I was attracted to a short Guardian post this morning that asked the simple question – Who uses Twitter in Africa – and where are they based? Simple enough and a great little research question. The article references Mark Graham and the Oxford Internet Institute. The selection of eight quick maps gives a small glimpse at the power of being able to tap into the Twitter API and do some quick geospatial visualisation to answer some useful research questions. The static images are merely tantalising (and the Guardian’s coverage is superficial) however and I clicked through to see if there was more meat in the underlying research.
The Urban Geographies of Tweets on Mark Graham’s blog is more informative and more importantly points to some shorter published pieces. Virtual Geographies and Urban Environments: Big Data and the ephemeral, augmented city explores the new digital layers of the urban environment to establish what and how they are constructed, and how they challenge existing power structures defined by the physical built urban environment. Tasty. The second referenced piece – Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geo-linguistic Contours of the Web – takes the broader strokes further with a exploration of how these digital representations of the city are constructed and more importantly how they are differentially conceived based on language, access to technologies and cultural mediation of technological mediation. I commend this discussion for your consideration. What is life like in the increasingly digitally mediated city?
