Month: May 2023

Professor Emmanouil Tranos is interested in the complexities that lie beneath our surface understanding of the so-called digital landscape – one that his research shows has an uneven terrain that can tell us more about urban trends than standard quantitative studies.

His previous work saw him develop and apply data modelling frameworks and computational workflows to expose the location-specific patterns of digital technologies, by looking at the digital traces left by economic activities and social behaviours. These spatial dimensions came into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic when his research highlighted the importance of a social scientific approach to understanding the digital economy. Together with colleagues from Geographical Sciences and the University of Bristol’s Alan Turing Institute, Professor Tranos is embarking on an Enterprise Fellowship to explore how this data-driven approach could inform public and economic policies, as well as business and innovation.

Why is it important to understand the spatial dimensions of digital technology and the digital economy?

There’s a narrative that digital technologies are ubiquitous, that you can find them everywhere. The reality is that digital technologies and the digital economy are tied to location. There is a spatial dimension to digital – in short, geography matters.

To some extent, depending on your location, digital technology transcends space – two people can be in different places and spaces and still communicate, work together, interact in a meaningful and productive way. However, geography comes into play because, among other things, our ability to do that depends on the access that we have to technology and the availability of connectivity.

Identifying the digital traces left by economic activities is important because it allows us to observe patterns and changes in the way that can be useful for local authorities. It can also inform businesses, by revealing new specialisations and emerging areas of urban activity that innovation can focus on.

How did you get into this field and what motivated you to focus your research interests here?

My starting point was transport infrastructure. I was focusing on the various economical effects that transport infrastructures generate. I remember attending a class during my Master’s degree which made me realise the parallel between more traditional infrastructures and telecommunications, which also have infrastructural attributes. That made me curious about digital technologies.

There are multiple digital divides – I deliberately use the plural because there are different layers involved. There are factors relating to infrastructural access and connections, then there are our skills and capacities to use these digital tools, and lastly but maybe most importantly, we have to consider how the differences in our capacities to extract value out of these tools, depending on the jobs we do, for instance.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital divides became very clear. There was a government mandate to work from home, but not everyone could do that. Large parts of the economy were not able to operate because they were not open to the digital model of working. That’s what we tried to capture by taking a detailed geographical look at the spatial dimensions that impose limitations on how digital technology applies.

You’ve developed some novel frameworks for understanding the dynamics of urban economic activities. What was your process?

There is one thing that everybody in this field of work agrees on – there is not any official data that we can consistently use or rely on. We have to be quite creative in capturing digital activities. For our previous study, in order to approximate the patterns of working from home, we had to use non-traditional data from a website that offers internet speed tests.

We also did a lot of work on large web archives, because they provided a great way to capture digital traces. We were able to map economic activities in Shoreditch in London, a well-known tech cluster, to see how those activities have evolved over time.

This allowed us to develop a method of identifying the geography and the evolution of specific types of economic activities at a much more granular level than official statistics in the UK, which are based on a system called Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), which hasn’t been updated since 2007 and would not have given us as much insight. If we had only relied on traditional data methods, many of the trends we spotted would have gone unnoticed.

By working in collaboration with the British Library, we were also able to look back at material from the mid-1990s and 2012, so from the early stages of the internet. The results we obtained were the equivalent to what some companies might have to spend months gathering, through qualitative research, interviewing people, focus groups, etc.

How does your Enterprise Fellowship build on your work to date?

For this project, we have further developed a framework of methods and data which can be applicable to other areas. This time, our focus is on developing a data set that is specific to Bristol. The information we are using now is much more current, in terms of the data sources and the web archives we can access.

Our plan is to be able to provide local authorities, specifically in cities, with data-based insights that can help them understand the types of economic activities that are within their localities and how their economies are evolving. As with the project in Shoreditch, and by working with complex data sets, I imagine we’ll be able to capture information about new previously unknown patterns and digital traces of economic activities.

What challenges lie ahead and how will you overcome them?

These data sets were not designed for people like me to conduct research. They are the side-product of digital technology. Trying to extract value from products that weren’t designed for these purposes is going to be challenging, but this is the only way to do what we want to do. We’re likely to be handling hundreds of terabytes of data every three months. We need to be able to sift through all of that data to find the interesting material.

This data has been available before but it hasn’t been utilised to this level of detail within social sciences, because of the complexities involved. We’re not only talking about large data sets but very unstructured data dumps of web archives that include the whole internet!

This kind of data is used by data analysts who offer consultancy services to cities and regions, but we are hoping to create an open access framework, to maintain the open science approach we have been working on already, for the benefit of local authorities.

What are you hoping to achieve? How is your work going to contribute to both social science and urban understanding?

Currently, there is no other way to consistently monitor economic activity. Our work offers an approach that fills that gap, without having to collect data in a costly and time-intensive manner. That information has the potential to help policymakers identify areas of interest where they need to focus their attention when developing industrial strategies and identifying interdependencies with other regions domestically and abroad through trade and supply-chain relationships.

At the Bristol level, we hope to be able to map the commercial and innovation profile of the locality, which could provide useful information for businesses. Part of our work will involve opening up a dialogue with local authorities, businesses and stakeholders about how we can make this information available in a commercial manner.

Emmanouil Tranos is Professor of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Bristol and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.

