Geographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality

By Mark Graham and Martin Dittus

Today's urban environments are layered with data and algorithms that fundamentally shape how we perceive and move through space. But are our digitally dense environments continuing to amplify inequalities rather than alleviate them? This book looks at the key contours of information inequality, and who, what and where gets left out.

Platforms like Google Maps and Wikipedia have become important gateways to understanding the world, and yet they are characterised by significant gaps and biases, often driven by processes of exclusion. As a result, their digital augmentations tend to be refractions rather than reflections: they highlight only some facets of the world at the expense of others.

This doesn't mean that more equitable futures aren't possible. By outlining the mechanisms through which our digital and material worlds intersect, the authors conclude with a roadmap for what alternative digital geographies might look like.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786807427

Mark Graham

Mark Graham is a professor in the Art Department at Brigham Young University. Graham is an internationally known illustrator. His research interests include teacher education, place-based education, graphic novels, ecological/holistic education, secondary art education, design thinking, STEAM education, and Himalayan art and culture. Contact: 3116-B JKB, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA.

Book preview

illustration

Geographies of Digital Exclusion

‘Conceptually rich and well-illustrated, this is a valuable analysis of data power at the global scale.’

—Professor Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University

‘An enlightening and accessible introduction to digital geographies and why they are important to our understanding of digital exclusion.’

—Alex Singleton, Professor of Geographic Information Science, University of Liverpool

‘Demonstrates how so much digital data is sourced from a very limited range of geographical locations and laboured over in various ways, and what difference this makes to the information about places on platforms like OpenStreetMap, Google Maps and Wikipedia.’

—Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

‘Systematic, sobering, yet uplifting, this volume makes the convincing case that digital transformation is not the end of geography, nor is it an equaliser for the diverse cultures and peoples across the globe.’

—Jack Linchuan Qiu, Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

‘An important and insightful book. Graham and Dittus eloquently map, measure and critically interrogate digital geographies in a way that forces us to reckon with their power and politics, the injustices they incur, and how we might imagine alternatives.’

—Professor Lina Dencik, Co-Director of the Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University

‘A must read for those deeply concerned about long hidden people and places who have been marginalised in the politics of place-making, including within digital worlds like Wikipedia and Google.’

—Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users and Co-Founder of FemLab.Co

Radical Geography

Series Editors:

Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill Former editor: Kate Derickson

Also available:

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Unlocking Sustainable Cities:

A Manifesto for Real Change

Paul Chatterton

In Their Place:

The Imagined Geographies of Poverty

Stephen Crossley

Making Workers:

Radical Geographies of Education

Katharyne Mitchell

Space Invaders:

Radical Geographies of Protest

Paul Routledge

Data Power:

Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance

Jim E. Thatcher and Craig M. Dalton

New Borders:

Migration, Hotspots and the European Superstate

Antonis Vradis, Evie Papada, Joe Painter and Anna Papoutsi

Geographies of

Digital Exclusion

Data and Inequality

Mark Graham and Martin Dittus

illustration

First published 2022 by Pluto Press

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Mark Graham and Martin Dittus 2022

The right of Mark Graham and Martin Dittus to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4019 7 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4018 0 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 786807 41 0 PDF

ISBN 978 1 786807 42 7 EPUB

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

List of Figures

Series Preface

Acknowledgements

1We All Are Digital Geographers

The cartographic attributes of the invisible

From cosmographies to digital geographies

Maps are not the territory

2When the Map Becomes the Territory

Pre-digital geographies of information

Democratising geographies and economies?

3Making Digital Geographies

The collection of geospatial data

Organising the information

A geospatial platform ecology

Two complementary approaches

4A Geography of Digital Geographies

How to ‘map’ digital maps

The world according to Wikipedia

A gallery of digital maps

A global map?

5Digital Augmentations of the City

How to map Google Maps

The city according to Google

A geolinguistic hegemony?

6Who are the Map-Makers?

Who contributes to Wikipedia?

Information environments

Participation environments

Limits to the universal platform?

7Information Power and Inequality

Wikipedia’s geolinguistic contours

Information equity and spatial contestation

What are the responsibilities of the map-maker?

8Towards More Just Digital Geographies

Introduction

Principles for the digital geographies of the future

Building digital geographies of the future?

What comes next?

