Ryan Burns

University of Calgary, Geography, Faculty Member

University of Washington, Geography, Graduate Student

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Doctoral candidate in geography at University of Washington, and formerly a research assistant with the Commons Lab at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Affiliated with UW’s Simpson Center through the Certificate in Public Scholarship program, and serve on the leadership boards of two specialty groups of the Association of American Geographers: the Socialist & Critical Geography SG, and the Geographic Information Systems & Science SG.

Earned a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) at Eastern Kentucky University, and M.S. from San Diego State University, each in geography. Research interests in the social and political implications of new mapping and mass collaboration technologies; specifically, how these technologies are used in humanitarian management. Presented my research in numerous domestic and international conferences, published a few things, and organizing a couple special journal issues on new geographic technologies.

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Papers by Ryan Burns

Datafying Disaster: Institutional Framings of Data Production following Superstorm Sandy

In the wake of disasters, communities organize to produce spatial data capturing knowledge about ... more In the wake of disasters, communities organize to produce spatial data capturing knowledge about the disaster, and to fill gaps left by formal emergency responders. The ways communities impact overall response efforts can produce inequalities, disempowerment, or further marginalization. Increasingly, this organizing and knowledge production occurs through digital technologies, and recently "digital humanitarianism" has become an important suite of such technologies. Digital humanitarianism is comprised of technologies like the crowdsourced crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, and the community of volunteers Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team which focuses on the amateur-generated global basemap OpenStreetMap. Digital humanitarianism is shifting the ways needs and knowledges are captured and represented as data following disasters. These transformations raise important questions for geographers interested in the socio-political and institutional processes that frame data production and representation.

In this article, I contribute to geographers' efforts to understand the institutional and community-based politics that frame the types of data that are produced in disaster contexts. I do so by drawing on an ethnographic project that took place in both Washington, DC and New York City after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. I show that digital humanitarians produced data in the Rockaway Peninsula of New York in response to perceived gaps on the part of formal emergency responders. In so doing, they represented needs, individuals, and communities in ways that local community advocacy organizations found problematic. These findings shed light on the politics and struggles around why particular datasets were produced, and the motives behind capturing particular disaster-related needs and knowledge as data.

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" Let the Private Sector Take Care of This " : The Philanthro-Capitalism of Digital Humanitarianism

In this chapter, I illuminate new political economies of humanitarian technologies. Crowdsourcing... more In this chapter, I illuminate new political economies of humanitarian technologies. Crowdsourcing, social media, and mass collaboration—collectively termed digital humanitarianism—are increasingly impacting humanitarian work. At the same time, for-profit businesses are becoming more involved in humanitarianism in the phenomenon called " philanthro-capitalism. " In fact, for-profit businesses are now partnering with digital humanitarians and developing technologies for their use. I argue that these phenomena signal broader shifting relationships between the state and the private sector, enabled through digital humanitarian technologies. Digital humanitarianism and philanthro-capitalism should be understood in the context of a greater climate of austerity and neoliberal political-economic reforms in humanitarianism. In this climate, humanitarian agencies see digital humanitarianism as an innovation that enables their continued operation. These shifts increasingly inculcate private, for-profit logics, rationalities, and imperatives into humanitarianism, aid relief, and most broadly the public sector. These processes take the specific form of philanthro-capitalism, as for-profit businesses such as Esri, Google, and others develop the tools and languages for digital humanitarianism. It is through these shifts that humanitarianism is becoming a new site for capital accumulation; the process by which crisis-related knowledges and needs are being turned into profit. It raises important questions about the relationship between crisis and capital accumulation, and how the profit imperative frames the types of needs and crises receiving attention. This represents a new struggle around how knowledge, needs, and people are encoded as data and the types of assistance that are deemed appropriate based on those representations.

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Representational Inequalities in the Calgary Smart City

A few weeks ago I sat down to interview one of the leaders of the city of Calgary's "smart city" ... more A few weeks ago I sat down to interview one of the leaders of the city of Calgary's "smart city" initiatives. Her name was Jean, and before I had EVEN finished describing the purpose of my research project, she interrupted and demonstrated one of the reasons she is quickly securing a reputation in the city. Upon my first mention of the phrase "smart city", she jumped in and said, {change slide} "municipalities are reclaiming that term, by the way. They're taking it back from industry -we're starting to learn that platforms will not just solve all our problems." I begin my talk today with this quote because the conversation that followed with her that day, and most of the rest of the research I've conducted to date have together signaled some interesting contributions -if not challenges -to some central tenets of our critical approaches toward smart cities. I'm going to be charting out some of these challenges with you today. Now, I'm just getting started with this research and so much of what I lay down here today is quite tentative, as a head's up.

