The End
Dec-11
: In this lesson, we will appreciate our achievements.
Today is the final day of class together. We need to celebrate and review our accomplishments!
But, there is always still more to learn…
We scratched the surface of several different technology platforms for reproducible spatial research:
The wonderful thing is that these platforms all have much of their code base in common, thanks to OGC and fundamental code libraries like PROJ, GDAL, and GEOS. Moreover, there are plenty of free and low-cost training resources for each of these platforms online, and you are free to keep using all of this software on your personal computer!
What you don’t get from the tutorials is:
- open science research practices
- best practices for critical geospatial research
- how these technological tools relate to theory and methods in geography and other academic disciplines
- strategies for coping with error and uncertainty
- a sense of how GIS tools fit within the bigger picture of a full research project from beginning to end
- critical awareness of how GIS technology is causally interrelated with society and the environment
That’s what we achieved through the lens of reproductions and replications and our critical Friday discussions. With that background in place, I welcome you to a lifetime of continued learning…
Where can you learn more on your own, to be more deeply prepared for work in any one of these technologies? This list will expand over time:
At the top of this list, there are two new open access books on spatial data analysis by people involved with developing the R and Python packages for spatial analysis.
- Geographic Data Science with Python by Rey, Arribas-Bel and Wolf, 2023
- Spatial Data Science with Applications in R by Pebesma and Bivand, 2023.
- Data Carpentry Workshops with free data science workshops
- Packt with low-cost digital books, often accompanied by video tutorials
- LinkedIn Learning with Lynda tutorial videos for Middlebury students
- The documentation, repositories, and discussion boards for all of the open source projects we have used
- FOSS4G Conferences have workshops, applied and research talks, and associated video channels, GitHub repositories, and open-access publications for those who cannot attend in person.
- Geo For All, a loose collaborative network of open source education labs
Ownership in Open Science
Is generally not reinventing the wheel from scratch. It’s making incremental improvements to scientific knowledge and to the scientific community through…
- open peer review
- pull requests
- GitHub issues
- reproductions and replications of previous studies
- developing and testing educational materials and providing feedback
- creating new tools, packages, libraries
GitHub Portfolios
- Final evaluation of the GitHub portfolios will occur at the end of Finals Week.
- To ensure credit is given for your revisions, please add comments to your Google Doc in response to qualitative feedback.
- Many students have successfully continued to develop their GitHub pages and portfolios post-graduation, helping lead to future employment and graduate school opportunities! You can start by including significant independent work from your other courses at Middlebury or interesting work / volunteer experiences! The Jekyll theme we used, Minimal Mistakes is highly customizable.
Self Evaluation
- Students in the course: please find a google doc for self-evaluation here and copy the document into your own Google folder in the course folder.
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