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.
