Research often involves handling the private, personal information about individuals and minority groups:

• Potential participants must be able to trust that their information will be used in a safe and respected manner.
• In some fields, ethics boards often review research proposals to ensure best practices are used.
• How will the data be used?
• Who will have access to data/results?
• What identifying information will be used/released?

GIS has the potential to be more intrusive in to people’s every day lives other sciences:

• We can know where people are at any given time
• We can guess at what they are doing reasonably well
• We can know where people shop, approximately how much money they make, who they know, and to which organizations they belong
• We can know if they belong to minority groups:
• E.g., racial minorities, religious minorities, political groups, LGBT+

What side of a border you live up on can have drastic impacts on outcomes. Where you live determines:

• What rights you have
• What schools you attend
• How much your vote matters (if you even get to vote)
• How much you pay in taxes
• What services you have access too
• Where you can travel

The systematic denial of services to racially marginalized groups by government and lending institutions in order to forcibly segregated communities.

• For much of the 20th century, redlining was legal and wide spread across North American cities. The practice has been more thoroughly documented and researched in the US.
• It is very important to note that redlining occurred in Canada as well (source)

Every cartographic choice you make can have ramifications.

• How we choose to display our data can have a big impact on how it is perceived
• Maps influence the way people think
• They can reinforce (or counter) biases individuals may hold
• All maps lie, but some lie more than others.
• Abstraction is a necessary part of map making
• But it needs to be done carefully

Who has access to GIS? ESRI products (e.g. ArcGIS Pro) have very expensive licensing fees. Beyond just the cost of the software, hardware to run GIS is not always accessible, and GIS training takes time.

• There are options to make GIS more accessible to the public
• But they can only go so far

Open source software is free to access, platforms are created and maintain by volunteers. There are open source alternatives that can provide some access to GIS:

• QGIS is an application with similar functionality to ArcGIS Pro.
• Python, R, JavaScript etc. are open source programming languages that have many GIS packages
• Free help pages like stackexchange and github doc's pages e.g., qgis can help with training, but they require a base level of knowledge first.

There are many ways the public can be involved in GIS; the can participate actively or passively.

• Public engagement is crucial way to increase representation of opinions and trust in institutions
• Not all participatory approaches are centered on engagement
• They can also be passive

The collection, processing, assembly, and dissemination of geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals. Is sometimes, part of participatory approaches to GIS; sometimes its just using freely provided information that people are unaware of.

• This is equally likely to be used for commercial purposes as it is for participatory, educational, and other non-commercial uses: E.g. Trip Advisor, Flickr, Twitter, etc.
• Usually some sort of "wisdom of the crowds" is used to validate data, or else data verification and validation is performed by the organizing group
• See Chae et al. (2025)

Allows interested volunteers and researchers to team up to address some scientific question.

• Volunteers provide the “leg work” of data collection, data cleaning, and initial interpretation of field data; guided by scientific research experts
• Participation levels can range from simple data collection through to contributing to academic journal submission.
• The COCORAHS platform is a great example!

The goal is the empowerment and inclusion of marginalized people. These groups tend to have little or no voice due to extremes of location, poverty, racism, sexism, anti-religious feelings, etc.

• Begins through a process of community mapping, with many steps and a set of long-term goals for the community
• Members of the community generate their own data and construct their own maps
• Bring members together to share their maps and combine into a community map/database
• These community efforts can then be coded into a GIS to systematize the community’s knowledge and allow for greater spatial analysis to occur
• Emphasizes engagement throughout the GIS process

It is important to reflect on your relation to your work. In the social sciences, positionality is especially important, because a researches privileges, biases, and preconceptions can drastically impact the people and communities they are working with.

• In some of the "hard" sciences, there are often a claims of total objectivity, but complete objectivity is impossible.
• No one is completely objective, that must be understood and acknowledged regardless of the field.

Some important questions to ask yourself, and things you may want to disclose depending on the context.

• Who am I and where do I come from?
• What is my relationship to the community/field I am working in?
• What are my motivations for this work?
• What biases may I have and how may my past experiences influence how I engage with this work?