There are now more than 3 billion Internet users on our planet. The connections afforded to all of those people, in theory, allow for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. The goal of this article is to examine how those potentials match up to actual patterns of participation. By focusing on Wikipedia, the world's largest and most used repository of user-generated content, we are able to gain important insights into the geographies of voice and participation. This article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought about a concurrent democratization of voice and participation. Despite the fact that it is widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by highly uneven geographies of participation. The goal of highlighting these inequalities is not to suggest that they are insurmountable. Our regression analysis shows that the availability of broadband is a clear factor in the propensity of people to participate on Wikipedia. The relationship is not a linear one, though. As a country approaches levels of connectivity above about 450,000 broadband Internet connections, the ability of broadband access to positively affect participation keeps increasing. Complicating this issue is the fact that participation from the world's economic peripheries tends to focus on editing about the world's cores rather than their own local regions. These results ultimately point to an informational magnetism that is cast by the world's economic cores, virtuous and vicious cycles that make it difficult to reconfigure networks and hierarchies of knowledge production.
In 2010 the American Community Survey (ACS) replaced the long form of the decennial census as the sole national source of demographic and economic data for small geographic areas such as census tracts. These small area estimates suffer from large margins of error, however, which makes the data difficult to use for many purposes. The value of a large and comprehensive survey like the ACS is that it provides a richly detailed, multivariate, composite picture of small areas. This article argues that one solution to the problem of large margins of error in the ACS is to shift from a variable-based mode of inquiry to one that emphasizes a composite multivariate picture of census tracts. Because the margin of error in a single ACS estimate, like household income, is assumed to be a symmetrically distributed random variable, positive and negative errors are equally likely. Because the variable-specific estimates are largely independent from each other, when looking at a large collection of variables these random errors average to zero. This means that although single variables can be methodologically problematic at the census tract scale, a large collection of such variables provides utility as a contextual descriptor of the place(s) under investigation. This idea is demonstrated by developing a geodemographic typology of all U.S. census tracts. The typology is firmly rooted in the social scientific literature and is organized around a framework of concepts, domains, and measures. The typology is validated using public domain data from the City of Chicago and the U.S. Federal Election Commission. The typology, as well as the data and methods used to create it, is open source and published freely online.
South Africa is known for its high rates of HIV and tuberculosis (TB), where HIV has provided fertile ground for the transmission of TB. Indeed, HIV–TB coinfection is widely understood as one of the, if not the, biggest health problems in the country. In practice, doctors and nurses understand that unusual cases of tuberculosis indicate HIV and they make diagnosis and treatment plans accordingly. International treatment standards and protocols inform this practice as doctors pay little attention to individual people and the political–economic, cultural, social, and environmental contexts in which they live. Political ecology, with its nested, place-based analysis, provides an excellent framework for understanding health in South Africa in the context of poverty; local understandings; and global policies, protocols, and priorities. To develop a political ecology of health, this article builds on the concept of local biologies, which understands health at the community scale as simultaneously biological, cultural, and social. Illustrated with the story of one HIV-negative woman's case of miliary TB, this article incorporates local biologies into a political ecology of health that mobilizes scales from the global to the “internal ecologies” of individual bodies. Centering its analysis on the place of the body, this article offers surprising insights into the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By examining the science of miliary tuberculosis alongside population-scale understandings of HIV–TB coinfection in a specific context, this article challenges the way we understand the health impacts of HIV/AIDS, suggesting that the epidemic has negative health implications even for those who are HIV negative.
What Carl Sagan did for cosmology, Harm de Blij is doing for geography. See, hear, or read him and you will sign on for a continuing course in a subject that he has brought alive like no one else i...
