FRONTIERS AND TERRITORY IN CYBERSPACE. METRIC PRINCIPLES FOR GEO-LOCAL INDEPENDENCE ON THE WEB

ABSTRACT (Translation from Spanish by Medialab Prado)
The report titled "FRONTIERS AND TERRITORY IN CYBERSPACE. METRIC PRINCIPLES FOR GEO-LOCAL INDEPENDENCE ON THE WEB" is a development of the knowledge area of the educational projects of area421 and it aims to reflect the difficulty of achieving certain globality levels for websites, regardless of their categorization, as well as help to understand the method by which a website achieves visibility on the Internet through its contents.

Between December 6, 2007 and January 2, 2008, 44 websites with differing characteristics and structures were studied, primarily to find relations between cyberspace and physical territory, as well as explore little-studied cybermetric methods which would make it possible to establish conditions for future studies. Geo-citations and territorial citations were chosen to establish websites' globality level, and to verify the degree of dependency of the website on the place or territory from which it is managed. For that purpose, three terms were defined:

GEO-CITATION: Citation given in cyberspace (Internet contents) referring to a physical territory.
LOCAL GEO-CITATION (gl): Geo-citation referring to the physical location from which a website is created or managed.
EXTERNAL GEO-CITATION (gx): Geo-citation referring to any physical location that is physically or culturally distant from the place from which a website is created or managed

This makes it possible to establish rankings comparing the sites that were studied. A detailed study of the geo-citations makes it possible to establish hidden relations of an economic, cultural, social, educational, political, historical or personal nature

44 websites (72,897,439 web pages) were chosen, operating from what we call the local level-- such as alternative arts centres-- to what we consider the global level: large social networks that operate worldwide whose domains are top brand names for cyber users. For the levels we consider closest to the territories, websites from the cultural sector were chosen for three reasons: first, because they are sufficiently globalized; second, because they are structured territorially; and third, given their communication structure. Among websites we consider corporative, they tend to reflect continuous activity, store it, and include outside activities, given that they usually publish the sources and primary activities of artists or lecturers. They consist of alternative centres, art galleries, art centres and museums. At what we understand a priori to be the intermediate level, highly specialized social websites in the cultural sector were chosen. The communications of these websites tend to reflect the same activities as the corporative cultural websites, channelling or grouping them, with similar objectives, though less closely tied to the territory. Our intent was to establish the possible difficulties in reaching acceptable levels of globality and whether the social conditions exist for the boom in local journalism in the cultural field. For what we consider globalized levels, large social network names with verified continuous activity were chosen, divided into three groups: social communication networks with secondary sources, social networks for community and bookmark sharing, and social repositories. Our purpose was to establish whether these services are really globalized, if their ties to the territory is greater or lesser than what one believes by default, where their boundaries are, and whether the different commercial or social objectives of these services imply a difference in their degree of globalization, given that these objectives require some degree of human involvement from the user and, as a consequence, a greater cultural and territorial implication

For the geo-citations, 19 large capital cities were chosen from Europe, the Americas and Asia. None of them were involved in armed conflicts or media conflicts (sports, etc.) during the time the study was carried out. Relatively simple cybermetric delimiters were used and several classic applied cybermetrics measures were used, such as the size of the website, its visibility on the Internet, the page rank, web impact (WIF) and relative popularity, to verify whether a relationship existed between geo-citations and these measures. When possible, the laboratory tool Google Trends was used, which establishes the source of user searches on Google Search.

From 3 to 22 January 2008, the results were analyzed, conclusions were reached, and the report was written

Our primary conclusions were: 1. The majority of websites are very close to the physical territory from which they come. 2. Globality is more of a supposition than a reality in cyberspace. 3. Local journalism has a natural place on the Internet. 4. An institution's cultural, language, social, historical, personal, market, etc. relations are reflected in the website representing it. 5. Geo-citations are a valid tool for determining hidden relations.

To summarize our general conclusions, of the 44 websites studied, none shows complete geo-local independence; only 2 (4.5%) achieved 50% of the highest score possible; and only 7 (15.9%) -all of them social networks- achieved over 33% of the highest score possible. The primary geo-citation on over 70% of the websites studied is their local geo-citation. Art centre websites score higher if they include participation options and a social network on their websites. In addition, in general terms, users are searching for a particular Web resource belonging to the same territory or kindred territories to the physical location of the website and in the majority of cases they share the same language or one of the languages offered on the website. Lastly, we would like to point out that the classical statistics gathered by cybermetrics do not of themselves measure territorial independence.

The report also includes a detailed study of the results obtained for each of the websites where it was possible to analyze hidden relations of a historical, cultural, social, economic, personal, etc. nature for the entities that were studied.