Cape Town Cyberscapes: Khayelitsha and the digital divide

For a recent project with Professor Stan Brunn, we updated and expanded our visualization on the cyberscape of Cape Town, South Africa (the original version from 2009 is here). Again this map was based on the amount of geo-coded material indexed in Google Maps using a fine grid of points approximately 1/10 of a mile apart.

This time around we were particularly interested in Khayelitsha, an informal (and fast growing) township in the Cape Town area. You can see it in the lower right of the map below (it is highlighted and vaguely boomerang shaped). The main take away from the map is the clear difference in amount of geo-coded material in Khayelitsha versus other richer, whiter parts of the region.

Map generated by Jeff Levy

Based on our previous work, this is entirely unsurprising. Nonetheless, it remains useful to visualize these inequalities at the metropolitan level in order to demonstrate that the digital divide in user-generated content operates at a variety of scales, and that even the most populated areas in terms of content are surrounded by areas with very little.

Floating Sheep Publications

A special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology on information technologies and urban networks has just been published. It has a great series of articles from a range of researchers. Including the following two from the Floatingsheep collective.


Graham, M. and M. Zook. 2011. Visualizing the Global Cyberscape: Mapping User Generated Placemarks. Journal of Urban Technology 18(1): 115-132.
This article focuses on the representation of physical places on the Internet or what we term cyberscape. While there is a wide range of online place-related information available, this project uses the metric of the number of user-generated Google Maps placemarks containing specific keywords in locations worldwide. After setting out the methods behind this research, this article provides a cartographic analysis of these cyberscapes and examines how they inform us about the material world. Visibility and invisibility in material space are increasingly being defined by prominence, ranking, and presence on the Internet, and Google has positioned itself as a highly authoritative source of online spatial information. As such, any distinct spatial patterns within uploaded information have the potential to become real and reinforced as Google is relied upon as a mirror of the offline world.


Zook, M., Devriendt, L. and M. Dodge. (2011). Cyberspatial Proximity Metrics: Reconceptualizing Distance in the Global Urban System. Journal of Urban Technology 18(1): 93-114.
In this paper we analyze how distances between a sample of a hundred major world cities varies when measured in cyberspace. The project develops a novel spatial statistical model based upon the number of user-generated placemarks indexed by Google Maps. We demonstrate how this metric captures the “invisible” patterns of intercity information flows and helps comprehend the contours of the complex digital network that exists between large urban centers across the world. Using a specially designed software program to interrogate Google Maps, a series of keyword searches (“tourism,” “business,” “hotel”) as well as each of the city names were conducted in each of the sample places. Comparing this digital measure with the material movement of people and other relevant descriptive variables, such as national economic development and language differences, we were able to provide a cogent model that plausibly explains why certain city pairs (especially those that are physically distant) exhibit strong informational linkages. While the strength of these digital connections undoubtedly demonstrates the continued importance of physical proximity and established transport infrastructures in the twenty-first century, one can also observe significant evidence for [new?] digital “wormholes” which indicates that processes of globalization driven by online interaction also operates by its own rules.

Visualizing Digiplace

Two of the basic concepts we use here at Floatingsheep are:

Cyberscape, or the cloud of geo-coded information through which we move everyday (handy visualization of cyberscape here).

AND

Digiplace, or the sorting of cyberscapes, often by software algorithms such as Google’s pagerank, to filter content and avoid information overload. A key part of digiplace is how it makes some parts of the cyberscape more visible while peripheralizing other areas.

We’ve never had a good visualization of digiplace…at least until now. But Taylor’s recent search (via his iPhone) on Google Maps for the keyword "Kroger grocery" resulted in a nice example. In the image below, Kroger’s is in the upper left and is marked by a red push pin. Interestingly, Meijer's, another grocery store chain, also shows up as a sponsored link. Digiplace in action.

Digiplace

While Google Maps does clearly label Meijer’s as a “sponsored link”, i.e., "paid for placement”, the digiplace produced by this search does change visibility within the retail landscape.

