Careers

Program Profile: Lakeland Community College’s Geography and Geospatial Technology Program

November 9, 2022

Photo of geography students receiving instruction on UAS operation during a class lab. Credit: Bobby Oliver

Geography students receive instruction on UAS operation during a class lab. Credit: Bobby Oliver

“Keeping up with technological change in the industry is key to our program,” explains Bobby Oliver, M.A., GISP professor and department chair for the Geography and Geospatial Technology program at Lakeland Community College (LCC) in Kirtland, Ohio. “We’re constantly updating and revising our curriculum to meet all of the changing needs, to ensure our students have access to the most current and advanced geospatial technologies out there.”

At LCC, keeping pace with the geospatial industry is essential to ensure the success of the hundreds of students who enroll in the Geography and Geospatial Technology program. Not only do Oliver and the LCC faculty accomplish this goal, but they do it well. In 2020, the program was recognized with the AAG Award for Associates Program Excellence. We asked Oliver what it was that made them stand out from the rest and her response was threefold: service-learning opportunities, a community engagement focus, and a highly connected professional network.

Photo of students at Lakeland Community College participating in an introductory geography class; by Bobby Oliver — Students at Lakeland Community College participate in an introductory geography class. Credit: Bobby Oliver

Community-oriented learning as a pathway to excellence

Since the program’s inception in 2011, LCC geography students have completed service-learning projects with the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, the City of Euclid’s Shore Cultural Center, and many other Cleveland-area nonprofit organizations. In response, these projects have often translated into internship opportunities for students.

We do a lot of community and college-wide engagement and make it a goal to create service-learning projects for students. We require our students to go out and be part of professional organizations within the community.

—Bobby Oliver

The involvement of LCC students within the local Cleveland community facilitates a symbiotic relationship centered around the value of a geographic education. For Oliver, this is a key component to the program. It enables students to apply their growing knowledge and skills in the real world while also building connections and bringing awareness to organizations that may not have previously understood the value of geography.

Finding success through championing the students and championing the program

Program faculty have also taken a proactive, integrative approach to teaching students about how the skills they’re learning in the classroom translate to professional careers, something geography students often aren’t aware of. Internships with local employers, job shadowing, alumni engagement, and professional meetings are well engrained elements of the program. “We have what’s called a career service checklist our students go through within each one of the courses in their program,” explains Oliver. “All of these things have helped build their job search skills for when they hit the job market.”

Developing and maintaining relationships with local professionals working in geography, GIS, and other related professions has been critical to the program’s success. Many of these professionals are on the program’s advisory board, which has strong and diverse representation from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. This has the added benefit of ensuring that students learn on the latest software platforms used by industry professionals.

GIS poster project by Lakeland Community College Geography student Caroline Petersen on Flow Map Analysis of Cambodian Refugee Migration, 1976-1995 — GIS project by Lakeland Community College Geography student Caroline Petersen on Flow Map Analysis of Cambodian Refugee Migration, 1971-1995

How increased visibility is essential to program viability

As with many geography programs, maintaining strong enrollments is the foremost challenge the program faces, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only added to the difficulty of recruiting and retaining students. However, Oliver and other program leaders have developed innovative solutions to attracting students, by exploring opportunities with other departments on campus, leveraging a dual enrollment program with area high schools, and making ongoing efforts to increase the program’s visibility on campus and in the community.

For our program to be successful, we have to make sure that people see what we’re doing, and how it impacts our community. Making sure the campus is aware that we’re here and [that] what we do is very essential—especially when it comes to [LCC’s] enrollments and long-term viability.

—Bobby Oliver

Video of LCC alumni Caroline Peterson sharing her experience in the LCC GIS program and how she uses those skills in her career.

An annual GIS Day event, Women in GIS luncheons, presentations to the Math Club and Model U.N., and collaborative projects with other departments across campus have all helped to highlight the program’s value. “We’re really trying to get the students to see how our community and region use GIS, and how geographic and geospatial skills are used in real jobs,” says Oliver. “These are the things that I feel really put us ahead, for a two-year program.”

