RGS Award

May 7, 2024

Today, the RGS announced that I received the Taylor & Francis Award for “excellence in the practice and promotion of teaching in higher education”. In their social media, the expanded a bit:

Daniel has made exceptional contributions to the teaching and practice of quantitative geography in higher education globally. He has led the way in integrating data science into geography, utilising emerging digital data sources to enhance our understanding of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.

Let’s get the easy part out of the way: I’m over the moon to receive this prize. For someone who did not start his career in Geography to receive anything, let alone one of the annual awards, from the Royal Geographical Society is beyond humbling and honoring. I have always thought of Geography as a welcoming discipline, a place (pun intended!) where our differences enrich us, where we can pursue our true interests irrespective of field-specific quirks, tradition, or academic inertia. This prize is living testament of such view. It is also specially meaningful because the award comes from a nomination from peers at the QMRG, the group I had the pleasure of chairing from 2017 to 2022. Whatever they tell you, what academics really want in life is peer recognition. This feels like a good milestone in that regard ;-)

While everything in the previous paragraph is genuine, I also feel a bit awkward about receiving the award as an individual. Nothing in what I have done in the “practice and promotion of teaching in higher education” has been alone. This is of course true in the figurative sense (standing on the shoulder of giants and all that), but also in a much more literal way. An example. The two pieces of work I am most known for are probably my GDS Course and the GDS Book. There are more, but they all have similar stories. The GDS Course grew out of materials I developed to teach my class when I first arrived at Liverpool in 2015. A lot of the content took heavy inspiration from what I had been soaking up in my time at ASU while working with Serge Rey, Luc Anselin, and the rest of that dream team that was the Geoda Center in the early 2010s. It also took important expiration from the Tempe days: all the code relied heavily on PySAL and related libraries that were (and still are!) developed as open source projects by a growing community. In 2018, I “compared notes” with Serge and Levi, we decided to pool our respective materials, give them “a light touch to make them seem more coherent”The degree to which “light touch” became an understatement will continue to haunt me as testimony of my/our naive optimism. and, five years later, the GDS Book saw the light of day. It’s a long way of saying, very little of what has made me famous came really from me. If anything, I was the the lucky one at the right place and right time, absorbing (and enjoying!) everything, piecing it together, and putting it back into the public. More like a Dj than a composer.

It is also very hard to disentangle individual contributions from the institutional context where they happen. If Liverpool had not been open enough to allow a fresh lecturer, coming from a different discipline, to fully redesign a course that consistently attracted a lot of students and seemed to be just fine, probably nothing of this would have happened. Also, if I hadn’t felt supported enough to undertake such changes on the first day of employment, nothing would have happened. And that was the case only because of the Geographic Data Science Lab.

So, as I’ve said elsewhere, if I can ask of you one thing while you have me in the spotlight, make it this: see past my individual contributions, which are few and made possible by a non-trivial amount of privilege, and celebrate the magic of people, communities, and institutions coming together to build a better future together. That is what this award is about, and what is truly inspiring.