Matthew Zook

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 In 2009 Matthew Zook and Mark Graham cofounded the FloatingSheep blog to understand the interactions between the GeoWeb and the offline world. 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.

Early and personal life Matthew Zook was born to mother Bonnie Zook and father Gordon Zook.

Education Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley - Dept. of City and Regional Planning. 2000 M.R.P., Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) 1995.

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.

His more recent research looks at the GeoWeb. Although the transition was gradual, what seems to have started with mapping content creation has turned into a fascination with mapping not only user generated content, but specifically geo-coded data.

Awards

University of Kentucky Provost's Outstanding Teaching Award (2013)

Maps made by Matthew Zook

In 2006, Zook provided expert testimony about the Geography of Internet Pornography in a federal court case American Civil Liberties Union vs. Alberto Gonzales

In 2007 and 2013 Matthew Zook won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Estonia.

Publications + Notable Work Title Journal/Publisher Year Cites 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 2005145 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