This article proposes a general framework for modeling population distributions in space and time. This is particularly pertinent to a growing range of applications that require spatiotemporal specificity; for example, to inform planning of emergency response to hazards. Following a review of attempts to construct time-specific representations of population, we identify the importance of assembling an underlying data model at the highest resolution in each of the spatial, temporal, and attribute domains. This model can then be interrogated at any required intersection of these domains. We argue that such an approach is necessary to moderate the effects of what we term the modifiable spatiotemporal unit problem in which even detailed spatial data might be inadequate to support time-sensitive analyses. We present an initial implementation of the framework for a case study of Southampton, United Kingdom, using bespoke software (SurfaceBuilder247). We demonstrate the generation of spatial population distributions for multiple reference times using currently available data sources. The article concludes by setting out key research areas including the enhancement and validation of spatiotemporal population methods and models.
In this article, I consider “alter-childhoods”: explicit attempts to imagine, construct, talk about, and put into practice childhoods that differ from perceived mainstreams. I critically examine alter-childhoods at fifty-nine alternative education spaces in the United Kingdom. I analyze alternative education spaces through the lens of biopolitics, developing nascent work in children's geographies and childhood studies around hybridity and biopower. I focus on two key themes: materialities and (non)human bodies; intimacy, love, and the human scale. Throughout the analysis, I offer a limited endorsement of the concept of alter-childhoods. Although there exist many attempts to construct childhoods differently, the “alternative” nature of those childhoods is always muddied, complicated, and dynamic. Thus, the concept of alter-childhoods is useful for examining the biopolitics of childhood and for children's geographers more generally—but only when considered as a critical tool and questioning device.
As rural households worldwide become increasingly engaged in urban economies and regional and global markets, agricultural land use is increasingly under influences of macrolevel forces. Investigating the cross-scale processes behind land-use decisions of rural households is important for understanding the deferential effects of macrolevel forces across local social and environmental contexts. We combined quantitative analysis of household surveys and qualitative analysis of interviews and participant observations in eight villages in the Poyang Lake Region of China to investigate how macrolevel forces associated with policy reforms in China (i.e., urban job markets and agricultural markets) interact with microlevel factors (i.e., the biophysical environment, location, and household demographics) to shape land-use decisions of rural households. We also found differential regional government interventions that reinforced preexisting biophysical conditions to affect household crop choices, contributing to the maintenance of intensive two-season rice production in select agricultural bases. Our use of multilevel modeling and qualitative analysis enabled an improved understanding of the cross-scale processes behind household land-use decisions, which has practical implications for securing food production and promoting sustainable land use.
The growing field of biomimicry promises to supplant modern industry's energy-intensive models of engineering with a mode of production more sensitively attuned to nonhuman life and matter. This article considers the revolutionary potentials created by biomimicry's more-than-human collectives and their limitations. Although biomimicry gestures toward a radical reontologization of and repoliticization of production, we argue that it remains subject to entrenched onto-political habits of social relations still dominated by capitalism and made part of a “terra economica” in which all is potentially put to profitable use and otherwise left to waste. With reference to Marx's notions of general industriousness and the general intellect, we find that this universalizing tendency renders myriad biological capacities and ways of knowing invisible. Drawing a comparison with the reworkings of life and knowledge explored in Shiebinger's work on nineteenth-century abortifacients, we show how biomimicry's more recent ontological remakings reproduce some forms of knowledge—and life—at the expense of others. Reflecting on biomimicry's inadvertent erasure of nonindustrial ways of knowing, we advance the notion of a pluripotent intellect as a framework that seeks to take responsibility for the cocuration of forms of life and forms of knowledge. We turn to Jackson's Land Institute as a grounded alternative for constructing more-than-human techno-social collaboratives.
Similar geographic areas often have great variations in population size. In health data management and analysis, it is desirable to obtain regions of comparable population by decomposing areas of large population (to gain more spatial variability) and merging areas of small population (to mask privacy of data). Based on the Peano curve algorithm and modified scale-space clustering, this research proposes a mixed-level regionalization (MLR) method to construct geographic areas with comparable population. The method accounts for spatial connectivity and compactness, attributive homogeneity, and exogenous criteria such as minimum (and approximately equal) population or disease counts. A case study using Louisiana cancer data illustrates the MLR method and its strengths and limitations. A major benefit of the method is that most upper level geographic boundaries can be preserved to increase familiarity of constructed areas. Therefore, the MLR method is more human-oriented and place-based than computer-oriented and space-based.