For further reading, see:
Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. GeoForum 38(6): 1322-1343

Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. Mapping DigiPlace: Geo-coded Internet Data and the Perception of Place. Environment and Planning B 34(3): 466-482.

Jedi Knights as a Religious Phenomenon

As a non-religious person, I'm not sure how I feel about the fictional protagonists of my all-time favorite movies being turned into a quasi-religious sect. But that's exactly what's happened with the Jedi Knights of Star Wars. From the worldwide movement in 2001 to list Jedi as one's religious preference to the current debate over the axing of Canada's long-form census, the Jedi have long permeated the boundary between reality and fantasy. With their locations visible in Google Maps, we now have evidence that have they also permeated the boundary between materiality and virtuality [1].
This map comes from a paper we're currently working on about the cyberscapes of religion in Google Maps. Using the absolute number of references to "Jedi" in the Google Maps database as our measurement, we thought that mapping these references in the UK would present an excellent opportunity to blur the boundaries between the sacred and the farcical.

Although the concentration of most geotagged content can be explained by population density, references to Jedi conform to a more unique spatial distribution. The greatest number of references to Jedi exist in and around the cities of Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham - all fairly large in their own right - rather than in the capital and largest city of London. It's also interesting to note that most of England has some level of references to Jedi, perhaps indicating a general level of interest across the country.

And yet, based on the actual counts from the 2001 census, the three cities with the most virtual references do not represent either the greatest absolute number of Jedi (that would be Leeds with 7,543) or the greatest number of Jedi as a percentage of the total population (Brighton and Hove with 2.6%). While both Nottingham (#12) and Manchester (#19) rank highly with Jedi as a percentage of the total population, Birmingham is ranked just #227 with just 0.6% of the population declaring themselves Jedi.

So what makes them so prevalent by our measure? Are these the locations of new, secret Jedi academies? Is there an important force nexus present somewhere in one of these cities? Any clues or suggestions welcome...

[1] We currently have no evidence that this virtual representation of Jedi within Google Maps has anything to do with the mystical powers of the Force.

Mapping Crime in the City by the Bay

Although we're a bit late to the game again, we thought we'd go ahead and do another comparison between some of our cyberscape visualizations and some other great maps floating (like sheep?) around on the interwebs. The following visualizations from Doug McCune use publicly available data from the City of San Francisco to map the incidence of various crimes around the city.

Actual Crime as Elevation in San Francisco

As one can see (and as Doug points out in his original blog post), the geography of crime in San Francisco is not only unevenly distributed in space, but also in terms of what crimes are being committed in different places. And while our visualization below shows only general references to "crime" in the Google Maps database, it demonstrates that the locations of virtual references to crime are actually highly correlated with the places that actual crimes occur.

Google Maps References to "Crime" in San Francisco

It's also interesting to note that the data for our map was collected in January 2009, while the city data used for the elevation maps covers all of the 2009 calender year. To see more of Doug's San Fransicso crime visualizations, you can see his original post here: If San Francisco Crime were Elevation.

Mapping the Bluegrass cyberscape

Although it's been quite a while since we last posted our metro-level cyberscape visualizations, we figured that now was as good a time as any to bring them back. In some of our previous posts, we mapped the total number of user-generated Google Maps placemarks in our sample cities, along with some Crescent City culture-specific maps of New Orleans for Mardi Gras and other interesting examples from around the world.

Below you'll find maps depicting the location of all user-generated placemarks (using the keyword "1") and placemarks referencing "crime" in Lexington, Kentucky. Although Lexington doesn't hold much, if any, significance for most of our readership, it presents an excellent opportunity to ground truth these virtual references by comparing them to our collective experiences as current and past residents of "the Horse Capital of the World".

All User-Generated Content in Lexington KY

User-Generated References to "Crime" in Lexington KY

In the first map, the highest concentration of placemarks exists in downtown Lexington. More specifically, the points with the most placemarks (shown in red) are at the intersection of Limestone and Main Streets, a primary intersection in the city and the site of Phoenix Park (formerly the Phoenix Hotel) and the city's courthouses.

