Category: geospatial data

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post about my favourite GIS tool QGIS, geospatial software tends to be used in a rather narrow subset of academic research, i.e. mostly environmental scientists and geologists. The reasons for interest there are somewhat obvious, I think, but this is not as much the case for the humanities and social sciences. I was recently having a conversation with a colleague who asked me why maps might be part of my research toolkit and this got me to thinking. There are some good reasons for researchers to be suspicious of cartography – particularly inasmuch as the “gaze” from above can tend to lend a sense of “mastery” and unwarranted epistemological confidence. James C. Scott conveys this powerfully in his book Seeing Like a State.

However, with a bit of humility in hand, geospatial data can be a terrific tool for learning and teaching. Continue reading →

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One of my favourite new tools that I’ve added to my social scientific research into environmental activism and religion in Scotland over the past three years has been geospatial work or GIS (short for Geographic Information System). Scholarship in the sociology of religion often works with very large data sets (like censuses), but this work is very seldom parsed out on a geospatial basis. This is a huge loss, I think, as there are a number of important ways that geography inflects demographic data sets. Continue reading →

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Photo of Bronisław Malinowski, feeling frustrated that the batteries on his smartphone died three months ago.
Bronisław Malinowski feeling frustrated the batteries on his smartphone died three months ago.

Over the past three years, I’ve been moonlighting as a social scientist doing ethnographic fieldwork in communities across Scotland from Callander to Orkney. Before heading out for the first time, I spent a few weeks assembling a toolkit for digital ethnography which I’ve been revising along the way. I thought I’d share a bit about what I’ve settled on using in case others are looking to upgrade their fieldwork toolkit. First, some caveats – I run Apple hardware but am passionate about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) particularly because it is often cross-platform, so when I switch to linux for my work PC in a couple years, I’ll be able to run most of those tools without much trouble. So my goal was to avoid being proprietary and only go with what was strictly necessary. Here’s what I found: Continue reading →