Infographic showing when the world's freelance community logs onto oDesk by country, with each circle representing the percentage of the internet population employed by oDesk online at that time (up to 0.05%) Josh Gowan/Stefano De Sabbata/Mark Graham

This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

oDesk claims to be the world's largest online marketplace for remote workers. So what can its data reveal about how -- and when -- the world's freelancers get to work? A team of researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute mapped it out. "In the Philippines, there isn't really a shift between night and day in terms of hours worked, which means they are matching themselves to an American market, and they do more stuff like personal assistance," says Mark Graham, who heads the Information Geographies programme at the institute. "But if you look at India, there's a clearer night-to-day working pattern -- maybe that's because they're doing work, such as writing software, where it's less important to be synchronous with their clients."


His research looks at "information as it gets mediated by technology -- does it change older geographies of information or reinforce them?" So, according to Graham, Twitter has a dispersed geography: Indonesia is the site's second-biggest population.

Academic publishing, though, remains concentrated in just a few parts of the world.

Graham looked at the oDesk data as the first part of a project on virtual labour: "Is this a way to address unemployment in big swathes of the world, or is it just creating digital sweatshops?"

Data visualisations are a geographer's bread and butter ("We've always done this. If you say the phrase 'data visualisation' to a geographer, you'll get a puzzled look, because what kind of visualisation doesn't draw on data?"), but fieldwork is needed to take the project on. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Graham will visit eight countries in Asia and Africa. "You can't answer everything by slurping up big data sets," he says. "You need to go and ask questions sometimes."