While the spatial pattern of all user-generated content is not surprising in the least, and largely mirrors what has been seen in other urban areas, the concentration of placemarks referencing "crime" is significantly more interesting. Rather than being a mirror of the more general pattern focused on the city center, placemarks referencing crime are focused on the Kirwan-Blanding residential complex on the University of Kentucky's South Campus.

Although this concentration isn't necessarily surprising, given the fact that the Kirwan-Blanding complex has been the site of some significant violent crimes, along with almost innumerable incidents of public intoxication and drug possession, this does represent an important deviation from common patterns of concentration within city centers, as was evidenced by the map of all placemarks in Lexington.

Political Cyberscapes II: Capitalism, Communism and Socialism

Following the first part of this series of maps on political cyberscapes, we now turn to mapping the keywords "capitalism", "communism" and "socialism" as they appear in Google Maps placemarks. The goal of this analysis is to see whether or not these references correspond to the world's political economic realities in the same way that previous maps of online references were closely tied to the offline world.

References to "Capitalism"

References to "capitalism" in Google Maps placemarks correspond closely to our expectations. Although most countries could be classified as capitalist (of one degree or another), the term is most closely associated with the capitalist countries of North American and western Europe. The highest relative concentration of references to capitalism exists in both the United States and Canada, with most of the European Union coming in with slightly fewer references. Interesting, however, is that other successful capitalist countries, like Japan and Australia, do not score highly with this measure.

References to "Communism"

The geography of references to "communism" highlights many countries with strong associations to it. For example, the communist states of Cuba, Turkmenistan and Laos are all of the highest classification while Vietnam, the Baltic states forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, a number of other former Soviet republics within Central Asia and Croatia formerly part of the communist state of Yugoslavia. While the absence of both China and North Korea on this map is somewhat perplexing, this is likely tied to our use of English search terms. (This issue is equally evident in the below map of the term "socialism".)

The places with the highest concentrations of references to "socialism" are, like references to "capitalism" and "communism", mostly what one would expect; Cuba, Libya, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Vietnam all score highly in this measure. Likewise, within the South American region, Venezuela (home to the outspoken and left-leaning Hugo Chavez) exhibits the most relative references to socialism. Interestingly the distribution of references to socialism is more dispersed than references to communism which corresponds to the offline situation as well.

References to "Socialism"

The relatively high number of references to "socialism" within the U.S. is a bit perplexing, as the U.S. has a long history of anti-socialist rhetoric. Although we do not know the specific context of each of these placemarks, we do note that over the past two years, the policy programs (e.g., health care) of the Obama administration have been heavily (and incorrectly) critiqued by the right wing as being socialist. It seems likely then that some of these references may be associated, albeit in a negative manner, with President Obama and his policies.

Political Cyberscapes I: Democracies and Dictators

Over the last few weeks, we've posted a series of maps that illustrate the representation of religious groups online via the number of references in Google placemarks. In an attempt to achieve the hat trick of talking about things best avoided at the dinner table, we've turned our (short term) attention to mapping a series of references to a range of political terms. (See here and here for some of the analysis on religion and sex).

The first in a two-part series, these maps show references to the terms "democracy" and "dictatorship" in Google Maps placemarks. In a likely vain attempt to forestall complaints, we would like to note that we fully understand that the reality of governance is never so clear as an either/or choice between democratic or dictatorial rule. In fact, as the findings of these maps show, the complexities of state politics are never as clear as they may seem, especially in this context.

Each of the maps below show the number of placemarks mentioning the keywords "democracy" or "dictatorship", aggregated at the country level across the world. These amounts were then normalized by the total number of placemarks per country, and classified based on the geometrical interval method, which is appropriate given the lack of a normal distribution in these datasets.

References to "Democracy"

The United States and United Kingdom have the highest relative levels of references in placemarks to "democracy". More interesting, however, is that both Iran and Iraq have relatively high numbers of references to "democracy" as well. While both nations maintain elements of democracy (e.g., elections), they are not widely considered to be fully democratic states. Meanwhile other countries such as India with long established democracies have relatively fewer references.

