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 understand the ways in which algorithmic bias can stand as evidence of existing inequalities, with the aim of informing policy interventions to tackle the social causes of these disparities.
Based on a case-study analysis of bias in the Chicago Crime Prediction Algorithm, this project explores the extent to which evidence of algorithmic bias can be used to guide policy responses to the societal disparities replicated in these tools.
This project seeks to apply the principles of AI for Fair Work, by using these as a benchmark for empirical on workers’ experiences of the implementation of AI systems in the workplace.
9 June 2025
The Oxford Internet Institute’s Franziska Sofia Hafner explores whether language models are perpetuating gender stereotypes.
21 May 2025
Oxford researchers reveal how AI language models encode a flawed and binary understanding of gender, posing significant risks for transgender, nonbinary, and even cisgender individuals.
10 March 2025
Meta recently announced its plan to build the world’s longest submarine cable system. The OII’s Professor Vili Lehdonvirta and DPhil candidate Anniki Mikelsaar ask what geopolitical and economic significance this new project may have.
LBC, 21 May 2025
It could give young people the freedom to live, travel and work across borders. But without stronger protections, it risks feeding a generation into an online gig economy built on broken promises and systemic exploitation.
HR Review, 20 May 2025
Most online gig economy platforms are failing to meet even minimum labour standards, according to a new report – with widespread non-compliance with basic protections around pay, working conditions and contracts.
Forbes, 17 April 2025
Article highlights how Cloud computing has changed the status of network hardware like servers and data storage from a common asset of organizations or companies to a type of infrastructure, referencing OII research.
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 Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI
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.
Former 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 taught 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.
Former 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.
