What (even) Is Geographic Analysis?

Last week I attended a workshop on economic complexity, geography, and innovation over in the Growth Lab in the Kennedy School, here at Harvard. The workshop assembled geographers, economists, and computational social scientists working with a range of types of spatial economic data (e.g., firm, employment, patent) to answer a variety of questions related to economic growth and development. Analytical geography was an explicit component of most of the research presented: distance and proximity, co-location, clusters, or neighborhood, for example. I felt right at home—here was a community of researchers working with data, methods, and topics closely aligned to the Center for Geographic Analysis.

So imagine my surprise when, introducing myself and the CGA to another participant during a coffee break, they asked a simple and direct question, “what is geographic analysis?” As often happens when confronted with a basic but unexpected question, I froze. Afterwards, I realized that those of us working in geographic analysis (and geography more broadly) are rarely called upon to define and explain ourselves—but we really should be able to!

So what is geographic analysis? This is an important question for our wider Harvard community: how is one supposed to know if they will be interested in CGA if one isn’t quite sure what we do? The easy answer is that geographic analysis (and the Center for Geographic Analysis) is all about making sense out of spatial data, patterns, processes, and phenomena. Analysis encompasses expertise with geographical data, metrics, and methods, but also visualization, computing, and spatial thinking and theory. Geographical analysis can be relatively straightforward (locating long lists of addresses or lat, long coordinates on a map) or more complex (quantifying the spatial patterns created by these long lists of locations or explaining what might be driving observed patterns). Increasingly, geographical analysis also requires expertise with complex algorithms, research computing, and data management/storage—as well as substantive domain knowledge and experience with complicated data types (like satellite imagery or social media data).

As our name suggests, at the Center for Geographic Analysis we are really into spatial thinking, questions, and data. Our research, outreach, services, and training are all aimed at promoting, enabling, and growing geographic (analysis) capacity at Harvard and beyond. If this sounds like something that might be interesting or helpful to you, come find us!

Rachel Franklin