We are in the middle of a revolution, or so the mantra goes, our world having been reinvented through digital technologies, changing mapping techniques and the aerospace industry. Data are at the heart of this revolution, one that, according to the United Nations (UN) Secretary General’s report A World That Counts, is a revolution for equality (cited in Satterthwaite, 2015). The coupling of vast data sets with geographic information systems (GIS) has already and will continue to change the world through knowledge sharing and codification (Hendriks, 1999). Increased computer penetration and ever-increasing speeds of internet access are transforming the world into an e-society, allowing more people to provide data about their lived experience, potentially improving the health and well-being of all whom it embraces (Fife and Pereira, 2008). Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a connected world with easy knowledge sharing for the benefits of humankind seems within grasping distance (O’Hara, 2004) and geospatial technologies are playing an increasingly large role in the way in which we understand and also create the world around us (Specht, 2018). We are witnessing an ongoing globalisation of space and a reshaping of the local through the accumulation and deployment of such technologies, leading to a situation in which space is not only homogenised (and global), but also always fragmented (Kirsch, 1995). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the humanitarian sector, where the rise of digital humanitarianism has seen a huge shift in the processes of mapping, now viewed as a vital tool in moments of crisis. These changes have themselves created a crisis in the humanitarian sector, which must now wrestle more than ever with the dualities of datafication, ‘Othering’ and the participation of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Geotagged digital photos, aid requests posted on Twitter, aerial imagery, Facebook posts, Short Message Service (SMS) messages, drones and many other tools now form part of the digital landscape of the humanitarian sector. These new and rich data streams are often brought together through mapping practices that are in many ways able to offer unprecedented depictions of communities’ needs within a crisis. Yet, it is also understood that the cartographic order of the world has forced many peoples into an imperial logic under the no-win situation often referred to as ‘map or be mapped’ (Edney, 2019; Paglen, 2008). Maps and data are not only poor at describing the qualities of the relationships of everyday life, but are also born of power that has traditionally been used as an instrument of both colonialism and the contemporary geopolitical ordering of the world (Paglen, 2008; Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018). These issues are both alleviated and compounded by the growth in the amount of data being collected, not only harnessing global positioning systems (GPS), but also sound-level, light and accelerometer sensors, as well as a wealth of ‘social’ data collected through means such as social media. Aggregating data from these diverse and plentiful sensors enables new forms of monitoring societal change and have become a mainstay of humanitarian responses (Buckingham Shum et al., 2012). The kind of abstract scientific knowledge collected in this way may seem universal, but in the real world, it is always integrated with supplementary assumptions that render it culture bound and parochial. The mode of communication itself also conveys a set of tacit cultural and social assumptions or prescriptions (Wynne, 1992). These issues are accentuated through digitisation, in which information is converted to bits – malleable, electronically stored bits that can erode cultural objects, information cultures and politics. As we attempt to manage information, information itself mutates into new forms that often require new types of management (Jordan, 2015).

This book concerns itself with one particular type of management, that is data management and codification undertaken through the use of GIS and other mapping practices such as citizen sciences and aerial mapping with drones. PGIS, and its related practices, evolved from the bringing together of a number of fields including geography, cartography and database management (Haklay and Tobón, 2003). These kinds of systems have been around since the 1960s, and can even be traced back to the early days of computing in the 1950s when the military began to see the importance of connecting geography with the new power of computing (Haklay, 2010). Despite Esri,¹ one of the most powerful mapping companies, emerging in the 1970s, and software that would allow personal computers to develop GIS products appearing in the 1980s, the term GIS itself was not coined until 1992 (Haklay, 2010). The 1990s then saw a great deal of development in relation to GIS with companies such as Garmin (est. 1989) developing ever-more powerful GIS- and GPS-based systems. However, these remained out of reach of most people. The level of complexity and multidisciplinary knowledge required to operate them was too significant a barrier to entry. This also meant that the control over these maps, and the power they represent, has always rested with organisations connected to the military or state, for example Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom (Ballatore, 2014; Evans, 2013). Yet, more recent changes in web-based geo systems and open-source GIS have reduced both the technical and financial entry points into digital map-making (Goodchild, 2009). These new resources initially included Google Earth and Google Maps, introduced in 2005 (Crampton, 2009), but now encompass a huge range of tools, including OpenStreetMap (OSM) (est. 2004), and allow maps to be built from the bottom up, by people and not governments, mapping alternative visions of society (Evans, 2013).

