Questions of equality and social justice are as important as ever in the information age. Do Internet technologies give rise to radical social change, or do they just reproduce existing social and economic divisions and relationships?
By changing how people and organisations interact with each other, ICTs disrupt and reconfigure social networks, information and value flows, and geographic space: but who exactly profits?
This project seeks to utilise newly available data to help urban policy makers improve transport infrastructure to cope with growing and increasingly mobile populations.
Contemporary urban policy makers face a critical challenge over the next decade or so: transport infrastructures need to be able to cope with growing (and increasingly mobile) populations, yet central and local governments are operating in an era of austerity where major new investment in infrastructure is unlikely.
Data science and data-centric engineering offer a potential solution to this problem. The availability of new data is transforming the way we study human behaviour as well as plan and operate infrastructure. Along with data from sensors, crowd-sourced data, social data, and administrative data have also all greatly increased. Millions of volunteers contribute geographic data to platforms like OpenStreetMap, while huge swaths of social data (e.g., online reviews, posts on social networking sites, etc.) augment our physical space with additional data. Administrative and government processes are digital, available in real-time and more easily linked and searched than ever before.
This project seeks to understand how these additional data sources complement sensor data to give us a deeper understanding of human behaviour and improve modelling and prediction tasks. It also seeks to innovate in ways to visualise and analyse this data quickly, extending previous work on generating tile maps algorithmically.
This project aims to map where in the world the data centers that make up the computational infrastructure of AI research are located and who owns them. It will also investigate government policies aimed at shaping this geography.
A data-driven approach to understanding structural determinants of digital inequalities
This project seeks to review the Indian government’s policies relating to AI and Work, to improve understanding of how they are/can be (re)configured to account for and address the informality that characterises Indian urban labour markets.
20 July 2023
Fairwork scores 15 web-based digital platforms against basic principles of fair work. No companies meet minimum standards for fair working practices.
28 April 2023
For the third year, researchers based at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, highlight the best and worst companies in the UK platform economy according to how they treat their workers.
2 March 2023
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2022 OII MSc Thesis Prizes. Three prizes were awarded for the best theses from the MSc in Social Science of the Internet and the MSc in Social Data Science, plus two ‘Highly Commended' awards.
Politico, 19 September 2023
For Vili Lehdonvirta, a Finnish researcher based at Oxford, the AI revolution has a fundamentally physical basis, one that could be as relevant to global power as the geography of proven oil reserves and pipelines has been for decades.
The Washington Post, 28 August 2023
CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines — In a coastal city in the southern Philippines, thousands of young workers log online every day to support the booming business of artificial intelligence.
TechCrunch, 21 August 2023
If you use apps from world-leading technology companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft or Google, there is a big chance you have already consumed services produced by online remote work — also known as cloudwork
Professor of Internet Geography
Mark Graham is an economic geographer. His research focuses on digital labour, the gig economy, and digital inequalities. He is the author, most recently, of The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction.
Professor Mark Graham is Professor of Internet Geography at the OII, asking how people and places are ever more defined by, and made visible through, not only their traditional physical locations and properties, but also their virtual attributes and digital shadows.
His work covers a diverse range of topics, including digital labour, the gig economy, internet geographies, and ICTs and development. His research has been published in journals including Information, Communication & Society, Sociology, The Journal of Development Studies, and Urban Geography, and he is an editor of Environment and Planning A. Professor Graham has authored and edited books published by Polity, Routledge, and Oxford University Press.
Graham is one of the founders of the participatory action research project called the Fairwork Project, founded in 2018, which has brought together a team of 22 labour sociologists and lawyers. Bringing together stakeholders – including workers, trade unions, platforms, and policy makers – the project aims to set minimum fair work standards for the gig economy and frequently reports on platforms’ working conditions. Other projects he has worked on have studied knowledge economies in Africa, the ‘planetary labour market’, and the inequalities of Wikipedia.
At the OII, he teaches the course Digital Capitalism and its Inequalities.
Departmental Lecturer
Grant Blank's work focuses on the social and cultural implications of the Internet and new media, quantitative and qualitative methods, and cultural sociology. He teaches on the OII social statistics courses.
Professor of Education, the Internet and Society
Rebecca Eynon's research focuses on learning and the Internet, and the links between digital and social exclusion.
Research Associate
Matthew Cole was a Postdoctoral Researcher with Fairwork, investigating global platforms. His research interests include the political economy of technology and platforms, particularly the transformation of work.
