Prof. Spigel:

You might wish to contact Prof. Jonathan Raper, at the City University in
London, UK. Five years ago, he gave a fascinating presenation at a
conference section I moderated.  (See #1 below).

Though Raper wasn't asking exactly the question you are, his methodology to
tie WWW geography to newspaper circulation was quite impressive.  That said,
I haven't turned up any recent work by him on that topic.  Should you
discover any, I would appreciate the appropriate pointers.

I am also quite interested in the question(s) you raise here, so please keep
all of us informed.

All the best,
Tom Johnson

#1:
Source: http://www.net-media.co.uk/nm2k/day2detail.html
Workshop 4 (intermediate/advanced)
16.45-17.45: "GIS as a research tool: applications and implications of
geographic profiling of newspaper web users"
Professor Jonathan Raper, Professor of Geographic Information Science, City
University

#2:
From:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/gisonline/student/topics/Module1/StreamA/topic2/Represe
ntingGeography.pdf

"For a very strong argument against absolute space in a specific application
of GIS see:
Raper, J. & Livingstone D (1995) Development of a geomorphological data
model using
object oriented design. International Journal of Geographic Information
Systems, 9(4): 359-83.

"Jonathan Raper gives a very succinct account of the science view in his
essay in the 'big book of
GIS': Raper, J.F. (1999) Spatial representation: the scientist's
perspective. In: Geographical
Information Systems, Volume 1 Principles and Technical Issues, Longley,
P.A., Goodchild, M.F.,
Maguire, D.J. and D.W. Rhind (eds), Chapter 5: 61-70.

"Jonathan's book Multidimensional Geographic information Science (Taylor &
Francis: 2000) also
explore fundamental aspects of 'geo-representation' in a theoretical sense,
focusing on the
implications of new technologically-supported ways of seeing, understanding
and storing
knowledge of the environment. It's pretty 'heavy' stuff but suitably
challenging if this area of
GISc interests you. Applications of geo-representation can be found in Unwin
and Fisher's
Virtual Reality in Geography (Taylor & Francis: 2001)."

#3:
Contact Raper at:
http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~raper/
Dr Jonathan Raper
Professor +HoD
Room A218a
Information Science
School of Informatics
City University
London EC1V OHB

[log in to unmask]
tel: +44 20 7040 8415
fax: +44 20 7040 8584


=============================================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism
http://www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                              505.473.9646 (h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com                    [log in to unmask]

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
            -John McCarthy, Stanford University mathematician
=============================================================

-----Original Message-----
From: Mapping and visualising Internet infrastructure and Web space
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Ben Spigel
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 7:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MAPPING-CYBERSPACE] Tracking internet phenomena


I have a methodology problems I've been struggling with, and was
wondering if anyone on the list had dealt with this before.

I'm studying how ideas spread over the internet and physical space,
things like internet 'memes' such as e-mail jokes, cartoons, think
"all your base belong to us." Unfortunately, there is no real way to
track these things. E-mails are anonomous and privite, so you can't
track where one of those e-mail jokes has been.

In theory you could track IP addresses for web-site based things,
like flash cartoons, but there are a few problems with this. You
would need the IP logs, which are rerely saved and most websites are
lothe to give out information like that. If I could make my own
internet meme on demand, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you -
I would be swimming in my pool of money. There are plenty of viral
ads out there which are specifically designed to collect information
about viewers, but I don't think marketing firms will give out this
kind of information to researchers.

The only other way that I can think of would be to do a internet
based survey, basically asking "1) Have you seen this thing, 2)where
do you live," but in order to get good data it would need to be huge,
something very hard for an internet survey.

Has anyone else successfully dealt with this problem or have any ideas?

Thanks,
--------
Ben Spigel
Department of Geography
University of Toronto