Using Big Data to better understand urban questions is an exciting field with challenging methodological and theoretical problems. It is also, however, potentially troubling when Big Data ...(particularly derived from social media) is applied uncritically to urban governance via the ideas and practices of “smart cities”. This essay reviews both the historical depth of central ideas within smart city governance —particular the idea that enough data/information/knowledge can solve society problems—but also the ways that the most recent version differs. Namely, that the motivations and ideological underpinning behind the goal of urban betterment is largely driven by technology advocates and neoliberalism rather than the strong social justice themes associated with earlier applications of data to cities. Geosocial media data and metrics derived from them can provide useful insight and policy direction. But one must be ever mindful that metrics don’t simply measure; in the process of deciding what is important and possible to measure, these data are simultaneously defining what cities are.
•Analyzes two years of geotagged tweets from Louisville, Kentucky.•Explores popular spatial imaginaries of the ‘9th Street Divide’.•Argues for greater linkages between socio-spatial theory and big ...data research.•Develops a novel conceptual and methodological frame for using social media data.
Big data is increasingly seen as a way of providing a more ‘scientific’ approach to the understanding and management of cities. But most geographic analyses of geotagged social media data have failed to mobilize a sufficiently complex understanding of socio-spatial relations. By combining the conceptual approach of relational socio-spatial theory with the methods of critical GIScience, this paper explores the spatial imaginaries and processes of segregation and mobility at play in the notion of the ‘9th Street Divide’ in Louisville, Kentucky. Through a more context-sensitive analysis of this data, this paper argues against this popular spatial imaginary and the notion that the Louisville's West End is somehow separate and apart from the rest of the city. By analyzing the everyday activity spaces of different groups of Louisvillians through geotagged Twitter data, we instead argue for an understanding of these neighborhoods as fluid, porous and actively produced, rather than as rigid, static or fixed. Ultimately, this paper is meant to provide a conceptual and methodological framework for the analysis of social media data that is more attentive to the multiplicity of socio-spatial relations embodied in such data.
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In less than a decade Bitcoin and the technology of blockchain – a cryptographically-secured, algorithmically-regulated, distributed-ledger – emerged as the enfant terrible of the global economy. ...Ironically, as cryptocurrencies reached collective valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars the Bitcoin project failed in its original purpose as an alternative currency governed by code rather than trust. Not only has Bitcoin not become a popular means of global peer-to-peer transactions but the much vaulted purity of algorithmic governance is heavily entangled in social relations. This article reviews blockchain’s computer architectures, its connections to materiality and space and the complexity of its established practices. This analysis shows that rather than occupying an algorithmic place apart, blockchain contains multiple and conflicting agencies and is messily embedded in the code/space of materiality. Nevertheless the faith in the superiority of algorithmic governance has injected a powerful discourse in economies that has proven more important and disruptive than the actual practices of Bitcoin or blockchain.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
With the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced information and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, ...lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of 'augmented realities', this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmented realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.
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•Examines geotagged tweets in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.•Argues for a mixed methods approach to studying big data.•Uses the TPSN framework to explicitly theorize sociospatial relations of big ...data.•∼30% of geotagged tweets about Sandy in the US were located in the NYC metro area.•Geographies of Twitter are more complex than just places with high concentrations.
Digital social data are now practically ubiquitous, with increasingly large and interconnected databases leading researchers, politicians, and the private sector to focus on how such ‘big data’ can allow potentially unprecedented insights into our world. This paper investigates Twitter activity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in order to demonstrate the complex relationship between the material world and its digital representations. Through documenting the various spatial patterns of Sandy-related tweeting both within the New York metropolitan region and across the United States, we make a series of broader conceptual and methodological interventions into the nascent geographic literature on big data. Rather than focus on how these massive databases are causing necessary and irreversible shifts in the ways that knowledge is produced, we instead find it more productive to ask how small subsets of big data, especially georeferenced social media information scraped from the internet, can reveal the geographies of a range of social processes and practices. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can uncover broad spatial patterns within this data, as well as understand how this data reflects the lived experiences of the people creating it. We also seek to fill a conceptual lacuna in studies of user-generated geographic information, which have often avoided any explicit theorizing of sociospatial relations, by employing Jessop et al.’s TPSN framework. Through these interventions, we demonstrate that any analysis of user-generated geographic information must take into account the existence of more complex spatialities than the relatively simple spatial ontology implied by latitude and longitude coordinates.
