<div dir="ltr"><font><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Hi everyone,</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">I’d like to introduce myself (Mark Graham) and three of my colleagues (Isis Hjorth, Helena Barnard, and Vili Lehdonvirta). </span><br>
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Dr <span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=169">Isis Hjorth</a> is a cultural sociologist focusing on emerging practices associated with networked technologies. In her PhD thesis - “Networked Cultural Production: Filmmaking in the Wreckamovie Community" (Hjorth, 2014) - Isis examined the conventions guiding the division of digital labour in crowdsourced films, and developed a typology of labour</span> <span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">orientations. She is now engaged with research on paid crowdsourcing and online work in low-income countries, working as as one of four researchers on the project "Microwork and Virtual Production Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia”.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Since obtaining her PhD in Management from Rutgers University, Prof <a href="http://www.gibs.co.za/faculty-and-research/faculty-and-research_1/faculty/dr-helena-barnard-.aspx">Helena Barnard</a> has been working at GIBS, University of Pretoria, in South Africa. Her research interests are in how knowledge (and with it technology, organisational practices and innovation) moves from more to less developed countries. She focuses both on organisational mechanisms (notably emerging multinationals) and individual mechanisms, especially the diaspora and scientific collaborations. The digital world is transforming how cross-national contact at both the organisational and individual levels takes place, and she is increasingly investigating how digitally-enabled processes and labour change engagement between high, middle and low income countries.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Dr </span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=320"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>Vili Lehdonvirta</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> is an economic sociologist and Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research focuses on the social, technical, and institutional underpinnings of digitally mediated markets, especially markets for online games, virtual currencies, and digital labour, and also on the social consequences of these markets. His book, </span><a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-economies"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> (with Edward Castronova) has just been published by MIT Press. His earlier publications include a report on the </span><a href="http://www.infodev.org/infodev-files/resource/InfodevDocuments_1056.pdf"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>market for microwork and game labour</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> and a qualitative study of </span><a href="http://dynamicsofvirtualwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/COST-Action-IS1202-Working-Paper-12.pdf"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>microworkers' occupational identity</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">. In terms of research approach, Lehdonvirta likes to mix observation and interviews with quantitative analyses of survey and log data.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=165">I'm</a> an Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and a geographer whose work is broadly trying to understand the difference that connectivity makes at the world’s economic margins. I have previously studied topics like the geographies of voice, participation, and representation on Wikipedia (e.g. in </span><a href="http://www.zerogeography.net/2014/01/uneven-geographies-of-user-generated.html"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>this paper</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">), the </span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=59"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>role of changing connectivity</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> in the BPO sectors of Kenya and Rwanda, and the </span><a href="http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=home"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>broader geographies of digital and augmented content</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> (here is a </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435j93"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>link to a recent BBC talk</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> I gave on the topic). At the moment, I’m working on two broad projects. First, a three year project on “</span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=119"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>microwork and virtual production networks</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">” (this is what we’ll be speaking about in the New York conference). Second, a </span><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=120"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal;color:rgb(4,46,238)"><u>five-year project on ‘knowledge economies’ in Sub-Saharan Africa.</u></span></a><span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal"> Here we plan to look at both micro tasks like call centres and microwork and rise of the quaternary sector as it is manifested through activities like web-development and mediated through institutions like ’innovation hubs.’ The ultimate point of all of this work is to better understand who benefits and who doesn’t from changing affordances and practices of digitally-mediated connectivity. </span><br>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Looking forward to continuing in New York.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-stretch:normal">Mark (and Isis, Helena, and Vili)<br><br></span>
</font><div><div dir="ltr"><div>------------------------------------------</div><div>Dr Mark Graham</div><div><br></div><div>Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow </div><div>Oxford Internet Institute</div><div>University of Oxford</div>
<div><br></div><div><div>Research Fellow<br></div><div>Green Templeton College<br></div><div>University of Oxford</div><br>Visiting Research Associate</div><div>School of Geography and the Environment</div><div>University of Oxford</div>
<div> </div><div><a href="http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/graham" target="_blank">oii.ox.ac.uk/people/graham</a> | <a href="http://www.geospace.co.uk" target="_blank">geospace.co.uk</a> | <a href="http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk" target="_blank">Information Geographies</a> | <a href="http://www.wikichains.org" target="_blank">wikichains.org</a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/geoplace" target="_blank">@geoplace</a> | <a href="http://www.zerogeography.net/" target="_blank">zerogeography blog</a><br>
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