DGRG Work in Progress YouTube Series: Spring Showcase 2022

For the past two years, I have served as Postgraduate Representative on the committee of the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG), a research group of the RGS-IBG focused on the relationship between geography and the digital.

Working together with fellow Postgraduate Representative Daisy Curtis, and Events Co-ordinator Maxwell Mutanda, one of the main innovations I have overseen during my time on the DGRG committee is the creation of our YouTube channel. As well as hosting recorded video content from events like our Annual Symposium, the channel is home to our Work in Progress series.

This series consists of short videos between 2 and 5 minutes in length, aiming to communicate recent or current work being undertaken by researchers on a wide range of topics that connect geography and the digital. Topics can include emerging research ideas, approaches to research methodology, research findings, approaches to teaching digital geographies and discussion of research outputs.

Through this series, we want to promote the fascinating, diverse work being done in digital geographies throughout the academic calendar and across the globe, developing our research community further.

By keeping the videos concise, our aim is that making them will require limited preparation and time commitment, helping to ease participation from postgraduates, early career researchers and those with caring commitments, for example. The short video format also makes this content highly shareable, helping contributors to communicate their ideas in a digestible way that can reach a wide range of audiences.            

Towards the end of last year and early this year, we announced a new call for contributions to the Work in Progress series. These videos would make up our 2022 Spring Showcase. I’m very pleased to say that this new batch of videos launched two weeks ago, beginning with a beautifully edited video by Jude Jabali (UCL) on the relationship between digital media and the built environment in the redeveloped area of Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea, London.

Yesterday, we published our second video of the Spring Showcase, featuring Dr. Jamie Halliwell (Manchester Metropolitan University) discussing how fan and sexual identities are expressed within the digital ecosystem of Eurovision fan spaces.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing videos on topics including digital privacy during COVID-19 and the influence of GIS (geographical information systems) on economic geographies. I will also be contributing a video to the series, discussing findings from my PhD research on how people engage with place through location-based games.

New videos are added to the series every fortnight. Subscribe to the DGRG YouTube channel to be notified whenever a new video is released. You can also follow updates from the research group on Twitter @digital_RGS. We have some exciting plans to develop new ways to engage with digital geographies research in 2022, so look out for more announcements soon from the DGRG.