Why Your Where Is Not Theirs

At some point in 2010 the balance tipped over: the majority of the world’s online information is now non-English unstructured data. This talk will explore how space and direction are expressed differently in some of the 5,000 languages in the connected world; how this can influence people’s perception of space (English-speakers included); and the implications for location-based technology and services. Linguistic diversity is highly concentrated with our greatest assets, including ecological diversity and mineral wealth, but also with our greatest threats, including sudden onset crises and epidemics. I will draw on examples from work in these four areas.