The emergence of big data brings new opportunities for us to understand our socioeconomic environments. We use the term social sensing for such individual-level big geospatial data and the associated analysis methods. The word sensing suggests two natures of the data. First, they can be viewed as the analogue and complement of remote sensing, as big data can capture well socioeconomic features while conventional remote sensing data do not have such privilege. Second, in social sensing data, each individual plays the role of a sensor. This article conceptually bridges social sensing with remote sensing and points out the major issues when applying social sensing data and associated analytics. We also suggest that social sensing data contain rich information about spatial interactions and place semantics, which go beyond the scope of traditional remote sensing data. In the coming big data era, GIScientists should investigate theories in using social sensing data, such as data representativeness and quality, and develop new tools to deal with social sensing data.
The exposome, defined as the totality of an individual's exposures over the life course, is a seminal concept in the environmental health sciences. Although inherently geographic, the exposome as yet is unfamiliar to many geographers. This article proposes a place-based synthesis, genetic geographic information science (Genetic GISc) that is founded on the exposome, genome+ and behavome. It provides an improved understanding of human health in relation to biology (the genome+), environmental exposures (the exposome), and their social, societal and behavioral determinants (the behavome). Genetic GISc poses three key needs: First, a mathematical foundation for emergent theory; Second, process-based models that bridge biological and geographic scales; Third, biologically plausible estimates of space-time disease lags. Compartmental models are a possible solution; this article develops two models using pancreatic cancer as an exemplar. The first models carcinogenesis based on the cascade of mutations and cellular changes that lead to metastatic cancer. The second models cancer stages by diagnostic criteria. These provide empirical estimates of the distribution of latencies in cellular states and disease stages, and maps of the burden of yet to be diagnosed disease. This approach links our emerging knowledge of genomics to cancer progression at the cellular level, to individuals and their cancer stage at diagnosis, to geographic distributions of cancer in extant populations. These methodological developments and exemplar provide the basis for a new synthesis in health geography: genetic geographic information science.
From 2000 to 2005, high returns from soybeans set off an unprecedented expansion of agricultural production across Brazil. The expansion occurred concurrently with a sharp rise in deforestation, leading academics and policymakers to question the extent and means by which the growing agricultural sector was driving regional forest loss. In this article, I consider and question the underlying drivers of indirect land use change, namely the potential impact of soybean expansion on beef prices and of land use displacement, via migration. I then present field-level results documenting the displacement process in Mato Grosso and Pará States of the Amazon. These results question the extent to which tropical Amazon deforestation is attributable to land use displacement; however, I argue that the agricultural sector could drive deforestation through other channels, namely through regional land markets.
Aeolian soil erosion is responsible for erosional landforms, or deflation patches, that are ubiquitous in the Kangerlussuaq region of West Greenland. Deflation patches are identifiable as bare regions within a mosaic of shrub and graminoid tundra, and have the potential to alter regional carbon cycling and vegetation dynamics. Understanding the spatial distribution of deflation patches is an important first step in establishing the drivers, controls, and ecological impacts of wind erosion in the region. Using high-resolution WorldView-2 satellite imagery, we created a land cover classification and percentage vegetation cover map to investigate the regional distribution and variability of deflation patches. Across the study area, deflation patches account for 22 percent of the terrestrial land surface and occur in greater density closer to the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). Farther away from the GrIS, local topography plays a larger role in determining the distribution of deflation patches, with wind erosion tending to occur on steep south–southeast-facing slopes. Parallels between the distribution of deflation patches and local wind patterns suggest that katabatic winds are an important driver behind deflation patch occurrence. Within deflation patches, graminoid cover increases with distance from the GrIS, due either to a lesser degree of erosion or to a longer recovery time. In the context of recent circumpolar shrub expansion, deflation might locally limit the dominance of shrubs by creating habitat more suitable for graminoids and is an important factor to consider when predicting vegetation changes in West Greenland.
