Digital Geography and Society最新文献

{"title":"“If the rating is high enough, I don't bother going into place details” - an exploration of digital platforms' users experiences of digital place representation","authors":"Maciej Główczyński","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100158","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100158","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Accessibility and pervasiveness of digital platforms have made them a prism of human everyday experience. These experiences are constructed through user-generated content (UGC), which becomes a highly relevant source of information and a significant factor influencing humans' perceptions and behavioural intentions. This article examines the impact of UGC on place perception and decision-making, employing a mixed-methods approach that combines in-depth interviews with a survey. It highlights the ways users interact with spatially explicit digital platforms like Google Maps, revealing how visual and textual UGC construct digital representations of places. Results reveal three primary strategies for navigating digital platforms: focusing on data filtering, utilising cross-platform comparison, and leveraging spatial exploration. Specifically, certain users rely on algorithm-based ranking lists, while others employ more customised filtering methods, thereby reducing the impact of digital platforms' mechanisms. Additionally, the study explores the user motivations behind creating and sharing UGC, revealing the dual purposes of personal identity expression, information sharing, and the creation of personal place archives. This research contributes to digital geography by deepening the understanding of the algorithmic mediation of place experience and the complex interplay between human and technological actors. It underscores the necessity of examining digital platforms as active mediators, raising questions about the visibility and user autonomy in increasingly digitalised environments.</div></div><div><h3>Prologue</h3><div>You have arrived in a completely new and unknown place. You have gone on vacation, a business trip, for studies, or simply wanted to escape your daily routine. You are surrounded by new sights, unfamiliar people. You are trying to grasp this new world, this new reality, and find your place in it. The feeling of being overwhelmed makes you reach for your phone—Google Maps, Instagram and TripAdvisor help you tame the surrounding space. You are wondering where to go, what to visit. A museum? A restaurant? TripAdvisor suggests the top 5 activities around you, and Instagram highlights the spot where all the influencers take their pictures. Google shows you a nearby Italian trattoria. Over 1000 people rated it 4.7 stars. Not bad, you think. Feeling a bit tired, you decide to take an Uber there. Moments later, as you post a photo of your cacio e pepe on Instagram and tag the restaurant, you start to wonder—how did you end up here? On your journey with your phone in hand, did you miss something? Was your experience pre-planned by someone else? You have fallen into the algorithm's trap, maybe?</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145978103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Digitally-mediated territorial imaginations: A deep learning approach to characterize online images of contested territories and place names","authors":"Zhaoxu Sui,&nbsp;Anthony C. Robinson","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100160","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100160","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Today, people increasingly absorb information about places from online images of locations they have never been to. In the context of contested territories, online images serve as a medium for imagining territories. However, online images of contested territories, just like any other type of mediated information, are channeled through political narratives and ideologies. To quantitatively characterize this digitally mediated territorial imagination, this article proposes a new deep learning approach using Google Cloud Vision API to quantitatively characterize scraped online images of contested territories queried through different toponyms. Through a case study of three disputed territories employing six toponyms, we find that the results of online image queries are different depending on toponymic inputs, and we show how this can lead to different territorial imaginations localized to political and historical contexts. This work contributes these findings using a novel approach that integrates quantitative analytics and critical perspectives on territorial imagination, highlighting future opportunities for deep learning methods to provide insights into real-world geopolitical issues.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146077660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social reproduction and feminized platform labor: Care, domestic work, and migrant Agency in Madrid and Milan","authors":"Cristina Barrial Berbén ,&nbsp;Alina Dambrosio Clementelli ,&nbsp;Ana Santamarina","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100150","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100150","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the rise of domestic and care work platforms in Southern European cities, focusing on Madrid and Milan as relational contexts where platform capitalism intersects with enduring crises of social reproduction, migration regimes, and gendered labor precarity. Drawing on Social Reproduction Theory and an intersectional analytical lens, the study unpacks how digital platforms mediate the commodification, fragmentation, and spatial reorganization of reproductive labor. Empirically, it combines multi-sited ethnography, semi-structured interviews with migrant women workers, and digital platform analysis to trace how platformization exploits and reconfigures pre-existing informal care economies historically sustained by racialized migrant labor.</div><div>The findings reveal that platforms, while promising formalization and professionalization, often deepen precarity by leveraging border regimes, creating stratified access to work, and externalizing risks onto workers. These dynamics multiply gendered spaces of vulnerability, exposing women to new forms of violence across fragmented urban and digital geographies. Simultaneously, the paper foregrounds diverse forms of migrant women's agency, including informal strategies of mutual aid, knowledge-sharing through digital networks, and collective organizing embedded in longstanding grassroots movements.</div><div>By situating the platformization of domestic labor within broader transformations of urban life and welfare retrenchment, the article advances critical debates on the feminization of platform labor and the infrastructures of social reproduction. It argues that these platforms are not only technological intermediaries but infrastructural actors reshaping the conditions of life and work. The study underscores the importance of recognizing and supporting migrant workers' everyday practices of resistance as crucial sites of political possibility amid deepening neoliberal restructuring.