“Hey Google, tell me about rivers”: A digital geography of urban rivers

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Political ecologies of water have long been interested in the links between water, knowledge, and power. These power dynamics extend to online spaces, where uneven access to information shapes environmental narratives. In this context, we argue that web discourses constitute a critical yet understudied source to study uneven environmental knowledge. We focus on the case of urban rivers, which are at the interface between society and its environment. Our analysis bridges theory and method by conducting a quantitative textual analysis and metadata analysis of web pages about urban rivers all around the world, collected using web scraping methods. Based on a corpus of 52,448 web pages, we examine what is said about urban rivers, by whom and from where. This large-scale approach allows us to map digital representations and test whether they reflect or challenge existing hydrosocial power relations. Our results show a diversity of topics and sources, which are unevenly distributed and sometimes not locally produced. By comparing local and non-local perspectives, we also reveal that local and non-local web discourse provide different framings of urban rivers. Based on these findings, we demonstrate that in the context of the digital divide, uneven representations of urban rivers are digitally produced; thus we argue that web discourses about water constitute a digital extension of the hydrosocial cycle. In addition to a methodological contribution to the analysis of web pages as geographical discourse, this research provides the first digital geography of urban rivers and demonstrates the potential of using digital discourse in geography.