The bringing together of GIS and the Web 2.0 has created a new space, termed the ‘Geoweb’ (Atzmanstorfer et al., 2014). This has allowed many more individuals, organisations and companies to make their own maps, but more importantly, like the Web 2.0 itself, this has also allowed for crowdsourcing of information and collective map-building through what is often referred to as volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Walker and Rinner, 2013). Many humanitarian projects rely heavily on the volunteered information provided by the public in order to build their maps, and in an ‘app economy’² more and more people are contributing to VGI, knowingly or unknowingly (Tene and Polonetsky, 2012, p. 267). VGI data is most often used to make ‘mash-ups’³ of maps where data is drawn from multiple sources, including base maps made available by the historical custodians of geographic information and other state-owned data sets (Atzmanstorfer et al., 2014; Ballatore, 2014; Brown et al., 2013; Crampton, 2009).

These changes to the way in which humanitarian work has been carried out has resulted in a very different landscape of response. While much of the work is carried out by traditional players, to only examine these would be a mistake. It must be also acknowledged that there is a multitude of ‘minor’ figures at all stages of codification and legitimisation who all play a part in the transformation of information and data within the humanitarian context (Lorimer, 2003). Digital humanitarianism has seen not only more non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and volunteer organisations enter the field, but also many more corporations and private, for-profit, businesses who are set on making humanitarianism their business model (Burns, 2019). This, coupled with what United Nations Global Pulse (UNGP) (2012) have termed a ‘data deluge’, has seen a significant change in who is employed in information management processes, as well as the collecting of ever-more data (Hunt and Specht, 2019).

Despite all these new actors in the humanitarian sector, the basic entry requirements for utilising GIS have not actually moved all that much (Elwood, 2006); fast internet, a computer or tablet are still required for producing the map tools themselves, even if a mobile phone is sufficient to provide the data. Indeed, the power and knowledge needed to process the vast amounts of data now available have become increasingly out of the reach of much of the world. This means that the control over the data produced is still in the hands of tech companies and larger humanitarian organisations (Haklay, 2013). Furthermore, what lies at the heart of a mapping project is the classification and codification of real-world objects into taxonomies and terminology, this again is done by those trained elites or corporations who make the software (Brown et al., 2013). It is then important to explore and examine these contradictions, which suggest, on the one hand, that people are better represented and aided in moments of crisis as more data is produced about and by them. And, on the other hand, that the codification of this data remains the task of a small number of people and organisations often from outside the situation itself.

Latour, in his work on the non-human, notes that as technology increasingly mediates society, the interconnections of humans and non-humans become increasingly complex (Latour, 1988; Kirsch, 1995). The idea that this is a simple transformation is, however, clearly a myth (Jordan, 2015). The appropriateness of these technologies to carry out this mediation is a complex issue, as they are designed by people with various degrees of understanding of sociology and technologies (Haklay, 2010) and are positioned within Western scientific patriarchal capitalism (Kirsch, 1995). When it comes to the world as experienced by humans, objects and their values can also be tied to complex sets of concepts and conventional rules governing their use, so there is an important sense in which we can, and indeed must, learn about some of the affordances that these new humanitarian technologies and interventions offer (Hutchby, 2001).

