Economic Geography

IT has allowed a gradual expansion of the power 
of our research relative to its cost, and has definitely 
had an impact on the dissemination of research
Information technologies (IT) have had a revolutionary impact upon our compu-
tational capabilities over the course of my career. The development of computing
power, software, and the Internet has all played a role in advancing our ability to
Approaching research methods in economic geography
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ask difficult questions and undertake complex analyses. These changes have also
changed the way we can share our results – instantaneously – to the planet, as
Thomas Friedman has argued cogently (Friedman 2005). IT has not changed
the need for scholars to conceptualize important research questions, seek fund-
ing to answer them, and to do the hard work of data gathering that is necessary
to be able to answer those research questions. However, it has given us an ability
to process and display results more quickly, and to engage in larger scale numer-
ical analyses. It has reduced the labor required to undertake many projects, and
has allowed a greater level of involvement of students in the classroom with
analyses not possible decades ago.
The availability of data on the Internet has been expanding dramatically, and
this will further help economic geographers to engage in more sophisticated
analyses, especially as it becomes easier to import data into a cartographic envi-
ronment. The kinds of numerical analyses that I described above were incredibly
time consuming in the old world of punch-cards and Fortran programming, and
today I am sure that I could do in Excel in a few hours what it took me days to
do in the 1970s. While it is great that IT has made our lives easier, there is a
danger of having analysis driven by what it is easy to do with modern comput-
ing systems, rather than standing back and making sure that we are asking the
right questions, and gathering the data to answer them.