Collection of Open Source GIS project work during Spring 2021
Over the course of three years as a geography minor at Middlebury College, I have tried many times to explain my GIS classes to my friends and peers. After every encounter, however, I leave feeling unfulfilled and unsuccessful. GIS is so hard to pin down because, I think, it is such an intensely interdisciplinary field. It changes from being a tool, to being a discipline, to being a skill in the blink of an eye, and dependent on audience and context. It’s easy to know when one is doing GIS, most of the time - sitting at a computer working on spatial analysis problems is usually the dead giveaway. However, once one spends a bit more time with those programs and that data, the incredible application possibilities of GIS become very apparent. This is one of the reasons I decided to minor in geography and continue learning this difficult skill. However, if I had to try to define GIS under one category, I would consider it a tool.
However, after some reflection, GIS is a part of geography, and geography is the science of where. As debated in Wright et al. (1997), GIS would have to divorce itself from geography in order to become a full science. As it stands, the scientific and technical aspects of GIS fall, in my experience, under the greater umbrella of geography, and serve as a tool for expanding geographic knowledge of the world around us. As geography is undoubtedly a science, GIS should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any other critical scientific technique.
Here is where the definition gets a little fuzzy. GIS is a tool, this is true, but is also an umbrella term itself for many more specific tools, such as software programs like QGIS and ArcGIS, and data sets curated by organizations and governments. GIS is a technique of geography like field research is a technique of biology: it is just one way to undergo geographic science research.
In my experience at Middlebury, I have spent about half of my geographic science experience using GIS to answer my research questions. GIS is useful for producing figures and visualizations, analyzing data and modeling variables, and even adding a math-like personality to geographic research. When not using GIS in geographic research, my work looks more similar to a historian’s or anthropologists’ research project—less numbers, more words. Under the current paradigm of hard sciences, this is less respectable (perhaps because numbers indicate reproducible and replicable calculations), but not always as apt for the specific research question.
Open source GIS is a term for making GIS practices more reproducible and replicable. It is a way of communicating to the scientific community that current scientific techniques of any kind are not accessible enough to truly be communal techniques. As the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine concludes in their 2019 “Reproducibility and Replicability in Science” report, one of the core principles of science is an aspect of communal enterprise. Without any ability for the community to participate in GIS work, a large degree of scientific validity is removed from the subsequent geographic research being undertaken.
In conclusion, GIS is a tool, and geography is a science. GIS is one of the principle techniques for conducting geographic science, and should therefore be treated with the same respect and standing as geography. In my experience with the Middlebury Geography Department, about half of my geography work has utilized GIS in some shape or another, and can comprise an entire project, or simply supplement other forms of geographic research. Open source GIS helps increase the reproducibility and replicability of a geographic research project, and incorporates a crucial community aspect into geographic science.
Readings:
Wright, D. J., M. F. Goodchild, and J. D. Proctor. 1997. GIS: Tool or science? Demystifying the persistent ambiguity of GIS as “tool” versus “science.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (2):346–362. DOI: 10.1111/0004-5608.872057
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/25303
Submitted March 09, 2021.