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Plenary 1: Attentional Social Media: Mapping the Spaces and Networks of the Fashion Industry

Wednesday, July 12, 2017
9:20 AM - 9:50 AM
Steele 03-206 (Plenary)

Overview

Prof Matt Zook


Speaker

Prof Matt Zook
Professor and Director of GIS Initiatives
University of Kentucky

Attentional Social Media: Mapping the Spaces and Networks of the Fashion Industry

9:20 AM - 9:50 AM

Abstract Text

This presentation examines the spaces of the global fashion industry through its most fundamental attribute, the ability to gain attention. Utilizing a novel indicator of how fashion attention manifests -- social media -- we map the spatial contours of this key metric and examine the networks which bind this global industry. Paralleling what has been shown in other studies we find that the fashion industry attracts attention globally on social media but the geography of this attention is uneven across the industry, industry function and space. More novel is the ability of this research to examine subsets of the attentional dimension of the fashion industry -- attention to creatives, business management and marketing -- and how these clusters of attention interconnected between places. As such, this work represents a strategy for future research within cultural economies to study not just the location of creativity but how attention to this creativity differentially extends across space, connecting certain cities and sub-locations of cities, while bypassing others. Such an analysis also represents a means to study the spatiality of demand -- particularly within cultural economies -- to help balance some of the productionist and supply side bias in economic geography.

Chairperson

Thomas Sigler
Lecturer In Human Geography
The University of Queensland

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