Affordances are functional and relational aspects that frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object. In this way, technologies can be understood as artefacts that may be both shaped by and that shape the practices humans use in interaction with, around and through them (Hutchby, 2001). If the innovation, integration and stabilisation of a technology in society are processes moulded by the actions of scientists, workers, capitalists, commuters and mayors, and thus a wide range of social contingencies, then where does society end and technology begin? Theoretical analyses have constructed a divide that places humans on one side and their technologies on the other, thus representing an artificially folded society (Latour, 1988). Conversely, Latour offers a process-oriented definition of high technology as a complex and dialectical association of humans and ‘non-human actors’. In Hutchby’s (2001) words, high technology is ‘a shifting network of actions redistributing competencies and performances either to humans or non-humans to assemble in a more durable whole an association of humans and things and to resist the multiple interpretations of other actors that tend to dissolve away the set up’ (p. 445). Technology, in this light, is a means of eliciting specific ends, but one that is always open to interpretation, resistance and change (Kirsch, 1995). In choosing our technology we become what we are, which in turn shapes our future choices (Feenberg, 1991).

It is then important to examine in detail these contradictions (Parker, 2006). To detach newer processes of humanitarian mapping from their background in GIS would be unwise (Weiner et al., 2002). The whole practice is somewhat of a movable feast, with both geospatial and data infrastructure technologies changing rapidly and with more people being connected to the resources that allow them to engage, many of these new practices are now somewhat removed from the critical discourses of the 1990s (Elwood, 2006). Approaching mapping as a spatial practice helps us to better understand them as a form of reframing societies rather than just remapping them (Bryan, 2011). In the same vein, these tools must not be examined as a tool that can be picked up and then put down again; rather these mappings become an intrinsic part of the fabric of everyday life, even after a crisis has passed (Johnson et al., 2005). It is certain that the role of citizens has shifted from being purely the object of maps to being increasingly involved in the creation of maps, but this has not turned maps into neutral objects separated from power, nor has it moved power to the citizen (Pánek, 2016). Regardless of the size of our data sets, any representation will necessarily exclude (Verplanke et al., 2016). Furthermore, the process of mapping has long been seen as instrumental in the forming of the Other, and with that the subjugation of the Other (Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018). Quite clearly an ever-more salient issue within the context of humanitarianism. It is essential too then that while collecting more data, it should be understood that this does not solve the deep psychological issue of feeling watched and tracked, which may well reduce the desire of people to participate in their own development and politics. Without additional safeguards and regulation around the way that data is used, collected, shared and then used for resource allocation, all these technological innovations become self-defeating in the face of the human desire for privacy (Dumbill, 2013).

The problem then is that codified expertise is really about speaking for others, and is not based upon a lived experience (Gaventa and Cornwall, 2008). The contradictions are deep and complex. There is a notion that scientific knowledge has much to contribute to the humanitarian sector; at the same time, local knowledge needs to be conveyed in a way that is understandable, but that also respects its tacit nature, and this is a gap that is hard to bridge (Coletta and Raftopoulos, 2016; Compton, 1989; Sillitoe, 1998). These issues of legitimisation are compounded by the small number of actors and gate keepers through which knowledge passes. The knowledge that so greatly affects people’s lives is held in the hands of a monopoly (Gaventa and Cornwall, 2008), a situation that often forgets, or ignores, the importance of knowledge in relation to who created it (Rose, 1997). So, while there has been a significant rise in the level of participation within the humanitarian sector (Tufte and Mefalopulos, 2009), the power of knowledge ultimately remains with the planners, the technicians and Western scientists. It has been accepted that more consultation needs to take place with beneficiaries (Sillitoe, 2000), but this has become a constant seeking of universalism of knowledge through the Western discourse, which often fails to account for the non-linear nature of alternative knowledges leading to deep ethnocentrism (Rose, 1997; Sillitoe, 1998). These issues are hard-baked into the notion of legitimisation (Forester, 1982). At every stage of information-seeking, searching with algorithms, interpretation and use, data are passing through stages of mediation, contextualisation and codification (Newsom and Cassara, 2011). If these mediated stages are based upon the historic prejudices and colonial power structures of old, then access to data in and of itself does not create equality, but instead drives a further divide between peoples (Catlett and Ghani, 2015). In order to overcome this issue, there needs to be a great deal of understanding and willingness to work through these problems. While there are many who might wish to do so, in the face of the juggernaut of what Burns (2019) terms ‘philanthro-capitalism’ within digital humanitarianism, finding community members and activists who can spare enough time and who are suitably motivated and knowledgeable is difficult at best, and their motivations can hardly be separated from their personal needs (Harlow, 2012; Mercea and Funk, 2016). Tools that bring people together are needed, but this is not a solution itself, and empowerment remains a complex issue (Perkins, 2007). People have a desire to be better informed generally (Carver, 2003), but no population is homogenous in the way data often present and the goals and aims of a community are often diverse (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Weiner et al., 2002), yet the new digital divide of algorithms and big data seeks homogenisation, which conversely leads to bigger divides between the haves and the have-nots and can also manifest as increased divides within a community.

