  Researchers and practitioners across many disciplines have recently adopted
computational notebooks to develop, document, and share their scientific
workflows - and the GIS community is no exception. This chapter introduces
computational notebooks in the geographical context. It begins by explaining
the computational paradigm and philosophy that underlie notebooks. Next it
unpacks their architecture to illustrate a notebook user's typical workflow.
Then it discusses the main benefits notebooks offer GIS researchers and
practitioners, including better integration with modern software, more natural
access to new forms of data, and better alignment with the principles and
benefits of open science. In this context, it identifies notebooks as the glue
that binds together a broader ecosystem of open source packages and
transferable platforms for computational geography. The chapter concludes with
a brief illustration of using notebooks for a set of basic GIS operations.
Compared to traditional desktop GIS, notebooks can make spatial analysis more
nimble, extensible, and reproducible and have thus evolved into an important
component of the geospatial science toolkit.
