Private, Public, Personal: Shifting Patterns in Geospatial Data Sources in Geographic Research
Geospatial data sources include data collected by the public sector (i.e., government), private sector (i.e., industry), or through fieldwork. Of these categories, the private sector, especially "tech firms," has provided new types of cutting-edge datasets that are particularly large and novel. These include data from social media platforms and location-based technologies such as GPS and mobile phones. Here, we explore the extent to which peer reviewed geospatial research has adopted these data sources, perhaps in lieu of more traditional data types.
We review peer reviewed journal articles from six flagship journals in GIS, Geography, and Urban Analytics that publish research that uses spatial data analysis. We find that geospatial researchers continue to rely on government-collected data for their research, but that data from the private sector has increased in recent years. This finding implies that as spatial analysis studies increasingly rely on private datasets, we should revisit (a) how industry data collection faces fewer regulations on data quality and has different motivations for their collection, (b) how this affects our ability to trust our datasets, and (c) the role of government and fieldwork in data collection and dissemination in the future.