The use of geographical information has changed dramatically since around 2010 and continues to do so; in particular users themselves are being encouraged to crowdsource data in moments of acute need. This though only serves to heighten questions over ease of data access. The digital divide then is not gone, and where it has been reduced, much like Hydra it has grown more heads. Large humanitarian organisations risk a ‘Tower of Babel’ moment in the way they present the success of reducing the digital divide without acknowledging these emerging issues (McFarlane, 2006).

Data are meaningful because of how someone collects, interprets and forms arguments with it. Data are not neutral. This is why Lisa Gitelman calls raw data an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms that hides the reality of the work involved in creating it (cited in Neff, 2013).

This is a worrying prospect when it is considered that the humanitarian sector is increasingly engaged in a process of datafication in low- and middle-income countries, where the use of new communications and database technologies is generating digital data that are machine readable and computationally manipulable, particularly for big data analytics (Taylor and Broeders, 2015). Whether this data collection technology is driven by economic, military-strategic, scientific or apparently altruistic motives, it is subject to a variety of influences during its innovation, diffusion, regulation and codification (Bijker and Law, 1992; Latour, 1988). The forms and functions of a technology are transformed by its innovators, market strategists, government regulators and through social use (Kirsch, 1995). It is also worth noting again that many of the key components of the networked society – the digital computer, the Internet, GPS – all have military origins and have been developed within capitalist social relations of production and unequal gender relations, they therefore build upon and reinforce existing spatial and social divisions (Perrons, 2004; Potts, 2015). We live immersed in representation, be it digital or through the cartographic gaze, it is how we understand each other, and in turn how we understand ourselves (Webb, 2009). These new modes of information lead to a globalised notion of self and other and this newly established worldwide scale is leading in turn to new conflicts, crises, wars and even catastrophes (Lefebvre, 2009), to which the world’s poorest are most susceptible.

This book, then, aims to bring together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of the poor, including those affected by climate change and the wider neoliberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data becomes ever-more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data of the poor, before selling it back to them. These issues are not entirely new, and questions around representation, participation and humanitarianism can be traced back beyond the inauguration speech of Truman – which divided the world into the ‘developed’ and ‘under developed’ – but the digital age throws these issues back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern in moments of crisis. This book questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis.

In Chapter 1, Tamara Bellone, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Francesco Fiermonte, Emiliana Armano and Linda Quiquivix provide us with an introduction to critical cartography. Born from decolonial movements of the 20th century, critical cartography has helped scholars reflect on the relationship between power and knowledge within colonial contexts of spatial representation and surveillance. The chapter engages with concerns of non-Western cartography, technological innovation and representation of territory and notes that even as the field of critical cartography has grown, Western cartography continues to be a powerful instrument in colonialist policies, even within postcolonial contexts.

In Chapter 2, Gregory Asmolov builds upon these ideas and introduces us to the counter concepts of participatory mapping and volunteered geographic information (Goodchild, 2009), as well as a proliferation of crowdsourcing practices and new online mapping tools. The chapter offers a critical examination of digital mapping and its role in crisis mapping, as well as in solutions to social problems that draw on the notion of activity systems (Engeström, 1987). Asmolov also provides us with an analysis of a number of empirical cases of online mapping from the field of emergency response and social development to illustrate how we must distinguish between two major forms of activity that have been associated with online mapping: ‘mapping as activity’ versus ‘mapping-enabled activity’. The analytical framework also highlights how the location of digital maps in the context of activity systems is associated with a set of actors that has been included in/excluded from the system.