Epilogue

Appendix

Reference tables

Data sources

Methodology for Chapter 5

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1 The Codex Nitriensis

1.2 The Carta Marina

4.1 Geotags in the Wikipedia article for Bhutan

4.2 The global locations of geotagged articles across all of Wikipedia’s language editions

4.3 Wikipedia geotags in Southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa

4.4 Number of Wikipedia articles by country, across all language editions

4.5 Number of Wikipedia articles by surface area, across all language editions

4.6 Number of Wikipedia articles per million people, across all language editions

4.7 Number of Wikipedia articles by global region, compared to population size and surface area

4.8 Wikipedia content over time, by region, across all language editions

4.9 Amounts of Wikipedia content for the ten most widely spoken languages

4.10 Estimated Google Maps coverage, aggregated across the ten most widely spoken languages

4.11 Estimated Google Maps coverage, normalised by population

4.12 Google Maps content volumes for the ten most widely spoken languages

4.13 Estimated Google Maps coverage for four widely spoken languages: Arabic, English, Hindi and Spanish

4.14 Number of nodes in OpenStreetMap per thousand people

4.15 Number of entries in the GeoNames database per million people

4.16 Number of observations in iNaturalist per million people

5.1 Results of an Arabic-language restaurant search in Kafr Qasim, near the West Bank

5.2 Map coverage by location and search language

5.3 Content density in Kolkata for Bengali, Hindi and English

5.4 Aggregated volume of search results by place and language

5.5 Content density in Kolkata for Bengali, English and Hindi

5.6 Majority content languages in Hong Kong

5.7 Estimated Google Maps coverage in four widely spoken languages: Arabic, Portuguese, French and Spanish

5.8 Share of search results by search and result language

6.1 Measures of digital participation by world regions

6.2 Wikipedia pageviews per internet-connected person, across all Wikipedia language versions

6.3 Anonymous Wikipedia edits across all language versions by contributor location, normalised by the number of internet users in each country

6.4 Edits to the Arabic-, English-, Hindi- and Spanish-language editions of Wikipedia

6.5 Wikipedia edits by anonymous editors over time, by editor location, across all Wikipedia language versions

6.6 Wikipedia edits by editor location relative to Europe, across all Wikipedia language versions

6.7 Internet users per country as share of the population

6.8 Cost of broadband relative to average income

7.1 Wikipedia’s local content equity

7.2 Contribution outflows on Wikipedia per global region

7.3 Contribution inflows on Wikipedia per global region

7.4 Local content equity on Wikipedia over time

7.5 Share of population literate in the most prevalent local language

7.6 Wikipedia local-language equity

7.7 Wikipedia language prevalence of four major languages

Series Preface

The Radical Geography series consists of accessible books which use geographical perspectives to understand issues of social and political concern. These short books include critiques of existing government policies and alternatives to staid ways of thinking about our societies. They feature stories of radical social and political activism, guides to achieving change, and arguments about why we need to think differently on many contemporary issues if we are to live better together on this planet.

A geographical perspective involves seeing the connections within and between places, as well as considering the role of space and scale to develop a new and better understanding of current problems. Written largely by academic geographers, books in the series deliberately target issues of political, environmental and social concern. The series showcases clear explications of geographical approaches to social problems, and it has a particular interest in action currently being undertaken to achieve positive change that is radical, achievable, real and relevant.

The target audience ranges from undergraduates to experienced scholars, as well as from activists to conventional policy-makers, but these books are also for people interested in the world who do not already have a radical outlook and who want to be engaged and informed by a short, well written and thought-provoking book.

Danny Dorling, Matthew T. Huber and Jenny Pickerill

Series Editors

Acknowledgements

This work in this book is inspired, encouraged and motivated by a few key people and projects. We would like to acknowledge: Matt Zook for his pioneering work in the field of digital geography that provided a foundation for us to pursue our own work in this area; the rest of the Floating Sheep Collective (Taylor Shelton, Monica Stephens, Ate Poorthuis) for making internet geography both critical and fun; Bernie Hogan, Ilhem Allagui, Ralph Straumann, Ahmed Medhat, Sanna Ojanperä, Ali Frihida, Claudio Calvino, Stefano De Sabbata, Richard Farmbrough, Heather Ford, Frederike Kaltheuner, David Palfrey, Gavin Bailey, Kalina Bontcheva, Taha Yasseri and Clarence Singleton for being star collaborators on our earlier ‘Uneven Openness’ project: Whose Knowledge – in particular, Adele Vrana, Anasuya Sengupta, Claudia Pozo and Siko Bouterse – whose efforts to centre the knowledge of marginalised communities (the majority of the world) on the internet are already world-changing and world-improving, sometimes quietly and sometimes not so quietly; Sneha Puthiya Purayil and Sumandro Chattapadhyay at the Centre for Internet & Society; Bill Dutton, Vicki Nash, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Helen Margetts for encouraging and supporting our work at the OII for over a decade; Cailean Osborne, at the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation; Licia Capra, Pete Masters, Andrew Braye, Melanie Eckle and countless others who have helped shape Martin’s previous research on the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team; Rob Kitchin, Agnieszka Leszczynski and Matt Wilson for their always inspiring contributions at AAG meetings; and, last but not least, the wonderful DPhil students that we’ve had the privilege of working with at the OII: Heather Ford for her pathbreaking work on representation in Wikipedia; Joe Shaw for driving forwards our thinking into digital rights to the city; Sanna Ojanperä and Khairunnisa Haji Ibrahim for their careful and committed work into digital inequalities; and Margie Cheesman, Fabian Ferrari and Marie-Therese Png for critically thinking through the political economy of digital infrastructures. We’ve learnt a lot from each of you, and thanks for keeping our compass pointed in the right direction.

