Digital geospatial information is layered throughout our urban landscapes; it is invisible to the naked eye, but is a central component of the augmentations and mediations of place enabled by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, computers, and other digital technologies. We not just produce, access, and use all of this geospatial information about place, but also access it whilst we are in those very places. Moreover, due to advances in mobile technology, many people now quite literally have access to this information in the palms of our hands. But far from uniform and ubiquitous, these digital dimensions of places are fractured along a number of axes such as location, language and social networks. This paper analyzes how these fractures differ across space and language to both highlight the differences and begin the process of explaining the factors behind them. While some of the disparities conform to longstanding offline patterns, others highlight the changing fortunes and positions of places in a globalizing economy and highlight the increasingly finer scale of differentiation in which understandings of places are constructed.

1. augmented realities and
uneven geographies: exploring the
geolinguistic contours of the web
AAG Annual Meeting
New York, February 25 2012
Mark Graham Matthew Zook
Oxford Internet Institute Department of Geography
e: mark@geospace.co.uk University of Kentucky
t: @geoplace e: zook@uky.edu

2. “We’re trying to build a virtual mirror
of the world at all times”
Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Location Services
LeWeb Conference, Paris 2010.

3. Spatial Palimpsests

4. “The Internet surrounds us like air, saturating our
offices and our homes. But it’s not confined to the
ether. You can touch it. You can map it. And you can
photograph it”
- Andrew Blum 2009

6. Cores and Peripheries of Information
• Singer’s (1970) international technological
dualism between rich and poor countries.
• UNESCO’s ‘New World Information Order’ to
describe uneven global flows of information
(Mowlana 1997)
• The Internet ‘as a new phase in a long history
of the West’s attempt to colonize not only the
territory and the body but also the mind of
the Third World “other” (Sardar 1996).

7. “here be dragons”
Psalter World map (1265)

9. Google News

10. 1) What are the geographies and densities of augmentations of material places?
2) What are the spatial footprints of different languages in the Geoweb?

11. http://maps-forum-announcements.blogspot.com/2009/06/local-listings-where-do-they-come-from.html

18. Eastern Canada: English and French

19. Spain: Spanish (Castilian) and Catalan

20. Belgium: Flemish and French

21. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Wallonia_in_Belgium_and_the_European_Union.svg

22. Belgium: English, Flemish, French

23. France: French and English

24. Israel/Palestine: Arabic and Hebrew

25. Search terms in Belgium
English
French
Flemish

26. Arabic
Hebrew
English

28. Bangkok
(“temple” in Thai) “temple” in English

29. a “ ” in Tel Aviv
589 results
“restaurant” in Tel Aviv
448 results
a “ ” in Tel Aviv
22 results

30. Valdrada: the mirrored city.
From Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Colleen Corradi Brannigan: www.cittainvisibili.com/acquerelli/Valdrada-en.htm

31. thank you
Mark Graham Matthew Zook
Oxford Internet Institute University of Kentucky
mark@geospace.co.uk Department of Geography
@geoplace zook@uky.edu