Maria Rosaria Prisco also explores the diffusion of Web 2.0 and geospatial technologies in Chapter 3. Building on Harvey’s three-dimensional conceptualisation of space (absolute–relative–relational) with the spatial trialectic (experienced–conceptualised–lived space) proposed by Lefebvre (1974), the chapter explores the possibilities and the real strength of the bottom-up production of local data (VGI, collaborative mapping, citizen science, etc.) in counteracting the technoscientific epistemology provided by the growing and pervasive datafication in the representation of the reality. The case of representation of space is then examined through some of the most well-known systems of indicators like the sustainable development goals (SDGs) (especially in relation to urban poverty and environmental justice in the Italian context) in order to provide ideas and thoughts on the way forward.

Faine Greenwood takes these notions further in Chapter 4, examining data colonialism, surveillance capitalism and an increasingly prevalent new technology in the humanitarian sector, drones. Building on theories of the politics of verticality and surveillance, this chapter explores how inexpensive civilian drones can simultaneously enforce and subvert asymmetric power structures, by providing both historically underrepresented and historically powerless groups with access to high-quality aerial imagery. At the same time, vulnerable populations can be harmed by humanitarian drone users who participate in the system of data colonialism by extracting and sharing their spatial data without seeking their consent or collaboration. While many aid workers hold strong opinions about the potential harms or benefits that humanitarian drone use presents to affected populations, this chapter is one of the first to fully explore these contradictions. The chapter also puts forward a preliminary model of humanitarian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) use that is conscious of the dangers of data colonialism and calls for more collaborate research work on the impact and benefits of drone data collection in aid work.

In Chapter 5, Giovanna Astolfo, Ricardo Marten Caceres, Garyfalia Palaiologou, Camillo Boano and Ed Manley explore the use of data analytics and statistics since the start of the 2015 Europe refugee crisis. The chapter sheds light on the methodological and ethical challenges posited by the collection, analysis and representation of data on migration and refugees. The chapter asks who is benefiting from such data-driven politics and to what extent it is harming individuals, organisations and society at large. The chapter builds upon the findings of a two-year data project called Refugee Spaces and argues that data analytics and statistics are often used as a ‘discursive practice’ to construct and uncritically reproduce narratives of crisis and threat and as a ‘governmental technology’ to invest political agendas on migration by ideals of evidence, rationality, progress and nationhood grounded in disputable truths.

Monika Halkort builds on this work in Chapter 6, exploring how the rising death toll of irregular migrants in the Mediterranean has conjured up a dense matrix of geospatial intelligence aimed at reducing the number of destitute bodies crossing the sea. Measured by the mere amount of data generated through the combined force of real-time tracking devices, image satellites and big data mining, she argues that Europe’s alleged refugee ‘problem’ is one of the best documented and well-mapped ‘crises’ in recent history. Against this backdrop the chapter asks why information about the dead and missing is widely absent or scarce. Mapping the critical blind spots in the data repositories of state and humanitarian actors against the technoscientific and juridico-political protocols underpinning big data regimes, this chapter interrogates the key factors contributing to the substantive gaps that assign dead and missing migrants the liminal status of ‘known unknowns’.

While there are many factors that drive migration, changing climate is expected to become an increasingly salient factor. In Chapter 7, Bogna M. Konior explores mapping crisis in the Anthropocene, a socio-geological era in which the uneven allocation of environmental risk follows global industrial development and denotes its own civilisational origin: capitalism and the global slave trade, the Great Acceleration, the fossil fuel economy and nuclear war. The chapter asks if climate capital and its uneven distribution can be mapped. The incomprehensibility of climate narratives forces a shift from analogue to digital and then computational media, where the processing of large data sets corresponds to the collective structures of feeling as defined cultural forms, a move central to all climate capital mapping: the blurring of realism and fiction and the paradoxical relation between the local and the commons. As a survey of these emerging digital climate fictions, this chapter examines post-global climate mapping in virtual reality projects such as the Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience and Melting Ice as well as digital cartography projects such as Italian Limes and the Welcome to the Anthropocene map by the Stockholm Resilience Center.

