Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap: responding to theories of female (under) representation in crowdsou
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Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap: responding to theories of female (under) representation in crowdsourced mapping Z. Gardner
. P. Mooney . S. De Sabbata . L. Dowthwaite
Ó The Author(s) 2019
Abstract This paper presents the results of an exploratory quantitative analysis of gendered contributions to the online mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM), in which previous research has identified a strong male participation bias. On these grounds, theories of representation in volunteered geographic information (VGI) have argued that this kind of crowdsourced data fails to embody the geospatial interests of the wider community. The observed effects of the bias however, remain conspicuously absent from discourses of VGI and gender, which proceed with little sense of impact. This study addresses this void by analysing OSM contributions by gender and thus identifies differences in men’s and women’s mapping practices. An online survey uniquely captured the OSM IDs as well as the declared
gender of 293 OSM users. Statistics relating to users’ editing and tagging behaviours openly accessible via the ‘how did you contribute to OSM’ wiki page were subsequently analysed. The results reveal that volumes of overall activity as well editing and tagging actions in OSM remain significantly dominated by men. They also indicate subtle but impactful differences in men’s and women’s preferences for modifying and creating data, as well as the tagging categories to which they contribute. Discourses of gender and ICT, gender relations in online VGI environments and competing motivational factors are implicated in these observations. As well as updating estimates of the gender participation bias in OSM, this paper aims to inform and stimulate subsequent discourses of gender and representation towards a new rationale for widening participation in VGI.
Z. Gardner (&) Nottingham Geospatial Institute, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Volunteered geographic information Crowdsourced mapping: gender biases OpenStreetMap Feminist GIS Critical GIS
P. Mooney Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland S. De Sabbata School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK L. Dowthwaite Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Introduction Our engagement with maps has changed. Nowadays, if you order a taxi, a pizza, or use an app to navigate your way through an unknown urban district, the data that these location based services use to provide you with
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that service will not be that collected by a qualified surveyor tasked by a government appointed agency, armed with the knowledge, skills and equipment to accurately locate and measure topographical features. Since the creation of Web 2.0 and the digital revolution in mobile computing, modern cartographic practices have changed. It is now more likely that this
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