In its 375 years, Harvard has only ever eliminated one entire academic program: its geography department, in the 1940s. Many universities followed suit.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Shortly after the elimination of geography at Harvard, the discipline underwent a quantitative and computational revolution that eventually produced innovations like Google Maps and global positioning systems, to name just two. Seventy years later we are paying for a prolonged lack of spatial thinking at American universities.
There are too few classes that enable learners to improve their spatial reasoning abilities, with maps and visualizations being, of course, the most central artifacts to such improvements.
The problem is simple: Not enough people know how to make maps or handle spatial data sets.
In the meantime, spatial thinking, visualization, contemporary cartography and the other core competencies of geographic education have never been more relevant or necessary.
Data visualization is an emerging, important discipline, and spatial thinking – geography – is a fundamental skill for good data visualization.
When talking about data visualization many begin with the assumption that it’s a new thing, freshly formed in this big-data era. But visualization is not new – for centuries people have measured and mapped out worldly phenomena.
What is new is the recent integration of spatial thinking and computing.
The current rise of what I prefer to call computational visualization is an obvious and logical extension of human practices that are as old as lines in the sand. But this idea that visualization is new hinders teaching and learning about the act of visualization.
Without the proper context, “dataviz” discussions and “data science” curricula neglect the important lessons and huge contributions from the past, contributions that can inform everything from design principles to teaching and learning.
As I look out on the world of data visualization, I see a lot of reinventing of the wheel precisely because so many young, talented visualizers lack geographical training.
Recommitting to a geography curriculum in both our high schools and universities will be crucial to effectively developing a generation of great data visualizers who can tackle our challenges.
Quantitative spatial analytics offer vital insights into the world’s most important domains including public health, the environment, the global economy and warfare.
Without geography – or any teaching that emphasizes spatial thinking – the focus will remain on the data, and that’s a mistake.
(Kirk Goldsberry is a visiting scholar at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis and an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University.)
