% of all edits actually originate in the country (38% are from the US). More: Who edits Wikipedia? by Mark Graham. Ed: In basic terms, what patterns of ‘information geography’ are you seeing in the region? Mark: The first pattern that we see is that the Middle East and North Africa are relatively under-represented in Wikipedia. Even after accounting for factors like population, Internet access, and literacy, we still see less contact than would be expected. Second, of the content that exists, a lot of it is in European and French rather than in Arabic (or Farsi or Hebrew). In other words, there is even less in local languages. And finally, if we look at contributions (or edits), not only do we also see a relatively small number of edits originating in the region, but many of those edits are being used to write about other parts of the word rather than their own region. What this broadly seems to suggest is that the participatory potentials of Wikipedia aren’t yet being harnessed in order to even out the differences between the world’s informational cores and peripheries. Ed: How closely do these online patterns in representation correlate with regional (offline) patterns in income, education, language, access to technology (etc.) Can you map one to the other? Mark: Population and broadband availability alone explain a lot of the variance that we see. Other factors like income and education also play a role, but it is population and broadband that have the greatest explanatory power here. Interestingly, it is most countries in the MENA region that fail to fit well to those predictors. Ed: How much do you think these patterns result from the systematic imposition of a particular view point—such as official editorial policies—as opposed to the (emergent) outcome of lots of users and editors…