We have deeply benefited from the conversations, debates and political engagements that the authors have engaged in as part of the Fairwork and Geonet projects based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Thank you very much to Amir Anwar, Fabian Braeseman, Stefano De Sabbata, Chris Foster, Sanna Ojanperä, Fabian Stephany, Ralph Straumann, Michel Wahome, Daniel Abs, Iftikhar Ahmad, María Belén Albornoz, Moritz Altenried, Paula Alves, Oğuz Alyanak, Branka Andjelkovic, Thomas Anning-Dorson, Arturo Arriagada, Daniel Arubayi, Tat Chor Au-Yeung, Alessio Bertolini, Louise Bezuidenhout, Gautam Bhatia, Richard Boateng, Manuela Bojadzijev, Macarena Bonhomme, Maren Borkert, Joseph Budu, Rodrigo Carelli, Henry Chavez, Sonata Cepik, Aradhana Cherupara Vadekkethil, Chris King Chi Chan, Matthew Cole, Paska Darmawan, Markieta Domecka, Darcy du Toit, Veena Dubal, Trevilliana Eka Putri, Fabian Ferrari, Patrick Feuerstein, Roseli Figaro, Milena Franke, Sandra Fredman, Pia Garavaglia, Farah Ghazal, Anita Ghazi Rahman, Shikoh Gitau, Slobodan Golusin, Markus Griesser, Rafael Grohman, Martin Gruber-Risak, Sayema Haque Bidisha, Khadiga Hassan, Richard Heeks, Mabel Rocío Hernández Díaz, Luis Jorge Hernández Flores, Benjamin Herr, Salma Hindy, Kelle Howson, Francisco Ibáñez, Sehrish Irfan, Tanja Jakobi, Athar Jameel, Hannah Johnston, Srujana Katta, Maja Kovac, Martin Krzywdzinski, Larry Kwan, Sebastian Lew, Jorge Leyton, Melissa Malala, Oscar Javier Maldonado, Shabana Malik, Laura Clemencia Mantilla León, Claudia Marà, Évilin Matos, Sabrina Mustabin Jaigirdar, Tasnim Mustaque, Baraka Mwaura, Mounika Neerukonda, Sidra Nizamuddin, Thando Nkohla-Ramunenyiwa, Sanna Ojanperä, Caroline Omware, Adel Osama, Balaji Parthasarathy, Leonhard Plank, Valeria Pulignano, Jack Qui, Ananya Raihan, Pablo Aguera Reneses, Nabiyla Risfa Izzati, Nagla Rizk, Cheryll Ruth Soriano, Nancy Salem, Julice Salvagni, Derly Yohanna Sánchez Vargas, Kanikka Sersia, Murali Shanmugavelan, Shanza Sohail, Janaki Srinivasan, Shelly Steward, Zuly Bibiana Suárez Morales, Sophie Sun, David Sutcliffe, Pradyumna Taduri, Kristin Thompson, Pitso Tsibolane, Anna Tsui, Funda Ustek-Spilda, Jean-Paul Van Belle, Laura Vogel, Zoya Waheed, Jing Wang, Robbie Warin, Nadine Weheba and Yihan Zhu.

A big thanks to the organisers and attendees at events and workshops whose engagement with our early material helped us develop it further: The Geonet Digital | Economy | Africa Conference 2018 in Johannesburg; Data Justice 2018 in Cardiff; Decolonising the Internet 2018 in Cape Town, in particular Kelly Foster and Christel Steigenberger; Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town, in particular Bobby Shabangu, Josh Lim, Frikan Erwee, Douglas Scott, Jens Ohlig, Lea Voget, and Lydia Pintscher; Worlds of Wikimedia 2019 in Sydney, in particular Bunty Avieson and team; State of the Map 2019 in Heidelberg; HOT Summit 2019 in Heidelberg; WikiArabia 2019 in Marrakech, in particular Ezarraf Noureddine, Vasanthi Hargyono, Asaf Bartov, Marc Miquel-Ribé, Farah Mustaklem; Decolonizing The Internet’s Languages at MozFest 2019 in London; all of the participants in our Wikipedia in the Middle East workshops in Cairo and Amman; and, finally, the participants at our RGS-IBG 2018 workshop in Cardiff, titled ‘Digital Representations of Place: Urban Overlays and Digital Justice’, including speakers Gillian Rose, Muki Haklay, Rob Kitchin and Yu-Shan Tseng, as well as countless others who provided thoughtful reflections on the inequities inherent in digital representation.