 

With parallel career trajectories, connected by a strong entrepreneurial streak and the desire to make a difference, Paul Golf and Dr Christophe Fricker are well placed to co-create a new offering in the language space. Both Pathway Three academics, they each divide their time between teaching at Bristol and offering their expertise through their independent businesses and consultancy work as translators and interpreters, in high demand with clients across the world. Backed by a joint Enterprise Fellowship, they are now combining their skills, experience and ambition to explore how the University can strengthen its global civic endeavours by formally organising its multilingual language capacity.

You’ve both accomplished a lot in the commercial space alongside your academic careers to date. What drove you to adopt this combinatorial approach to your work?

Paul: As soon as I came out of my undergraduate degree, I wanted to leverage my interest and understanding of the Chinese world in an entrepreneurial capacity. I’d been working as a freelance translator during my studies and had done some tutoring. I realised there was a big need for my skills in the commercial space, facilitating business meetings and briefings, so I set up a consultancy for a time. I then worked with the Xinhua News Agency on an archiving project supplying universities, which eventually led to the connections that brought me to Bristol. I bring my entrepreneurial insights into what I teach, because a lot of students will become freelancers. Right now, I feel my experience in systems strategy could be useful here.

Christophe: It’s very simple – I love teaching, I love being a translator, I love teaching translation, I love reaching out to new people. When you set up a business, all of a sudden, you reach out to a much wider spectrum of people than when you’re in employment – you need to get advice and support from people with different specialisms and skills. That’s what makes a company work and that’s what I enjoy doing. I enjoy talking to people from different walks of life. Being an entrepreneur allows me to do that. As a translator and a service provider, I’m motivated by supporting people to be able to use languages deliberately. Most of my teaching is around translation. I want our graduates, my students, to be aware and happy that when they use language as translators, when they produce a translated text, that text is a way of inserting something into the world that is new and creative, and that isn’t a replica or a faint echo of something that already exists. I want them to be proud and confident of something new and useful, and often beautiful.

The relational aspect of how you approach teaching and business comes across strongly in the projects you’ve worked on, and by the very nature of translation and interpretation as essential communication. How would you describe the importance of language?

Christophe: Language enables us to relate to each other, that’s something that we can shape. Imagine politics without language, or doing business without language, or social care or sports without language? It would be absurd. It’s a truism but it’s worth pointing out that language is our most powerful way of shaping the world and putting ourselves into it and seeing how we’re connected to it. Yet most people don’t notice it, in the same way we don’t notice the air we breathe, because it’s there all the time. But once you do decide to look at language use, you realise it is central to the way we make little changes in the world.

Whenever we meet someone new, whether it’s our in-laws, a family, a new type of community, chances are that people will speak in a different way from what you’re used to, with their unique rhythms, enunciation, terms and phrases. The same applies if we move to another country, a new neighbourhood, begin work with a new employer, and the way we greet and interact with people. All of these are pragmatic issues in language use, and they all contribute to the way we feel we belong, and the way we can make each other feel welcome, or the way we pass for legitimate, the way we acquire some form of credibility. I’m intrigued by the situation, the situatedness of language.

Paul: Anytime anything happens cross-culturally or internationally or multi-lingually, there is a demand and a need for language services. At every level of the supply chain, whether there’s a document that needs translating or a contract that needs to be signed or a sales order, legal information, travel arrangements, negotiation, absolutely anything that crosses language, culture or nation requires translation and interpretation, in every field of international business.

Tell us about your joint Fellowship – what’s the motivation behind your plans to develop a formalised translation service?

Paul: It’s something that we already do. The University has all of these X-factor components: we have extremely experienced, highly trained professional staff, we have hundreds of students who we train to specifically do the job of translation and interpretation, and we have a bridge into digital technologies, so the collaborative opportunities are huge. I’m a systems strategist, I’m passionate about creating structures that are much bigger and can take a lot of people with them. I have a conviction that we can make positive changes in the world. This is a key opportunity for us to provide a solution in this global space.

Christophe: A university that understands itself as a global civic university needs to realise that means being a multi-lingual university, and to create systems and processes to be multi-lingual in an effective and an attractive way. To do that, it needs to draw, to a significant extent, on the multi-lingual expertise of its current academic staff.

What are your own aspirations and ambitions for how you’d like to see your project evolve?

Paul: I have a nuanced approach to vision, I feel like when I look back on my career so far, the things that have worked have been the things I didn’t expect to work, and they worked in ways that I didn’t expect! The things that I’ve planned have tended not to work in the way I wanted them to. I tend to trust the ripples rather than trip on the future – I just think I’ve got a lot of rocks on my side of the pond, I don’t know what outcomes will transpire, so I’m just throwing as many rocks in and trusting the ripples. Ripples don’t happen if rocks don’t go in so they’ve just got to go in! That’s how I do everything. Of course, you have to strategise to have a sense of where you’re going. Equally, something could happen that could cause the whole thing not to work – and I say that from experience – so my relationship to strategising is one of humility.

I’ve also been very blessed to receive support and enthusiasm from people across the University while pulling this idea together. That has made me want to keep going. It’s been a hopeful and inspiring process to engage in. I’ve got stuff that I’m good at but there’s plenty that I’m not, so getting energetic teams together where we get the best out of each other, that’s what I love doing.

Christophe: I’m interested in the relationships between people and how we encounter each other, through languages. The language industry is booming, it’s one of the most dynamic in the world and is going from strength to strength, so that is a good sign and a good time to be a translator.

Paul Golf is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages. Dr Christophe Fricker is a Lecturer in German and Translation in the Department of German. Both are part of the Faculty of Arts.