In Chapter 8, Aleš Završnik and Pika Šarf provide us with the first of two chapters on fighting back. This chapter explores the potential of ‘sous-veillance’ for individual autonomy and dignity, fairness and due process, community cooperation, empowerment and social equality. Examining numerous examples, such as the Satellite Sentinel Project, which tracks troop movements and warns civilians of attacks in Sudan; Virtual Community Watch, a service that crowdsources surveillance of the Texas–Mexican border; and citizen ‘cop-watching’ programmes, which film and counter-film police with wearable cameras at protests, the authors argue that we are witnessing a new wave of computerised technologically enhanced counter-surveillance or ‘sous-veillance’. The chapter focuses on three aspects: ‘datafication’ (the use and reuse of data), ‘resistance’ (from passive avoidance to active subversion) and the ‘empowerment’ of the user, applying these categories to three specific ‘sous-veillance’ visualisation tools: (1) Erar, an online business transaction application created by the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia, which provides citizens with data on the business transactions of public sector bodies and government spending (awarded the ‘2013 United Nations Public Service Award’); (2) the Slovenian platform named ‘Kdo vpliva?’ (literally ‘Who Influences?’), which shines a light on the connections between lobbyists, companies, politicians and state institutions through visualisations of three different kinds of networks: lobbying contacts, the network of transactions between the companies represented by the lobbyists and the public sector; and (3) traffic-ticket monitoring with Redaar, a smartphone application that helps users identify where and when traffic tickets were issued.

In the final chapter, Rupert Allan draws upon his experiences working as country manager for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in Uganda, overseeing interventions such as CrowdSourcing Non-Camp Refugee Data (USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) BPRM (Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration)), the Uganda Open-Mapping Project (World Bank/OpenDRI), Data for Resilience in Refugee Settings (GPSDD (Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data)) and Drone Data for Refugee Context National Risk Atlas Methodology (Embassy of Japan). Rupert also represented HOT/Missing Maps on the Uganda Ministry of Health Emergency Operations Committee (EOC) in developing the Ebola Data Resilience Strategy for preparedness and outbreak following cross-border events in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This chapter brings together many of the issues discussed throughout this book and works to explore ways through each, both via the experiences of working in Uganda as well as examining their theoretical underpinnings, leading to the conclusion that we are all part of a united statelessness.

References

Atzmanstorfer, K., R. Resl, A. Eitzinger and X. Izurieta (2014) ‘The GeoCitizen-approach: community-based spatial planning – an Ecuadorian case study’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 41 (3): 248–59.

Ballatore, A. (2014) ‘Defacing the map: cartographic vandalism in the digital commons’, Cartographic Journal, 51 (3): 214–24.

Bennett, W.L. and A. Segerberg (2012) ‘The logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics’, Information, Communication & Society, 15 (5): 739–68.

Bijker, W.E. and J. Law (1992) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Brown, M., S. Sharples, J. Harding, C.J. Parker, N. Bearman, M. Maguire, D. Forrest, M. Haklay and M. Jackson (2013) ‘Usability of geographic information: current challenges and future directions’, Applied Ergonomics, 44 (6): 855–65.

Bryan, J. (2011) ‘Walking the line: participatory mapping, indigenous rights, and neoliberalism’, Geoforum, 42 (1): 40–50.

Buckingham Shum, S., K. Aberer, A. Schmidt, S. Bishop, P. Lukowicz, S. Anderson, Y. Charalabidis et al. (2012) ‘Towards a global participatory platform: democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence’, European Physical Journal Special Topics, 214 (1): 109–52.