A huge thank you to everyone who offered perspectives, critique and advice regarding work contained in earlier drafts of this book, including: Danny Dorling, Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Ben Drury, David ‘Mapmaker’ Garcia, Matt Wilson, Ralph Straumann, Taha Yasseri and Nancy Salem. Special thanks also to Nancy Salem and David Sutcliffe for their invaluable edits and comments at the final stage of the book.

We are grateful to the volunteer translators for our research of Google Maps in Chapter 5, including: Anasuya Sengupta, ashashyou, Babalwa Tembeni, Bonface Witaba, Bruno Lincoln, Buntubonke Mzondo, Busisiwe Moloi, Can Liu, Champ Wu, Dror Kamir, Elisa Pannini, Emaliana Kasmuri, Emerson Leandro Monteiro, Farah Mustaklem, Frikan Erwee, Gabriel Eugênio Aquino Diedrich, Irene Poetranto, Laure Joanny, Nduta Mugo, R. Fanelwa Ajayi, Ruben De Smet, Sephora Mianda, Xavier Romero-Vidal and everyone who helped promote our call for translators.

Thank you to The Alan Turing Institute for providing us with hotdesks and WiFi in central London, and to David Castle and Pluto for their trust and patience as we prepared our manuscript.

Parts of the book are reproductions and reworkings of earlier publications in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geo and Wired.

Finally, thank you to Adel El Zaim, Matthew Smith, Laurent Elder, Gehane Said and Nola Haddadian of the IDRC for supporting our earlier research on the geographies of Wikipedia. Our research in this book was primarily funded by the Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2016-155) and Whose Knowledge. Mark Graham is partially funded as a Turing Fellow under Turing Award Number TU/B/000042. This work was also made possible through funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 335716.

1

We All Are Digital Geographers

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

(John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996)

THE CARTOGRAPHIC ATTRIBUTES OF THE INVISIBLE1

The internet used to be a faraway place. You would tap into the net through a clunky terminal and be transported into another world. People talked about travelling down an information superhighway, and surfing the net. We would enter a cyberspace and get ‘online’. It was never fully clear where the internet was, but what all of those visions had in common is that they weren’t here. John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ famously summed up some of these transcendent visions. The internet was a new world for all of us to build: a world with its own culture, economy, politics, ethics and – most importantly – space.

But with every year since the penning of that Declaration in the late 1990s, something else has happened instead. We have found ever more ways of embedding the internet into everyday life and everyday places.

Temperance Street, Manchester

Temperance Street in Manchester is a short road that is only a stone’s throw from Manchester Piccadilly train station. It looks a lot like many other streets near British railway stations: on one side there is a brick viaduct for the main rail line into Piccadilly. The arches under the viaduct host garages, wholesalers and other businesses that don’t necessarily need to be in a more trafficked area. Moss, weeds and bushes grow out of the bricks, giving the road a relatively unkempt – even dishevelled – look.

Temperance Street is therefore a rather unassuming place, and most people from outside of Manchester (and indeed many within it) had likely never heard of it until Google Street View helped to bring this small corner of the city to fame. However, the attention it received was not necessarily the sort of attention that the Manchester tourist board would have chosen.

Like most European cities, most of Manchester is mapped by Google’s Street View feature, which allows people to virtually ‘be there’ in a three-dimensional snapshot of every navigable part of the city. Ironically, Temperance Street – named after the nineteenth-century mass movement to promote abstinence from excesses – was the site of an extremely public sex act. Anyone using Google Maps to navigate through that part of the city to the station wouldn’t just see the garages, parked cars and railway arches that make up Temperance Street; they would also see an image of a woman performing fellatio on a man leaning, pants down, against the viaduct.

After being noticed, the image quickly went viral. Journalists expressed shock that such a scene could be found in Google’s depiction of Manchester, and social media commentators took great delight in seeing the city documented in such a raw and uncensored way. Before long, Google had removed the offending stretch of road from Street View.

Where is Jerusalem?

The city of Jerusalem has been at the centre of ethno-political struggles for millennia. As a holy city to Jews, Christians and