Analyzing the Geography of Systemic Racism in an Introductory Geographic Information Systems Workshop

Abstract

Academic geospatial librarians have the potential to stimulate broader critical understanding and reflection about the racial inequities and injustices that remain inscribed in our social institutions. One way they might do so is by teaching introductory GIS workshops that explore these themes. This paper proposes one such workshop, and provides a link to a detailed sample lesson plan that other instructors can use as a template for their own teaching materials. In particular, the proposed workshop uses a publicly available dataset of traffic police stops, which has been collected and organized by the Stanford Open Policing Project, to explore and document geographic patterns in racially biased policing practices.

Keywords:

• geographic information systems
• spatial data science
• systemic racism
• policing
• census
• bias

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions that helped improve this paper, and the associated workshop lesson plan. I would also like to thank colleagues at New York University Libraries and the University of Colorado Libraries for thought-provoking conversations that inspired the development of the workshop discussed in this paper.

Disclosure Statement

There are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1. The sample workshop discussed in this paper can be accessed at the following link: https://doi.org/10.25810/x6yz-6g18

2 The organization Data for Black Lives is one example of an anti-racist community organization that centers the role of data science and visualization in its work. There are often important connections between such organizations and scholarly research communities. For a discussion of several projects (often involving collaborations between academics and community members) that use data science to understand and redress various forms of social inequity, an excellent place to begin is Data Feminism, by D’Ignazio and Klein (2020).

3 https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/

4 The lesson plan in the Supplemental Material appendix uses the R programming language, but does not presuppose a background in R, and is designed to be accessible to geospatial librarians from diverse intellectual backgrounds. Moreover, geospatial librarians who are not R users, but who would like to teach the workshop using a different GIS software platform, will be able to adapt the lesson plan to the GIS platform of their choice after reading through the Supplemental Materials. In other words, while the code which implements the analysis and visualization tasks in the sample lesson plan is written using R, these tasks are platform agnostic, and can be implemented using a variety of GIS software applications.

5 The Open Policing Project website provides a list of various publications that use the data, which may be useful for prospective workshop instructors to explore if they plan to develop a workshop that uses this data: https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/publications/

6 dplyr is part of the broader suite of packages known as the tidyverse (Wickham et al. 2019), which figures prominently in the sample tutorial.

7 For a thought-provoking discussion of how a pluralistic and ethically aware conception of data science considers “data cleaning” (which might inform this section of a potential workshop), see Chapter 5 of D’Ignazio and Klein (2020).

8 The sample workshop materials provided in the supplemental materials provides some possible post-workshop discussion questions. Some of these discussion questions, such as one that asks learners to reflect on the implications of the maps they made for public policy, might naturally be led by a subject-librarian expert. If a geospatial librarian is teaching the workshop without a subject-matter expert as a co-instructor, and wishes to engage in a broader discussion of systemic discrimination in the context of the workshop, several resources are available to help instructors navigate potentially fraught classroom discussions of race and racism. A useful place to start is the following reading list from the Center for Racial Justice in Education: https://centerracialjustice.org/resources/reading-lists/.