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About the Authors: Matthew Zook * E-mail: zook@uky.edu Affiliation: Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America Solon Barocas Affiliation: Microsoft ...Research, New York, New York, United States of America danah boyd Affiliations Microsoft Research, New York, New York, United States of America, Data & Society, New York, New York, United States of America Kate Crawford Affiliations Microsoft Research, New York, New York, United States of America, Information Law Institute, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America Emily Keller Affiliation: Data & Society, New York, New York, United States of America ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9189-0421 Seeta Peña Gangadharan Affiliation: Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1955-3874 Alyssa Goodman Affiliation: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Rachelle Hollander Affiliation: Center for Engineering Ethics and Society, National Academy of Engineering, Washington, DC, United States of America Barbara A. Koenig Affiliation: Institute for Health Aging, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America Jacob Metcalf Affiliation: Ethical Resolve, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2803-6625 Arvind Narayanan Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America Alondra Nelson Affiliation: Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America Frank Pasquale Affiliation: Carey School of Law, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of AmericaCitation: Zook M, Barocas S, boyd d, Crawford K, Keller E, Gangadharan SP, et al. PLoS Comput...
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Google Earth was released a few months prior to Hurricane Katrina and became an important tool in distributing information about the damage occurring in New Orleans, albeit not to all parts of ...society. While Google Earth did not create the economic and racial divides present in society, its use in the post-Katrina context reflect this gulf and have arguably reinforced and recreated it online. This paper has three main objectives. The first is to provide a clear empirical case study of how race remains relevant to the way people use (or do not use) the internet and internet based services. The second is highlighting the power of new online and interactive mapping technologies and demonstrating how these technologies are differentially adopted. The third and final objective is illustrating how any divide in accessing digital technology is not simply a one time event but a constantly moving target as new devices, software and cultural practices emerge. Thus, in addition to highlighting the racial inequalities in US society in general, Hurricane Katrina provides an important window on the way in which race remains a key factor in the access and use of emerging digital technologies.
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This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web‐based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in ...which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and GeoCommons. This analysis demonstrates that ITs were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of relief and aid agencies without actually being physically present in Haiti. While not without problems, this effort nevertheless represents a remarkable example of the power and crowdsourced online mapping and the potential for new avenues of interaction between physically distant places that vary tremendously.
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The Internet has often been portrayed as the ultimate leveler of information where existing hierarchies of power and privilege are undermined by meritocracy. Some websites and functions are, however, ...more equal than others. In particular, search engines such as Google have been a key means to construct meaning out of disorder. This ordering (or enclosing of the Internet commons), however, comes at a cost as a location within the top 10 Google search results, marks the boundary (albeit a fluid one) between the core and the periphery of the Internet. The recent incorporation of spatial elements into the Google indexing raises fresh and geographically relevant concerns. This article focuses on the construction, access and use of Google derived rankings to deploy geo-referenced information in the physical environment and the way this melding of code and place affects how people interact with place. Using the theoretical concept of DigiPlace this article analyzes how Google Maps and Google Earth are structured and shape what appears (and what does not) in cyberspace and DigiPlace. Of particular concern are the implications of a private corporation controlling this new space.
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10.
Viral Data Leszczynski, Agnieszka; Zook, Matthew
Big data & society,
11/2020, Volume:
7, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ...ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals and communities. This collection of papers explores how data (and their absences) is figuring in the making of the discourses, lived realities, and systemic inequalities of the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
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