Burns, R. (2019) ‘New frontiers of philanthro-capitalism: digital technologies and humanitarianism’, Antipode, 51 (4): 1101–22.

Carver, S. (2003) ‘The future of participatory approaches using geographic information: developing a research agenda for the 21st century’, Urisa Journal, 15 (1): 61–71.

Catlett, C. and R. Ghani (2015) ‘Big data for social good’, Big Data, 3 (1): 1–2.

Coletta, M. and M. Raftopoulos (eds.) (2016) Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (London: ILAS).

Compton, J.L. (1989) ‘Strategies and methods for the access, integration, and utilization of indigenous knowledge in agriculture and rural development’, in D.M. Warren, L.J. Slikkerveer and S.O. Titiola (eds.), Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Implications for Agriculture and International Development (Studies in Technology and Change No. 11) (Ames: Iowa State University Research Foundation, Technology and Change Program), pp. 171–83.

Crampton, J.W. (2009) ‘Cartography: Maps 2.0’, Progress in Human Geography, 33 (1): 91–100.

Dumbill, E. (2013) ‘A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think: an interview with the authors of big data’, Big Data, 1 (2): 73–7.

Edney, M. (2019) Cartography: Its Ideal and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Elwood, S. (2006) ‘Critical issues in participatory GIS: deconstructions, reconstructions, and new research directions’, Transactions in GIS, 10 (5): 693–708.

Engeström, Y. (1987) Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit Oy).

Evans, L. (2013) ‘How to build a map for nothing: immaterial labour and location-based social networking’, in G. Lovink and M. Rasch (eds.), Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (Amsterdam: Unlike Us, Institute of Network Cultures), pp. 189–99.

Feenberg, A. (1991) Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press).

Fife, E. and F. Pereira (2008) ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and ICT: challenges of end-user adoption of digital life’, in Proceedings of FITCE Congress, January, p. 57, https://www.fitce.org/congress/2008/paper/41.pdf (accessed Jan. 2019).

Forester, J. (1982) ‘Planning in the face of power’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 48 (1): 67–80.

Gaventa, J. and A. Cornwall (2008) ‘Power and knowledge’, in P. Reason and H. Bradbury (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, vol. 2 (New York: Sage), pp. 172–89.

Goodchild, M. (2009) ‘NeoGeography and the nature of geographic expertise’, Journal of Location Based Services, 3 (2): 82–96.

Haklay, M. (ed.) (2010) Interacting with Geospatial Technologies (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons).

— (2013) ‘Neogeography and the delusion of democratisation’, Environment and Planning A, 45 (1): 55–69.

Haklay, M. and C. Tobón (2003) ‘Usability evaluation and PPGIS: towards a user-centred design approach’, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 17 (6): 577–92.

Harlow, S. (2012) ‘Social media and social movements: Facebook and an online Guatemalan justice movement that moved offline’, New Media & Society, 14 (2): 225–43.

Hendriks, P. (1999) ‘Why share knowledge? The influence of ICT on the motivation for knowledge sharing’, Knowledge and Process Management, 6 (2): 91.

Hunt, A. and D. Specht (2019) ‘Crowdsourced mapping in crisis zones: collaboration, organisation and impact’, Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 4 (1): 1–11.

Hutchby, I. (2001) ‘Technologies, texts and affordances’, Sociology, 35 (2): 441–56.

Johnson, J.T., R.P. Louis and A.H. Pramono (2005) ‘Facing the future: encouraging critical cartographic literacies in indigenous communities’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 4 (1): 80–98.

Jordan, T. (2015) Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (London: Pluto Press).

Kirsch, S. (1995) ‘The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 (5): 529–55.

Latour, B. (1988) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Lefebvre, H. (1974) The Production of Space (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell).

— (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Lorimer, H. (2003) ‘Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28 (2): 197–217.

McFarlane, C. (2006) ‘Crossing borders: development, learning and the North–South divide’, Third World Quarterly, 27 (8): 1413–37.

