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This article focuses on the representation of physical places on the Internet or what we term cyberscape. While there is a wide range of online place-related information available, this project uses the metric of the number of user-generated Google Maps placemarks containing specific keywords in locations worldwide. After setting out the methods behind this research, this article provides a cartographic analysis of these cyberscapes and examines how they inform us about the material world. Visibility and invisibility in material space are increasingly being defined by prominence, ranking, and presence on the Internet, and Google has positioned itself as a highly authoritative source of online spatial information. As such, any distinct spatial patterns within uploaded information have the potential to become real and reinforced as Google is relied upon as a mirror of the offline world.
Notes
Although this paper focuses on Google, it is not the only organization to use the collective intelligence of cyberspace to make inferences about economic, social, and political relationships in physical space; it is simply the most visible. Yahoo is working on a similar service, as are smaller groups such as Whoissick.org and HealthMap.
The idea of a palimpsest refers to the myriad material, historical, and virtual layers that shape our understanding of a place. Palimpsests, therefore, consist of not only material experiences of place, but also photographs, videos, stories, websites, and countless other objects and representations.
This statistic was calculated by using Google to search for the following terms “filetype:kmz” and “filetype.kml.”
Also see http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/ for an excellent overview of other datamining techniques.
In comparison, the same search but for all of Google indexed data returned 10,273 hits.
As it was not possible to obtain the total number of placemarks at particular location when this data was collected, this paper uses the keyword "1" (the number one) as a proxy for the overall amount of user generated content at a particular point.
Interestingly, Karimbayeva (2010) has found that the ability for users to contribute geographic information to Google from within China is often limited. It is therefore possible that many of these contributions are submitted by users from outside of the country.
Google Maps directories are drawn from a range of sources such as yellow page listings and appear in Google Maps search results as individual placemarks. These placemarks are distinct from and exclude user generated placemarks.
These four terms are selected due to the fact that they represent a variety of ways in which people can spend their free time.