Responsible and ethical use of location data: Resources from Doug Specht

At a recent conference of the European Association of Geographers, I had the honor of being re-acquainted with Doug Sprecht and his work. Doug is a Chartered Geographer, Advanced Teacher, and Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Westminster in the UK. His work can be found here, including his forthcoming book which I am greatly looking forward to, the Routledge Handbook of Geospatial Technology and Society. At the conference, Doug shared some of his recent writings and additional resources that are germane to the focus of our book and this blog and graciously agreed for me to highlight them here.

Royal Geographical Society Ask the Geographer (Ethics podcast) and teaching materials:

https://www.rgs.org/schools/teaching-resources/responsible-and-ethical-use-of-location-data-with/ [rgs.org] These include “Roads to nowhere: How maps change the way we travel and experience the world around us”, “Ethics and geospatial data”, “Locating open access resources”, “The ethics of open data”, and “Defining types of data”, all of which are short but insightful, able to be used directly in discussions with students and for consideration in research projects.

UK Statistics Authority ethics guide:

https://uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/publication/ethical-considerations-in-the-use-of-geospatial-data-for-research-and-statistics/pages/1/ [uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk]

This guidance document explores ethical considerations in the use of geospatial data for research, analysis and statistics. It has been developed by the UK Statistics Authority’s Centre for Applied Data Ethics in partnership with geospatial colleagues. It is divided into 8 main parts, providing an initial introduction to geospatial data and ethics, before moving on to consider case examples and potential mitigations related to four key areas, as well as links to further resources. An ethics checklist is also provided for researchers and analysts using geospatial data, which summarises the main points covered in this guidance.

Locus Charter:

ethicalgeo.org/locus-charter [ethicalgeo.org] The Locus Charter is an agreement spearheaded by EthicalGEO and Benchmark Initiative, which promotes responsible practice in the use of location data across all sectors including public, private, educational, and not-for-profit contexts.

UNICEF ethics guide:

https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/971-ethical-considerations-when-using-geospatial-technologies-for-evidence-generation.html [unicef-irc.org] This paper is concerned with geospatial technologies and how they have transformed the way we visualize and understand social phenomena and physical environments, with a focus on ethical dilemmas such as privacy and security concerns as well as the potential for stigma and discrimination resulting from being associated with particular locations. The paper states that the use of geospatial technologies and resulting data needs to be critically assessed through an ethical lens prior to implementation of programmes, analyses or partnerships. This paper examines the benefits, risks and ethical considerations when undertaking evidence generation using geospatial technologies, supplemented by a checklist that may be used as a practical tool to support reflection on the ethical use of geospatial technologies.

I encourage you to investigate these resources and use them in your own instruction and research.

–Joseph Kerski

Update on Energy Geospatial Data

Awhile back, we wrote about a source for electrical lines data, here, but because I keep seeing inquiries about this type of data on listserves, LinkedIn, and elsewhere, I thought an update was warranted. In addition to the source we identified in the above post, the Energy Atlas is a good source. While just for the USA, the energy atlas is an excellent example of the “modern” way to serve up geospatial data that we have been highlighting in this blog of late. Accessing its data pulls up an ArcGIS Hub site which serves the data efficiently and quickly. This data includes information on fossil fuels, nuclear, electricity, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydropower, including storage, and transmission. But, keeping in mind the sensitive nature and security issues surrounding this kind of data, your need for detail might exceed the resolution provided here. Even so, a great deal of information exists on the Atlas.

The Atlas also includes unexpected information that I was grateful to see on past natural hazards, which could be used to assess risk to the current energy infrastructure; as, for example, what occurred from a series of frigid days in early 2021 that caused massive power outages in Texas USA. The Hub site allows for multiple formats to be downloaded or streamed, such as shapefiles, KMLs, GeoJSON, file geodatabase, and CSV. Feature services as well as feature layers are offered, which means some of the data can be streamed instead of downloaded, and you can preview everything in the online interactive map viewer.

The metadata is rich, and one of the most useful pages is this one, providing metadata information for interactive state maps, an example of which is shown below.

Part of the US Energy Atlas.

One of the useful metadata pages on the energy atlas.

I invite you to explore and to suggest your own sources for energy related data for selected places in the world.

—Joseph Kerski