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Burns - openData.pptx

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Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, Social Relations

Spatial technologies and the organizations around them, such as the Standby Task Force and Ushahi... more Spatial technologies and the organizations around them, such as the Standby Task Force and Ushahidi, are increasingly changing the ways crises and emergencies are addressed. Within digital humanitarianism, Big Data has featured strongly in recent efforts to improve digital humanitarian work. This shift toward social media and other Big Data sources has entailed unexamined assumptions about technological progress, social change, and the kinds of knowledge captured by data. These assumptions stand in tension with critical geographic scholarship, and in particular critical GIS research. In this paper I borrow from critical research on technologies to engage three important new facets of Big Data emerging from an interrogation of digital humanitarianism. I argue first that within digital humanitarianism, Big Data should be understood as a new set of practices, in addition to its usual conception as data and analytics technologies. Second, I argue that Big Data constitutes a distinct epistemology that obscures many forms of knowledge in crises and emergencies and produces a limited understanding of how a crisis is unfolding. Third, I argue that Big Data is constitutive of a social relation in which both the formal humanitarian sector and ''victims'' of crises are in need of the services and labor that can be provided by digital humanitarians.

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Burns, R. 2014. Moments of closure in the knowledge politics of digital humanitarianism

Geoforum, 2014

Geographers interested in the social and political implications of the geoweb have recently turne... more Geographers interested in the social and political implications of the geoweb have recently turned their attention to its attendant ''knowledge politics''. Such work looks at the processes and discrete moments in development that led to certain knowledges being represented and other knowledges remaining invisible. In this paper I build on these conversations by exploring the knowledge politics of digital humanitarianism. Digital humanitarianism, a technological corollary to the geoweb, is the set of social and institutional networks, technologies, and practices that enable large numbers of remote and on-theground individuals to collaborate on humanitarian projects. Specifically, in this paper I offer 4 ''moments of closure'' when knowledge politics have been negotiated, enacted, and made durable in digital humanitarianism. These moments of closure constellate around the themes of inclusion, categorization, accuracy, and visibility. I then consider the implications of these moments for the kinds of epistemologies digital humanitarianism espouses, and how knowledges come to be represented. I argue that these knowledge politics -the struggles for legitimacy and means of representation -are fluid and contested, yet become more stable when implemented through technology. Through these processes digital humanitarianism, and by extension the geoweb, embodies the social relations that first produced the debates around knowledge representation.

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Shanley, L., R. Burns, Z. Bastian, E. Robson. 2013. Tweeting up a storm: the promises and perils of crisis mapping.

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Burns, R., L. Shanley. 2013. Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Response: Workshop Summary

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Burns, R., A. Skupin. 2013. Towards qualitative geovisual analytics: A case study involving places, people, and mediated experience.

Cartographica, 2013

This article seeks to address the gap between the quantitative, summative data that are typically... more This article seeks to address the gap between the quantitative, summative data that are typically engaged in geovisual analytics and the more personal, experiential ways of knowledge construction accentuated by qualitative GIS. By incorporating diverse forms of data within a high-dimensional conceptual framework, we set out a type of qualitative geovisual analytics. This approach is attentive to the epistemological limitations of singular data sources and highlights the multiple ways of exploring neighbourhoods. The article reports on a project that used an online survey, including collection of personal impressions of San Diego neighbourhoods based on street-level video. Three attribute spaces are conceptualized: survey respondents' characteristics, attributes of San Diego neighbourhoods, and characteristics of the words used to describe these neighbourhoods. The self-organizing map (SOM) technique was used to reduce the dimensionality of these attribute spaces for visual exploration. This approach makes several important contributions, including a demonstration of ''scaling up'' the work that has been done in qualitative GIS. It productively integrates experiential data with a geovisual analytics approach and reaffirms the multiple meanings of visualization.

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Burns, R. 2012. Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management: Workshop Overview.

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Talks by Ryan Burns

Representational Inequalities in the Calgary Smart City

In contemporary cities, data are a key component in drives to become "smarter". From sensors embe... more In contemporary cities, data are a key component in drives to become "smarter". From sensors embedded in the urban landscape to increasing pressure to make data freely available in open data platforms, new ways of producing and collecting data are shifting how we think of and represent places and people. Data's collection, processing, production, and representation all entail complex negotiations that produce and underwrite new inequalities and exclusions. Yet, while some critical research has begun to explore the precise types and functions of these data-focused inequalities and exclusions, it remains understudied both comparatively and in empirical grounding.

These shifts can be understood through existing geographic research, but raise new questions and research challenges at the intersection of GIScience and urban geography. In this presentation I draw on a nascent project in the city of Calgary that seeks to explore these processes. The City of Calgary currently approaches its open data platform and smart city initiatives in ways that challenge research conducted elsewhere, in avoiding the smart city discursive framework and seeming to cautiously vet the types of data released for public use. I submit that while existing research on knowledge politics is useful for understanding the politics behind open data platforms, the Calgary case entails practices and processes that necessitate reconceptualizing how knowledge, places, and people come to be encoded as data.

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