The Role of Open Source in Geographic Research

Open Source can help solve a lot of problems for the reproducibility crisis for geography, but it still has some limitations. At this point, I think that Open Source is beginning to help improve reproducibility in geographic research, but it still has the potential to do a lot more work.

By nature, geography by nature is interdisciplinary; as a result, it dovetails nicely with the capabilities of Open Source. Sergio Rey argues that one of open sources’ benefits is how it can foster communication and collaboration between researchers across different disciplines. Thus, the use of Open Source in geography could improve collaboration and sharing of methods, which could lead to more productive research (Rey, 2009). In inviting the participation of others, Open Source may also make geographic research more accessible to people of different backgrounds, thus introducing more diverse perspectives and a wider range of skill sets. In essence, Open Source may bridge the gap between academics, technically skilled people, as well as students. What is more, Open Source would keep researchers accountable, reducing the possibility of nefarious methodology, fudged data, or bias. With all a researcher’s data and source code readily available, others are able to participate in the research process, reproducing studies to test the validity of the original researcher’s outcomes, and making adjustments as they see fit (Rey, 2009).

Of course, Open Source does have some limitations. By design, it can make research more accessible to wider groups of people, but it still may be exclusionary to people who don’t have the technical savvy to use the software effectively. This could be limiting to human geographers, for example, who may be less reliant on computers for their research. Additionally, specifically for geography, Open Source has primarily “concentrated on spatial data and traditional GIS functionality” (Rey, 2009). Although Open Source may help foster collaboration across disciplines, a lot of this hinges upon the free sharing of source code, which may be less useful for human geography, or geographic study that relies less on numbers, coding, and technology. In essence, Open Source can be incredibly useful for computer-based geographic research, but it cannot encompass the full breadth of geography as a field of study. Fully enmeshing the use of GIS and Open Source with what geographic research can be, I think, would be limiting to the field as a whole. What is more, the current projects of Open Source for GIS do not encompass more advanced methodology, like “spatial analysis, statistics, spatial econometrics and spatial modeling” (Rey, 2009), meaning that the capabilities of Open Source now do not accommodate more advanced methods/processes for geographic research.

References NASEM. 2019. Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. DOI: 10.17226/25303 Chapter 3, Understanding reproducibility and replicability (pages 31-43 )

Rey, S. J. 2009. Show me the code: Spatial analysis and open source. Journal of Geographical Systems 11 (2):191–207. DOI: 10.1007/s10109-009-0086-8