This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the "work" art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geography's recent interest in "active experimentations and anticipatory interventions" in the face of the challenges posed by the environmental and social uncertainties of the Anthropocene. We propose two dimensions to the force of art with respect to these concerns. First, it provides a site and set of practices from which scientists, artists, and communities can come to recognize as well as transform relations between humans and nonhumans. Second, it encourages an accounting of the constitutive force of matter and things with implications for politics and knowledge production. Through these two dimensions, we explore how the arts can enable forms of socioecological transformation and, further, how things might be different in the future, enabling us to explore who and what might play a part in defining and moving toward such a future.
Multiple environmental factors contribute to the spatial and compositional character and elevational patterns of alpine treeline ecotones (ATEs), and the relative influence of these factors is scale dependent and spatially variable. Frameworks detailing the hierarchical structure of the ATE have been developed to characterize scale dependencies of the pattern and controls of treeline, but this topic has not been studied across a broad range of scales (e.g., from the hillslope to the region). This research directly examines scaling by comparing relationships among treeline elevations and a set of possible controls as geographic extent is varied. The data set used for this research consists of elevational data at the ATE and a set of hypothesized controls for 1,006 sites in twenty-six mountain ranges across the Western United States. The response and predictor variables are quantified from digital data sets using geographic information systems and remote sensing methodologies and then analyzed using a Mantel test framework. Results generally support, and add empirically derived detail to, existing theoretical frameworks, with climatic controls (i.e., variables characterizing temperature and precipitation) having higher correlations with ATE elevation at coarser scales and topographic variables having higher correlations at finer scales. These scale relations support the conceptual hierarchical frameworks that have been proposed, and they are useful guides of covariate selection for future ATE modeling endeavors.
Based on the need for meaningful political responses to socionatural change, in this article we develop an interim politics of resourcefulness as a strategy for addressing the limitations of postpolitical environmental governance. Drawing on political and epistemological insights of third-world feminism as well as an ongoing collaborative with environmental justice organizations in West Atlanta, we argue that visions for just socionatural futures must necessarily be generated in conversation with historically marginalized communities. We offer an interim politics of resourcefulness as one way of forging those kinds of engagements between academic researchers and communities, and describe the forms that such engagements have taken in our own research.
Most world cities can now be characterized as multiethnic and multicultural in their population composition, and the residential patterning of their major component ethnic groups remains a topic of substantial research interest. Many studies of the degree of residential segregation of ethnic groups recognize that this is multiscalar in its composition, but few have incorporated this major feature into their analyses: Those that do mostly conclude that segregation is greater at the microscale than at the macroscale. This article uses a recently developed alternative procedure for assessing the degree of segregation that differs from all others in that it analyzes the geography of all groups simultaneously, providing a single, synoptic view of their relative segregation; can incorporate data for more than one date and therefore evaluate the statistical significance of the extent of any change over time; operates at several geographical scales, allowing appreciation of the extent of clustering and congregation for the various ethnic groups at different levels of spatial resolution; andmost importantis based on a firm statistical foundation that allows for robust assessments of differences in the levels of segregation for different groups between each other at different scales over time. This modeling procedure is illustrated by a three-scale analysis of ethnic residential segregation in Auckland, New Zealand, as depicted by the country's 2001, 2006, and 2013 censuses. ??,????????,???????????????????,???????????????,????????????????????????????????,????????????,??????????????????????????,????????????????????????????????????,?????????????,?????????????,?????????????????;???????????,???????????????????????;??????????,??????????????????????????????;????????????????,??????????,?????????????????????????????,?????? 2001 ??2006 ?? 