Abstract
DOI: 10.1177/2399808317721784
At the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive festival, attendees found themselves broadcasting their own conference experiences in 140 characters-long “tweets,” possibly comparing this recently launched service to Facebook, and maybe discussing whether they would buy a first-generation iPhone the next month. In the following 10 years, smart phones and social media came to define the ways we produce and consume information, how we live and understand our cities, and thus came to shape our current digital geographies.
Abernathy's book captures the impact that those changes had on both human geography and geographic information science, mostly due to the now ubiquitous presence of GPS technologies. I found it an extremely engaging and well-written book, presenting a nuanced understanding of these new sources of geographic information, along with a diverse set of practical examples of data capturing and visualization.
The book is structured in two separate, complementary parts. The first part starts with a definition of the geoweb as “a distributed network of geolocated nodes that capture, produce, and communicate data that include an explicitly spatial component” (p. 2). This is followed by a brief history of the geoweb in Chapter 2, from its roots in western geography, through the emergence of the internet and GPS technologies, to the current digital globes and augmented reality systems.
The two subsequent chapters focus on two different aspects of the geoweb. Chapter 3 takes a “big data” perspective, focusing on the volume, velocity, and variety of the data involved, as well as their veracity. Chapter 4 explores various practices surrounding the concept of “citizen cartographers,” from public participation GIS and Google Maps mesh-ups, to volunteered geographic information (VGI, see Goodchild, 2007) and geolocated social media. Both chapters succeed in presenting two faces of these technologies and practices. On the one hand, the hopes of empowerment of citizens and marginalized populations rooted in Pickles's (1995) critique of GIS, and counter-mapping projects. On the other hand, the use of the same technologies for surveillance and governamentality (Foucault, 1979). The latter critique is based on a conceptualization of our experiences of present-day life in the wealthy part of a globalized world as “spatially extended cyborgs” (p. 315, see also Schuurman, 2002). Chapter 5 expands on this analysis by exploring three challenges of the geoweb: privacy (see Elwood and Leszczynski, 2011); accuracy of the data, which has been widely discussed in the VGI literature (see Senaratne et al., 2017); and concerns over the power of algorithms to affect our perceptions of places (see Ballatore et al., 2017). A fourth challenge, which receives less attention in the book, is “the marginalization of those without the necessary tools” (p. 45) to participate in the creation of geographic data and to be spatially extended cyborgs. Uneven geographies of access, of participation, and of representation are creating new information inequalities (Graham et al., 2015), not only between the Global North and the Global South but also within cities and nations, as they are rooted in broader power struggles (e.g. Glasze and Perkins, 2015; Leszczynski, 2012; Stephens, 2013). These inequalities are not just important from a critical perspective, but they can also negatively affect quantitative analyses, such as geoparsing (Acheson et al., 2017).
The second part of the book is preceded by Chapter 6, which frames common geographic data types and formats in the context of broader conceptualizations of space and place (“beyond the geotag”, see Crampton et al., 2013), signaling a shift to a more practical part of the book. All the practical components of the book are focused on a gentle introduction to free and open-source software, and related code and data are available on the companion website, which makes this book a valuable resource for self-learning. The first four chapters of the second part focus on data capturing. Chapter 8 is particularly interesting in providing an introduction to some indirect and possibly less known methods of retrieve geographic information from various forms of text and other file formats, through geocoding, geotagging, and geoparsing. Chapter 9 focuses on social media, and in particular on one of the most widely used sources of such data, that is the Twitter Streaming API. Chapter 10 discusses the intersections between the geoweb and the internet of things, with a hands-on Arduino example. The following three chapters guide the reader through the use of QGIS, GRASS, and a diverse selection of R libraries to analyze and visualize geodata. A broader discussion of map projections could have been relevant in Chapter 11, as it is often a difficult subject to approach for learners. Finally, the book concludes with an introduction to web mapping, using some of the most popular APIs and platforms.
This is “not a book on data analytics” (p. 7), but it will provide students and researchers in social science and humanities with a solid foundation for handling quantitative data from the geoweb. At the same time, Abernathy's book can provide GIS specialists with a critical introduction to social media data and VGI – opportunities and limitations of digital geographies.