Matthew Zook is an American geographer and professor in the Department of Geography, University of Kentucky. He studies the geography of the Internet, the GeoWeb, economic geography and domain names[1] [2] In 2009 Matthew Zook and Mark Graham cofounded the FloatingSheep blog to understand the interactions between the GeoWeb and the offline world.[3] In 2011 Zook cofounded the New Mappings Collaboratory at the University of Kentucky to focus on public engagement in Lexington, 'big data' and user-generated Internet content, as well as the affordances of place-based thinking, analysis, and representation.[4]
Matthew Zook was born to mother Bonnie Zook and father Gordon Zook.[5] Zook has three sisters. He graduated high school in Goshen, Indiana and later continued his education from Earlham College where he graduated in 1989. Zook continued on to his Masters education at Cornell University where he finished in 1995. August 17, 1996 he married Eva Ensmann whom he met while studying together at Cornell. Zook received Lasik eye surgery between 2007 and 2008. Zook was ordained as clergy of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in 2012.
Much of Zook's early work is on how economic factors have influenced and shaped the internet and the ICT industry (Information, Communications and Technology). He discusses how the infrastructure of the ICT industry was constructed upon an existing network of Venture Capital [grounded capital]. This research showed how despite the image of the internet being a tool of egalitarian communication and commerce, the resources of production were creating a digital divide.[7]
See also: History of Walmart.
His work as an economic geographer contributed to a greater understanding of the expansion and impact of Walmart in USA. Zook also created a heat map generated from the data being collected from the Price of Weed project, which was featured in Wired.[8]
His more recent research looks at the GeoWeb. Although the transition was gradual, what seems to have started with mapping content creation[9] has turned into a fascination with mapping not only user generated content, but specifically geo-coded data.[10]
In 2006, Zook provided expert testimony about the Geography of Internet Pornography in a federal court case American Civil Liberties Union vs. Alberto Gonzales[13]
| The Web of Production: The Economic Geography of Commercial Internet Content Production | Environment and planning A/PION LTD | 2000 | 174 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Old Hierarchies or New Networks of Centrality? | American Behavioral Scientist/SAGE | 2001 | 127 | |
| Grounded Capital: Venture Financing and the Geography of the Internet Industry | Journal of Economic Geography/Oxford University Press | 2002 | 124 | |
| The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital, dot-coms, and Local Knowledge | Wiley-Blackwell | 2005 | 145 | |
| The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. | Geoforum | 2007 | 93 | |
| Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake. | World Health and Medical Policy | 2010 | 89 |