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…

Development, Mapping, Methods

Mapping the uneven geographies of information worldwide

by Mark Graham 11/06/2013

There are massive inequalities that cannot simply be explained by uneven Internet penetration. A range of other physical, social, political and economic barriers are reinforcing this digital divide.

by Mark Graham 11/06/2013

Images are an important form of knowledge that allow us to develop understandings about our world; the global geographic distribution of geotagged images on Flickr reveals the density of visual representations and locally depicted knowledge of all places on our planet. Map by M.Graham, M.Stephens, S.Hale.

Information is the raw material for much of the work that goes on in the contemporary global economy, and visibility and voice in this information ecosystem is a prerequisite for influence and control. As Hand and Sandywell (2002: 199) have argued, “digitalised knowledge and its electronic media are indeed synonymous with power.” As such, it is important to understand who produces and reproduces information, who has access to it, and who and where are represented by it. Traditionally, information and knowledge about the world have been geographically constrained. The transmission of information required either the movement of people or the availability of some other medium of communication. However, up until the late 20th century, almost all mediums of information—books, newspapers, academic journals, patents and the like—were characterised by huge geographic inequalities. The global north produced, consumed and controlled much of the world’s codified knowledge, while the global south was largely left out. Today, the movement of information is, in theory, rarely constrained by distance. Very few parts of the world remain disconnected from the grid, and over 2 billion people are now online (most of them in the Global South). Unsurprisingly, many believe we now have the potential to access what Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales refers to as “the sum of all human knowledge”. Theoretically, parts of the world that have been left out of flows and representations of knowledge can be quite literally put back on the map. However, “potential” has too often been confused with actual practice, and stark digital divisions of labour are still evident in all open platforms that rely on user-generated content. Google Map’s databases contain more indexed user-generated content about the Tokyo metropolitan region than the entire continent of Africa. On Wikipedia, there is more written about Germany than about South America and Africa combined. In other words, there are massive inequalities that cannot simply be explained by uneven Internet penetration. A range of…

Development, Mapping

Crowdsourcing translation during crisis situations: are ‘real voices’ being excluded from the decisions and policies it supports?

by Gwyneth Sutherlin 07/05/2013

If you have ever worried about media bias then you should really worry about the impact of translation.

by Gwyneth Sutherlin 07/05/2013

As revolution spread across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, participants and observers of the events were keen to engage via social media. However, saturation by Arab-language content demanded a new translation strategy for those outside the region to follow the information flows—and for those inside to reach beyond their domestic audience. Crowdsourcing was seen as the most efficient strategy in terms of cost and time to meet the demand, and translation applications that harnessed volunteers across the internet were integrated with nearly every type of ICT project. For example, as Steve Stottlemyre has already mentioned on this blog, translation played a part in tools like the Libya Crisis Map, and was essential for harnessing tweets from the region’s ‘voices on the ground.’ If you have ever worried about media bias then you should really worry about the impact of translation. Before the revolutions, the translation software for Egyptian Arabic was almost non-existent. Few translation applications were able to handle the different Arabic dialects or supply coding labor and capital to build something that could contend with internet blackouts. Google’s Speak to Tweet became the dominant application used in the Egyptian uprisings, delivering one homogenised source of information that fed the other sources. In 2011, this collaboration helped circumvent the problem of Internet connectivity in Egypt by allowing cellphone users to call their tweet into a voicemail to be transcribed and translated. A crowd of volunteers working for Twitter enhanced translation of Egyptian Arabic after the Tweets were first transcribed by a Mechanical Turk application trained from an initial 10 hours of speech. The unintended consequence of these crowdsourcing applications was that when the material crossed the language barrier into English, it often became inaccessible to the original contributors. Individuals on the ground essentially ceded authorship to crowds of untrained volunteer translators who stripped the information of context, and then plotted it in categories and on maps without feedback from…

Collective Action, Ethics, Mapping, Politics & Government

Did Libyan crisis mapping create usable military intelligence?

by Steve Stottlemyre 14/03/2013

While many people continued to contribute conventional humanitarian information to the map, the sudden shift toward information that could aid international military intervention was unmistakable.

by Steve Stottlemyre 14/03/2013

The Middle East has recently witnessed a series of popular uprisings against autocratic rulers. In mid-January 2011, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled his country, and just four weeks later, protesters overthrew the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Yemen’s government was also overthrown in 2011, and Morocco, Jordan, and Oman saw significant governmental reforms leading, if only modestly, toward the implementation of additional civil liberties. Protesters in Libya called for their own ‘day of rage’ on February 17, 2011, marked by violent protests in several major cities, including the capitol Tripoli. As they transformed from ‘protestors’ to ‘Opposition forces’ they began pushing information onto Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, reporting their firsthand experiences of what had turned into a civil war virtually overnight. The evolving humanitarian crisis prompted the United Nations to request the creation of the Libya Crisis Map, which was made public on March 6, 2011. Other, more focused crisis maps followed, and were widely distributed on Twitter. While the map was initially populated with humanitarian information pulled from the media and online social networks, as the imposition of an internationally enforced No Fly Zone (NFZ) over Libya became imminent, information began to appear on it that appeared to be of a tactical military nature. While many people continued to contribute conventional humanitarian information to the map, the sudden shift toward information that could aid international military intervention was unmistakable. How useful was this information, though? Agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community convert raw data into useable information (incorporated into finished intelligence) by utilising some form of the Intelligence Process. As outlined in the U.S. military’s joint intelligence manual, this consists of six interrelated steps all centred on a specific mission. It is interesting that many Twitter users, though perhaps unaware of the intelligence process, replicated each step during the Libyan civil war; producing finished intelligence adequate for consumption by NATO commanders and rebel leadership. It…