In the case of Iraq, the prevalence of democracy in placemarks is likely associated with the attempts to establish a functioning democratic government as part of the ongoing occupation. Similarly in the case of Iran, the placemarks mentioning democracy are almost certainly related to the mass protests against the Iranian regime following last summer's contested elections. These protests were accompanied by a mass online demonstration using a variety of social media applications and this activity appears to be reflected within Google Maps.

This same anomaly can also be found in the countries with highest concentrations of references to "dictatorship" in the map below, in which many non-authoritarian countries are relatively prominent, while some authoritarian states are not. For example, the U.S. shows up as having a high number of placemarks referencing dictatorship. Again, our method captures interest in a particular keyword within places' cyberscapes and imperfectly reflects offline activities. In this particular instance, the U.S.'s high showing is likely tied to the fact that the U.S. has many placemarks and that the search term was in English.

References to "Dictatorship"

Nevertheless, many current dictatorships - Myanmar (Burma) in southeast Asia, Eritrea in east Africa and Cuba - display some of the highest relative concentrations of the keyword dictatorship. Other countries whose history included authoritarian leaders -- Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Nicaragua -- remain prominent in terms of their online representations. In fact, in contrast to georeferenced mentions of democracy (which seem more oriented towards the potential for democracy in the future) references to the keyword "dictatorship" appear to have more of a historical element to them.

So while there remain some distortions in how the political systems of the world are represented in Google Maps, these maps reinforce our findings that the online representations of place are strongly tied to the physical world. Moreover, in the case of these political cyberscapes, they introduce a new level of temporality - the historical and futuristic references that have previously been absent (or, at the very least, less noticeable) - to our analysis of these online constructions of offline space.

And one of the most fundamental question -- Who gets to make these political definitions? – remains.

Finding Religion

We've received many comments in response to our latest series of maps of online representations of religion. Some were full of praise while others, well, weren't.

The critiques focused mainly on the fact that the maps didn't include the full diversity of religious beliefs in the world, or that the dominant belief systems of an area didn't necessarily appear in a place's cyberscape. A lot of this can be tied to our decisions about what to map and how to display it. Any map represents a whole range of decisions about what to include and how to display it and obviously some of our decisions rankled the sensibilities of some folks. The Anglicans of the United Kingdom seemed particularly incensed about being classified as Catholic. Jeez, it is almost as if there were decades of dynastical conflict and civil war about the issue of religion in England.

So, in response to the concerns raised by our readers we're featuring a series of maps of different religious terms. All of the maps below plot only the raw number of mentions of a particular keyword in the Google Maps database. Because these maps are not adjusted based on population or the relative specialization of placemarks with the given keyword, densely populated areas and those with higher levels of internet access are more prominently shown. Also, the sizing of the circles are unique to each map and therefore one CANNOT make direct comparisons between maps.

Despite these shortcomings, the maps are more or less indicative of the places where our readers expected to find high concentrations of Anglicans (particularly the U.K.) and Lutherans (northern Europe and the Nordic countries).

Map of Anglican

Map of Lutheran

Although it would appear that parts of the US, Canada and Australia rival the UK in the number of Anglicans, this isn't necessarily the case. Indeed, terms such as the "Church of England," "Church or Scotland" or "Church of Ireland" are used equivalently to "Anglican" in the U.K. but were not one of the keywords in our study.

For sake of comparison, we've also include a map of references to "catholic" in Google Maps placemarks. Remember, one CANNOT directly compare the size of the circles between maps. The sizing is unique for each.

Map of Catholic

The inability of capturing the variety of language used to described a single phenomenon remains a methodological issue for us, but it is one that we are continuing to address. Regardless, our concern is not with purporting to show the actual number of people subscribing to a particular religious doctrine in a particular place, but rather only how religions are represented in the cyberscapes of places.

For example, the terms Atheist and Agnostic are largely located within the U.S. (Southern California and the Northeast) and Europe. Few other parts of the world show the presence of these keywords.

