SpaceRaise: Geospatial Data and Quantitative Analysis in Social Science

What a week. From Monday to Friday last week, i was blessed to participate in the Spaceraise workshop on Geospatial Data and Quantitative Analysis in Social Science, as part of the SpaceRaise Academy at the GSSI in l’Aquila. And I have to say, it was such a great time. On a personal level, as well as academically.

Thanks to the efforts of the organising committee, it was a truly international events. Many people could participate because of the scholarships they provided (I did not ask for it). I don’t remember the numbers but more than half of the participants came from outside the EU or brought some personal international experience. It was beautiful to be there and listening to the many stories, perspectives, and arguments.

As someone, that organises academic events more or less regularly, I want to point out especially how many African scholars participated in the event. Due to the prohibitive visa regime and the crass global inequalities, it is usually extremely difficult to come together with people from the continent, and I was once more reminded of what we are missing out on in Europe by making this exchange so hard. Some conversations I had last week with folks from Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Egypt really left me puzzled of why I hear these voices so rarely, and then just on topics directly related to the African context. Instead, there, we were speaking about global affairs, food, religion, and which kind of data set I could use to measure environmental changes in arid landscapes. Other incredible people came from Ecuador, Mexico, Indonesia, El Salvador, or Pakistan, and each gave me something special. Glad that academic events can lead to something like this.

It also made me reflect on my own profession. As a trained economist, most of my academic experiences came from economics conferences, workshops etc., and I could not help to notice how different they are in vibe. Everyone I encountered this week, was open and friendly, without much need for formality or to set oneself apart. Also, no arguing about schools of thought, or a truer representation of reality. Political conversations were more about thinking together and sharing ones view, than arguing about the right and wrongs. And I am wondering, how much we can learn from fields such as this beautiful bunch of remote sensing researchers and practitioners.

Academically, it also was inspiring, the workshop did a great job of bringing together people working on very different things, and introducing novel methodologies. And while I am still kind of new to the whole satellite image processing business and therefor overly excited, I am very much looking forward to continuing learning more and more how to use all those new methodologies, and play with the newly discovered data sets.

I would have liked to point out a specific talk or scholar from the Week, but it was more about the small details and inspiration than the big thoughts. Many thanks in particular to the presenters on the data labs, and all the effort that they put into teaching methodologies and data access.

Shoutout to the amazing Maddalena and Alessandro for hosting me, to Santiago for being my travel companion, and to the friendly scholars of GSSI.