2013 ????????????????????????????????????? La composicion poblacional de la mayoria de las ciudades mundiales ahora puede caracterizarse como multietnica y multicultural, y el diseno residencial del principal componente de sus grupos etnicos sigue siendo un topico de sustancial interes para investigacion. Muchos estudios sobre el grado de segregacion residencial de grupos etnicos reconocen que esa segregacion es multiescalar en su composicion, pero pocos han incorporado tan importante rasgo en sus analisis: Los que lo hacen, mayoritariamente concluyen que la segregacion es mayor a la escala mas pequena que a escala macro. Este articulo usa un procedimiento alternativo recientemente desarrollado para evaluar el grado de segregacion, que difiere de todos los demas en cuanto este analiza la geografia de todos los grupos simultaneamente, dando lugar a una vision sencilla y sinoptica de sus segregaciones relativas; puede incorporar datos para mas de una fecha y en consecuencia evaluar la significancia estadistica del alcance de cualquier cambio a traves del tiempo; opera a varias escalas geograficas, permitiendo apreciar el alcance del agrupamiento y congregacion para los varios grupos etnicos, a diferentes niveles de resolucion espacial; ylo mas importantese basa en una firme fundamentacion estadistica que facilita hacer robustas evaluaciones de las diferencias en los niveles de segregacion para diferentes grupos a diferentes escalas en el tiempo. Se ilustra este procedimiento de modelado por medio de un analisis a tres escalas de segregacion etnica residencial en Auckland, Nueva Zelanda, como se muestra en los censos de este pais de 2001, 2006 y 2013.
Wildfire plays an important role in ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, but past relationships among fire, climate, and human actions remain unclear. A multiscale analysis of thirty-four macroscopic charcoal records from a variety of biophysical settings was conducted to reconstruct fire activity for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) during the past 12,000 years. Trends in biomass burning and fire frequency are compared to paleoenvironmental and population data at a variety of temporal and spatial scales to better understand fire regime variability on centennial- to millennial-length time scales. PNW fire activity in the early Holocene is linked to climatic and vegetation changes; however, increased fire activity in the middle to late Holocene is inconsistent with long-term trends in temperature and precipitation. Two hypotheses are explored to explain the rise in fire activity after ca. 5,500 calendar years before present, including greater climate variability and increased human use of fire. Climatic changes such as increased El Niño/Southern Oscillation event frequency during the past approximately 6,000 years could have led to hydrologic shifts conducive to more frequent fire events, despite overall trends toward cooler and moister conditions. Alternatively, increasing human populations and their associated uses of fire might have increased biomass burning. Centennial-scale changes in fire activity, such as during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age, closely match widespread shifts in both climate and population, suggesting that one or both influenced the late-Holocene fire history of the PNW.
This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geography's contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educational settings and its highly disparate expression as a research discipline in university departments. The project also hopes to contribute to the development of a framework for communicating the aims and purposes of geography in schools internationally, because here, too, there is great variety in definitions of national standards and even of disciplinary allegiances (including, e.g., the social studies, humanities, and biological sciences). GeoCapabilities does not seek to flatten such divergences, for one of geography's great strengths is its breadth. The long-term goal is to establish a secure platform for the international development of teachers’ capacities as creative and disciplined innovators. The project encourages teachers to think beyond program delivery and implementation and to embrace their role as the curriculum makers.
This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital "fulldome" film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The project, which brought together AVL's programmers, visualization experts, and artists with NCAR's scientists, required the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives. In the language of such collaborations, the term renaissance team was coined to capture the collective expertise necessary to produce modern, high-end visualizations of large data sets. In this article, we deploy Simondon's concepts of technical objects and collective individuation to analyze the development of AVL's Katrina simulation. One extended sequence of team member collaboration suggests that technical objects also be treated as "collaborators," for they have the capacity to transform such collectives through the unique problems they present.