Map of Atheist and Agnostic

References to Scientology, the domain of Hollywood actors like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are similarly concentrated in the places one would expect of them. Although Scientology's status as a religion can surely be debated (and continues to be in many countries, which could help explain the cluster in Germany), one sees large pockets in Los Angeles, where the Church of Scientology is now headquartered, New Jersey, where it was founded, and Clearwater, Florida, where it maintains a large complex.

Map of Scientology

Even Google Maps references to Zoroastrianism, purported to be the oldest known religion but now claiming relatively few adherents, are located in the parts of Iran, the United States, Pakistan and India that continue to have clusters of Zoroastrian believers.

Map of Zoroastrianism

So even the descendants of a religion founded in the 5th century B.C. are on Google Maps. Who knew?

How does the density of placemarks vary across space?

One of the most fundamental questions in our research is also one of the most basic. How does the density of placemarks vary over place? Back in June 2009, we took an initial look at information inequalities but had to rely on keyword searches for "0" and "1" (based on the assumption that there would be no particular spatial bias to these terms) as proxies for the total amount of content produced about a place. It worked fairly well but was less ideal than we hoped.

Recently it became possible to conduct wildcard searches (using the "*" operator) and this post revisits the same question, How does the density of cyberscape vary across locations? We conducted a wildcard search at approximately 260,000 points on the Earth's surface and collected the total number of placemarks indexed there. As always, a direct observation is preferable to a proxy measure so we're quite excited by these maps.

One sees that the United States contains the most placemarks (77 million) with almost twice as many as China which has 43 million. The only other countries that also have over ten million placemarks are the usual suspects when it comes to technology use: Germany, Japan, the UK, France and Italy. However, looking at the raw number of placemarks per country only tells part of the story. So, we decided to normalize these data by population and area. In doing so, some interesting patterns emerge.

Most countries in western Europe have extremely high levels of user-generated content per person despite having fewer placemarks than countries like China or the US. Denmark in particular stands out as having the world's highest ratio of placemarks per person. We're not sure why the Danes are so well represented in cyberscapes. Perhaps Danes have the perfect combination of high levels of disposable time and income to allow them to engage in the construction of user-generated content (the country has the world's highest level of income equality, a large welfare state and one of the highest levels of internet access). An alternate theory (which we're not putting a lot of store in) rests on the well established fact that all things internet-related can usually be explained by pornography. Denmark was the world's first country to legalize pornography and, as such, it stands to reason that they have a head start when it comes to producing content for the internet. We should point out that we haven't yet had a chance to explore the actual content that the Danes are producing.

Moving swiftly on, it is remarkable that China, despite being home to 1.3 billion people, continues to have a relatively high ranking when the data are normalized by population. The finding is a testament to the enormous amount of content being created about China. Interestingly in many of our maps so far, China has not shown up very strongly but this is likely connected to our focus on English search terms. For instance, we're currently searching using the Chinese characters for temple which is producing some interesting patterns that are also much denser than the searches on the English word temple.Finally, we decided to normalize the data by area. Here, very different patterns emerge. Small, densely populated countries like the Maldives and Singapore rise to the top of the list. Much of Europe as well as Japan and South Korea also stand out as having a large number of placemarks per square kilometre.

These maps show that there is no single way to represent the multiplicity of the world's cyberscapes. Depending on the particular way that these cyberscapes are measured and normalized, some quite different results can be found. And yet, irrespective of how the data are measured, a general 'digital divide' can be observed in these virtual representations of place. Western Europe, North America and parts of East Asia are represented by a significant amount of virtual content, while much of the rest of the world (in particular most of Africa and the Middle East) remains, both literally and figuratively, off the map.

Visualization of an Urban Cyberscape

We recently created this visualization of an urban cyberscape. In other words, the online extension of the socially constructed human landscape in which the lines between material place and digital representations of place blur.

It is this hyrbid space that floatingsheep.org is focused on mapping and analyzing.

More info at the FAQ

NOTE: The original title of this post should have read cyberscape, not cyberspace. These are the problems associated with making up words...

