I’m a Professor of Geographic Data Science in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL. Why Geographic Data Science? My experiences in the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton and, much later, the Geography Department of King’s College London encouraged me to maintain a healthy critical distance from my work.

So while I’m always excited by the possibilities of new kinds of data to tackle tricky problems, I also remain cognisant of the fact that ‘the data don’t speak for themselves’ (as it was so memorably put in Data Feminism). In that context, Spatial Data Science seemed too divorced from the critical element, implying a focus largely on the technical rather than their embedding in wider socio-economic and political concerns.