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145719099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Metro Manila's digital infrastructure ecosystem. Insights into critical data centre studies in the majority world","authors":"Boris Michel,&nbsp;Finn Dammann","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100177","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100177","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article contributes to the growing field of critical data centre studies. A key contribution of these debates is to understand data centres as powerful socio-technical assemblages and as an infrastructural foundation of digital worlds. This interdisciplinary research highlights the role of data centres in materialising, fixing, and embedding data flows, and it brings to the fore the geographies, politics, economies, and environmental relations of digital infrastructures. While much of this research focuses on large hyperscalers in peripheral regions of the Global North, on Western Big Tech companies, and on the growth of data centres for AI, this article broadens this perspective by looking at data centres in and around Metro Manila, a city that might be considered an unlikely candidate for a booming data centre industry. This shifts the focus to the specifics of the development of data centres and digital infrastructures in a postcolonial setting and its particular path dependencies and geopolitical intricacies and this brings into focus an infrastructural ecosystem that cannot be neatly integrated into the grand narratives of global platform power. Focusing on Metro Manila's data centre ecosystem also highlights the more ordinary data centres and the broader set of actors that enable everyday internet connectivity and cloud services, which are vital for integrating the city and its hinterlands into the global digital economy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148177757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the algorithm: Cooperative alternatives to platform capitalism in urban delivery workforces","authors":"Nuria Soto Aliaga,&nbsp;Claudio Milano,&nbsp;Olga Jubany","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100157","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100157","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Digital labour platforms have transformed urban delivery by expanding precarious labour regimes grounded in algorithmic management, outsourcing, and deregulation. In Barcelona, an emblematic setting of platform capitalism, these transformations have generated both intensified precarisation and new worker-led responses. Within this context, delivery cooperatives have emerged as organisational alternatives that seek to reconfigure digital labour around democratic governance, collective autonomy, and a more human-centred use of technology. This paper examines two such initiatives, Mensakas and Les Mercedes, with the aim of understanding (1) how they organise work and govern technological tools differently from dominant platforms; (2) which organisational, social, and political dimensions underpin their functioning as alternatives; and (3) what possibilities and constraints shape their efforts to democratise digital labour. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative design combining longitudinal ethnography (2016–2024), fifteen semi-structured interviews, and five focus groups carried out in 2024. This triangulated approach makes it possible to analyse working conditions, spatial practices, and workers' narratives concerning cooperative organisation in a highly competitive urban logistics environment. The findings show that, despite relying on different technological infrastructures, one based on open-source cooperative software and the other on external private tools, both initiatives place human coordination, solidarity, and democratic decision-making at the centre of work organisation. Their physical workplaces operate as spaces of belonging and collective support, contrasting with the fragmented, public space waiting characteristic of platform labour. At the same time, these cooperatives face structural challenges linked to market pressures, limited resources, and asymmetric competition with investor-funded platforms. Overall, the study argues that cooperative organisation can offer grounded pathways to resist algorithmic exploitation and imagine fairer forms of urban delivery work. This research forms part of the INCA project Increase corporate political responsibility and accountability (European Union under G.A. No. 101061653).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145978102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Platformized domestic labor beyond technology: “Uncaring by design”?","authors":"Anke Strüver ,&nbsp;Janne Martha Lentz ,&nbsp;Helena Bellgardt","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100161","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100161","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Platform studies have increasingly emphasized everyday life as central to researching how gig labor platforms have seemingly evolved into urban infrastructures that connect the demand and supply of services. This paper takes the emphasis on everyday life seriously, locating the rise of platforms mediating domestic services within longer histories of feminized, migrantized, and informal domestic work in Continental Europe This encompasses the perspectives of platform clients and the undercurrents that emerge between workers and clients following the digital mediation of domestic services, specifically within the private sphere of the home. In doing so, we propose a shift in focus from digital platforms as such to the embodied and affective encounters and expectations that underpin platform-mediated domestic work. Against this backdrop, we approach marketplace platforms that mediate domestic cleaning services in view of interpersonal relationships between cleaners and clients, highlighting how platforms mediate gigs while relying on workers' subject positions shaped by migrantized, gendered, and classed embodiments. We zoom in on Austrian care platforms by combining empirical insights from interviews with cleaners and clients, which are presented as composite vignettes and supplemented with insights from interviews with platform managers. Moreover, we offer a critical feminist reading of the platformization of domestic service labor and the underlying power hierarchies. Hence, we build on the observations that domestic work has gained political momentum through its platformization and yet continues to be devalued along gendered, classed, and migrantized embodiments – and due to its location at home.