2025 FOSS4G NA | Reproducing Geographic Analysis Studies - Middlebury College
In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Joseph Holler, Matthew Mills, and Samuel Bernard of Middlebury College present Reproducing Geographic Analysis Studies: Open Science Project-Based Learning. The presenters discuss a unique NSF-funded curriculum that teaches advanced GIS students to apply open science research practices by attempting to computationally reproduce published GI science studies.
The presentation provides a deep dive into the course structure, which uses a Project-Based Learning (PBL) framework to move students from introductory GIS software to high-level spatial analysis in R and Python. The students share their experience reproducing a high-profile study on hazardous heat exposure in prisons, detailing the technical hurdles they encountered—such as missing data grids, inconsistent code scripts, and undocumented environments—and how overcoming these obstacles deepened their understanding of geographic validity and the full research life cycle.
Highlights:
🛰️ The Reproducibility Crisis: Why most GI science studies can't be repeated and the difference between computational reproduction and broader verification
🔄 Project-Based Learning (PBL): Moving beyond step-by-step lab tutorials to sustained, authentic inquiry on real-world research problems
🧩 Open Science Research Compendium: A look at a standardized structure for organizing raw data, metadata, procedures, and computational environments
⚙️ Building a Pre-Analysis Plan: The importance of registering a research strategy in a computational notebook before executing any code
🌐 Real-World Case Study: Reproducing nature sustainability research on extreme heat risk in US carceral facilities using R and T-MAP
🏢 Identifying Threats to Validity: How students interrogated the coarse 4x4 resolution of climate data against localized prison coordinates
🏗️ Creating Public Products: Transforming messy research into living, citable web reports and digital archives with DOIs
For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com
#Geospatial #FOSS4G #OpenScience #GIS #Reproducibility #Rstats #SpatialAnalysis #DataScience #MiddleburyCollege #HigherEducation #ProjectBasedLearning #GIscience #GitHub #ResearchEthics #ProjectGeospatial
