Across the globe, daily economic, social and political activities increasingly revolve around the use of social content on the Internet. This user-generated content influences our understandings of, and interactions with, our social environment, and yet it is remarkable how little we know about the broader contexts in which much of that content is created. Using the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform, this project therefore proposes to comprehensively uncover: (1) where Internet content is being created; (2) whether the amount of content created in different places is changing over time; and (3) how content moves across time and space in the Social Web.
As an entry point into research on the social Web, this project will analyse data from the world’s most used, and arguably most influential, micro-blogging platform: Twitter. The platform might initially appear to just be a source of trivial content creation. However, it has recently been the source of significant change in political campaigning and protest, education, emergency response, legal proceedings, and cultural expression. The sheer scale and volume of content that passes through the platform allows it to provide valuable insights into real-time conversations happening throughout the world.
This project will develop and employ rigorous methods to map and measure how conversations on Twitter are taking place over time and space. Stage one will consist of creating a database of all geolocatable content on the platform in order to map the geographies of content creation (i.e. it asks: ‘who is creating content?’). Stage two will move beyond straightforward mappings of content in order to examine the movement of concepts and ideas over time and space. The final, and most ambitious, stage of this project will explore the changing visibility of the world’s twenty most widely spoken languages in the social Web.
By bringing together methods that are at the intersection of computer science and social science, this project aims to geographically and temporally map the movement of content and ideas in the social Web. It will examine where content is created, who is creating content, and how that content is layered over our material environment. Doing so will allow broad academic debates about inclusion, social participation, and cultural diffusion on the Internet to be addressed.
This project is suported by Oxford University Press’s Fell Fund.
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.
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, and Turing Fellow. He develops and applies computer science techniques to the social sciences focusing on improving equitable access to quality information.
Former MSc Student
Thesis: Determining the Importance of Geography On Twitter Supervisor: Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger Completed: 2012
Former Researcher
Ning Wang holds a joint position between the OII and Oxford's Mathematical Institute. His work involves in the collection and analysis of a big dataset tracking patterns of communication in online social networks.
Al Jazeera, 2 May 2013
In the run-up to the Malaysia's first 'social media' election, Al Jazeera quotes findings by Mark Graham that Malaysia is the sixth largest producer of information via Twitter in the world.
The Malaysian Insider, 27 February 2013
The Malaysian Prime Minister predicted that the forthcoming election will be Malaysia's first social media election. He quoted Mark Graham: Malaysia and Brazil have high levels of Twitter use.
DW Akademie, 18 February 2013
'Cities have become both digital and digitized' says Mark Graham whose work on geocoded tweets in African cities is answering questions on his research for Deutsche Welle Akademie.
