November 10th | 5:30pm | Charles Library Event Space
Who Builds the Map? Twenty-Five Years of Open Source Spatial Analysis
Geographers have always built the instruments through which places are seen, measured, and compared. In this talk, I will discuss why it matters, now more than ever, to ask who builds those instruments, how they are built, and whose work counts as scholarship, especially when the instruments are software. As PySAL, the Python Spatial Analysis Library, marks twenty-five years, the talk looks back at how the project began and grew and forward to what its next decade needs, asking what running an open source project inside a university reveals about credit, collaboration, teaching, and community. Along the way it considers what open source means for who gets to take part in spatial analysis. No programming background is required.
Sergio Rey’s research focuses on spatial data science, geocomputation, the dynamics of spatial inequality, regional science, and open science. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Spatial Econometrics Association, and the Regional Science Association International. His work has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other sources. Rey served as editor of Geographical Analysis (2015–2018) and the International Regional Science Review (1999–2018). He is the Founding Director of the Center for Open Geographical Science and the co-founder and lead developer of the open-source Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL). He has taught PySAL workshops around the world.