Metro Cyberscapes from around the World

Today's posting is comparing the cyberscapes (geo-coded data in cyberspace) of a range of cities from around the world. While cyberscapes can come from a range of sources, these maps are limited to user generated placemarks in Google Maps.

The best way to understand these maps is that these are the locations which Internet users have decided to annotate with placemarks. Thus, places with a great deal of economic and cultural activity within metropolitan areas are the ones highlighted within these maps. For example, the financial district and Market Street corridor in San Francisco; Westminster and the City of London in London; and the historic downtown and University of Kentucky campus in Lexington. Be careful comparing one city to another as the symbols/legends are scaled differently for each city (see notes below).

(For some reason the blogger software insists on moving all the maps far below. Keep going and you'll see them).

Baghdad	Beijing
Buenos Aires	Cape Town
Chicago	Washington D.C.
Dublin	Hong Kong
Jerusalem	Lagos
Lexington, KY	London
Los Angeles	Mexico City
Mumbai	New Orleans
New York	Pyongyang
Rio de Janeiro	San Francisco
Tallinn

It is also useful to compare the maximum number of placemarks (limited to user generated placemarks containing the search term "1") found in any one location for each city. This provides a means by which the overall size of each metro's cyberscape can be compared. New York and London clearly are the best developed within this set of cities (and likely the world). Likewise one can see a sizeable difference between cities within developed and developing countries. Lexington, KY (a U.S. city of approximately 250,000 people) has a comparable number of placemarks as do the most important cities in South America, India and Africa.

Notes on the maps

• These maps are based upon a 100 meter search grid of the city. The white box in each map indicates the area for which we have data.
• The data measures the number of user generated placemarks containing the search term "1" (selected to limit the amount of language bias between cities) at the grid locations in each city. Google Map queries required a search term and "1" is the best proxy for general levels of placemark use.
  
• Not surprisingly, there is a large amount of variation between cities with placemark use. The Pyongyang cyberscape has a maximum of 130 placemarks at any one location while New York has 100 times as many placemarks at its most dense location.
• The size/color of the symbology is the same for each map but the scale can be quite different. For example, the largest symbol for Baghdad represents a range of 64 to 68 placemarks while the map of London does not even include locations that have fewer than 76 placemarks.
• All data is from January 2009.

Crescent City Cyberscapes

In honor of today's raucous Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans, we present to you all a series of cyberscapes showing the concentration of numerous New Orleans eccentricities (some good, some bad). We'll mostly let the pretty pictures speak for themselves on this day of celebration, but notice the concentration of activity in these maps in both the French Quarter and the Lower Ninth Ward (see map of New Orleans neighborhoods below for reference).

All User-Generated Placemarks

Things get more interesting when you compare the distribution of placemarks for specific keywords. Unfortunately due to a technical glitch we do not have a map for the term Mardi Gras. But since a main element of the celebration in New Orleans is about processions, using the keyword "parade" provides a good sense of the distribution of activity on Mardi Gras with a large cluster in the French Quarter where the largest (and best known) parades occur.

But Mardi Gras is more than the French Quarter with neighborhood parades and celebrations being a key part of local identity. These events, known as "second lines", have a much different geography within New Orleans. Neighborhoods outside of the tourist district (such as Treme and Broadmoor) emerge as important (and non-tourist oriented) sites for Mardi Gras.

__Second Line_______Parade______

_

Other New Orleans cultural icons include mapping Beignets (clustered around the Cafe du Monde site) and Jazz. The map of jazz highlights both the French Quarter and the site of the annual jazz festival.

Beignet_______Jazz__

_

Some of most intriguing results are for the keywords "Hurricane" and "Katrina", each of which highlight parts of the city that were particularly hard hit in 2005. The Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood and the site of the levee break are particularly well documented.

Hurricane_______Katrina__

_

Anyone interested in Hurricane Katrina and Google Maps should see:
Crutcher, M. and M. Zook (2009). Placemarks and Waterlines: Racialized Cyberscapes in Post Katrina Google Earth. GeoForum 40(4): 523-534.

Map of New Orleans Neighborhoods (to orientate yourself)