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146188994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards planetary-intimate social media research","authors":"Elisabeth Militz ,&nbsp;Marlene Benzinger ,&nbsp;Roberta Hawkins","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100154","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100154","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Feminist perspectives provide important impetus for more socially just research on and with social media platforms through a feminist ethics of care. However, a specific geographical conceptualization of social media platforms is still lacking. We argue for a feminist-geographical understanding of social media platforms and research as intertwined across planetary-intimate scales. We contend that feminist social media research must take seriously the planetary-intimate connections of social media platforms if it wants to contribute to the transformation of these capitalist, exploitative, unsustainable, and unjust digital systems. At the heart of planetary-intimate social media research are questions of power and the more-than-human context realizing social media platforms. We assert that social media platforms should not be viewed as discrete and disembodied in research with and on them, but rather as situated, embodied systems entangled across planetary-intimate scales.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145927218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spatial and temporal implications of the platformization of work in the logistics chain: From Rotterdam to Madrid","authors":"Francisco Fernández-Trujillo ,&nbsp;Pablo López Calle","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100153","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100153","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Through the analysis of workers' experiences at different points in the logistics chain, we aim to demonstrate how platformization is a phenomenon with homogeneous and common impacts across different stages, and how algorithmic control shapes a differentiated citizenship within urban space. Our findings show that the platform-based management of logistics work produces concrete spatial arrangements of workers and specific perceptions and management of time. This management relies on workers being in a state of latent availability, conditioning both their time management and their location for the performance of tasks. The contemporary logistics system, based on the reduction of delivery times, relies on platform systems and algorithmic management that intensify workers' precarious conditions, shaping their access to urban space. This approach allows us to conclude that the platformization of logistics—based on the provision of logistics services by a precarious workforce that is permanently available in both space and time—has been generating unequal spatialities among subjects.</div><div>Based on research involving more than 50 interviews with logistics chain workers in the Netherlands (Spanish migrants working in the logistics sector in the Dutch region of Brabant and posted truck drivers from Spanish companies operating in Central Europe) and in Spain (delivery workers, mainly migrants from Latin America), this analysis offers a transnational perspective on precarization in Europe.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145718987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When it rains, it pours. Digital nomads, platform real estate, and the housing crisis in Málaga","authors":"Ibán Díaz-Parra ,&nbsp;Enrique España ,&nbsp;Jaime Jover","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100156","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2026.100156","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>During the COVID-19 lockdown, the Southern Spanish city of Malaga relied on digital nomads as an alternative strategy to sustain the short-term rental market in a zero-tourism context. We hypothesize that, in its aftermath, the hotspots for remote foreign workers, especially in tech, may lead to the saturation of rental markets in these tourist enclaves. This study contributes to research on the impact of digital nomads and similar migration profiles on tourism-led urban economies, with a focus on local rental markets. First, we analyzed local policies and real estate strategies aimed at attracting digital nomads to Malaga. Second, we conducted fieldwork interviews with platform real estate managers and landlords, as well as with foreign tech remote workers who employ platforms for housing services. The paper identifies a series of lifestyle labor migration profiles targeted by the local government and platform real estate managers that do not necessarily fit the formal definition of digital nomads. Moreover, it illustrates the potential impact of these profiles on rental markets amid the rise of platform real estate.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145978104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coping with mundane (cyber-)violence: FLINTA* youth's strategies in the resurgent patriarchy","authors":"Tabea Bork-Hüffer ,&nbsp;Lea Lübbert ,&nbsp;Belinda Mahlknecht","doi":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100155","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.diggeo.2025.100155","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent research has shown that the permeation of everyday life by mobile and intimate digital technologies has significantly expanded spatial reach and contributed to the (re)production and normalisation of violence across entangled online and offline spaces. Yet, how do affected populations navigate these conditions and what does that tell us about the nature of geographies of mundane (cyber-)violence? Situated at the intersection of digital, feminist, and young people's geographies, this article examines the strategies used by FLINTA* (<strong>f</strong>emale, <strong>l</strong>esbian, <strong>i</strong>ntersex, <strong>n</strong>on-binary, <strong>t</strong>rans, <strong>a</strong>gender) youth in Austria and Germany to endure, adapt to, and rework violence and discrimination within their entangled online and offline spaces.</div><div>Drawing on a qualitative multi-method study involving FLINTA* youth, we identify their spatial strategies in response to heteronormative discourses, persistent traditional gender norms, and stereotypes that shape relations of power and violence. The findings highlight the role that technologies play in both enabling micro-level forms of individual and collective empowerment and in reinforcing norms of femininity, masculinity, and heteronormativity within a resurgent patriarchy that continually reproduces and normalises gendered and sexualised violence. Youth coping and reworking efforts thereby meander between progress and setback, empowerment and boundary, requiring constant weighing and adjustment. They are essentially spatial strategies, exposing the complex interrelations between space, gender, and violence stretched across entangled socio-material-digital spheres.</div><div>Overall, the article contributes to the conceptualisation of digital geographies of mundane violence from an intersectional feminist perspective, foregrounding how FLINTA* youth live, feel, and negotiate the contradictions of power and possibility in their everyday spaces.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100377,"journal":{"name":"Digital Geography and Society","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145978101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}