Mercea, D. and A. Funk (2016) ‘The social media overture of the pan-European stop-ACTA protest’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 22 (3): 287–312.

Miller, C. C. (2006) ‘A beast in the field: The Google Maps mashup as GIS/2’, Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 41 (3): 187–99.

Morozov, E. (2014) ‘The rise of data and the death of politics’, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation (accessed Oct. 2015).

Neff, G. (2013) ‘Why big data won’t cure us’, Big Data, 1 (3): 117–23.

Newsom, V. and L.L.C. Cassara (2011) ‘Local knowledge and the revolutions: a framework for social media information flow’, International Journal of Communication, 5: 1303–12.

O’Hara, K. (2004) ‘Ontologies and technologies: knowledge representation or misrepresentation’, ACM SIGIR Forum, 38(2): 11–17.

Paglen, T. (2008) ‘Mapping ghosts’, in L. Mogel and A. Bhagat (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Los Angeles, CA: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press), pp. 39–50.

Pánek, J. (2016) ‘From mental maps to GeoParticipation’, Cartographic Journal, 53 (4): 300–7.

Parker, B. (2006) ‘Constructing community through maps? Power and praxis in community mapping’, Professional Geographer, 58 (4): 470–84.

Perkins, C. (2007) ‘Community mapping’, Cartographic Journal, 44 (2): 127–37.

Perrons, D. (2004) Globalization and Social Change: People and Places in a Divided World (London: Psychology Press).

Potts, J. (2015) The New Time and Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Rose, G. (1997) ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics’, Progress in Human Geography, 21 (3): 305–20.

Satterthwaite, D. (2015) ‘Local democracy as a substitute for data (and a rather good substitute too)’, IIED, https://www.iied.org/local-democracy-substitute-for-data-rather-good-substitute-too (accessed Jan. 2015).

Sillitoe, P. (1998) ‘The development of indigenous knowledge: a new applied anthropology’, Current Anthropology, 39 (2): 223–52.

— (2000) ‘Let them eat cake: indigenous knowledge, science and the “poorest of the poor”’, Anthropology Today, 16 (6): 3–7.

Specht, D. (2018) ‘Did you find the world or did you make it up? Media, communications and geography in the digital age’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 13 (2): 1–13.

Specht, D. and A. Feigenbaum (2018) ‘From cartographic gaze to contestatory cartographies’, in P. Pol Bargués-Pedreny, D. Chandler and E. Simon (eds.), Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age (Routledge Global Cooperation Series) (London: Routledge), pp. 39–55.

Taylor, L. and D. Broeders (2015) ‘In the name of development: power, profit and the datafication of the global South’, Geoforum, 64: 229–37.

Tene, O. and J. Polonetsky (2012) ‘Big data for all: privacy and user control in the age of analytics’, Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, 11: xxvii.

Tufte, T. and P. Mefalopulos (2009) Participatory Communication: A Practical Guide (World Bank Working Paper No. 170) (Washington, DC: World Bank).

United Nations Global Pulse (UNGP) (2012) Big Data for Development: Challenges and Opportunities (New York: UNGP).

Verplanke, J., M.K. McCall, C. Uberhuaga, G. Rambaldi and M. Haklay (2016) ‘A shared perspective for PGIS and VGI’, Cartographic Journal, 53 (4): 308–17.

Walker, B.B. and C. Rinner (2013) ‘A qualitative framework for evaluating participation on the Geoweb’, URISA Journal, 25 (2): 15–24.

Webb, J. (2009) Understanding Representation (New York: Sage).

Weiner, D., T.M. Harris and W.J. Craig (2002) ‘Community participation and geographic information systems’, in. W.J. Craig, T.M. Harris and D. Weiner (eds.), Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems (London: Taylor & Francis), pp. 3–16.

Wynne, B. (1992) ‘Sheep farming after Chernobyl: a case study in communicating scientific information’, in B.V. Lewenstein (ed.), When Science Meets the Public (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science), pp. 43–68.