David M. Mark

David M. Mark, The University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (UB) Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and an internationally recognized leader in the field of GIScience, died Sept. 24 after a brief illness. He was 74.

Jeri Jaeger, UB professor emeritus of linguistics and Mark’s partner of 15 years, was by his side.

Mark joined the UB faculty in 1981 and had a major impact on the Department of Geography and the university more broadly, and his influence on the disciplines of geography, GIScience and human spatial cognition/languages was seen on an international scale. Among his many achievements, he worked with Andrew Frank, Andrew Turk, David Stea and others to establish the field of ethnophysiography — the perception and description of landforms by different cultures.

Mark served as director of the UB site of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), funded by NSF to UB, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Maine from 1995-2013. NCGIA helped establish a national and international presence for the burgeoning field of GIScience.

Mark’s own research began with geometric descriptions of the land surface and evolved toward ethnophysiography. Along the way, he pioneered methods for representing these landforms using digital computers, which helped usher in the field of GIScience. He and other NCGIA colleagues simultaneously developed a formal theory for spatial thinking, grounded in cognition and linguistics. His ethnophysiographic and ontological research has been a major component of the theoretical foundation of GIScience. Collectively, his work has profoundly influenced the knowledge body of GIScience and the research directions pursued in the field today.

A prolific scholar, Mark published well over 200 manuscripts that have been cited over 18,000 times. He was lead investigator on numerous large grants, including from the National Institutes of Health and two National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrated Graduate Education, Research and Training (IGERT) projects, which funded and launched the careers of about 50 doctoral students.

He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Researcher of the year (2004), Educator of the Year (2009) and Elected Fellow (2010); the American Association of Geographers’ Robert T. Aangeenbrug Distinguished Career Award (2013); Simon Fraser University’s Outstanding Alumni Award for Academic Achievement (2016); and the Waldo-Tobler GIScience Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2016).

A native of British Columbia, Canada, he earned a B.A. in geography from Simon Fraser in 1970, an M.A. in geography from the University of British Columbia in 1974 and a Ph.D. in geography from Simon Fraser in 1977. He was an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario before joining the UB faculty.

Aside from his academic achievements, Mark was an enthusiastic “birder” for many decades. He and Jaeger traveled extensively, including to the Amazon River, the coast of Alaska, game parks in Africa, Egypt and the Nile River, and India. He added to his lifetime list of birds wherever he traveled.

In years past, David was a member of the geography department’s soccer team and goalie for the floor hockey team. Many of his teammates were his graduate students. He was a dedicated fan of the Buffalo Sabres and Bills, and went to many games with friends. Having bonded with the Bills during the Super Bowl years of 1991-94, he had been looking forward to this year with great anticipation.

Contributed by members of the University at Buffalo Geography Department.

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Careers

Program Profile: Salisbury University – GIS

October 20, 2022

GIS has been taught at Salisbury University since at least the early nineties, says Dr. Michael Scott, a graduate of the Department of Geography and Geosciences and now a professor in the department and dean of the Henson School of Science and Technology. Continuing the success of their GIS program, in 2007, the department expanded into graduate education with their M.S. in GIS Management (MSGISM).  

Photo of Andrea Presotto — Andrea Presotto

“We realized that our students were doing very well in terms of finding employment and working in the field,” said Dr. Andrea Presotto, director of the MSGISM. “But the organizations they worked for were not particularly strategic about managing their GIS implementations.”  

The new M.S. program was conceived as a combination MBA and GIS degree, to better equip students with the skillsets necessary to become not only effective GIS practitioners, but also address this gap in data management and become leaders in public administration, grant writing, enterprise operations management, and a host of other skills beyond the technical level. This outside-the-box thinking and response to employment realities have elevated the program to one of the most respected departments on campus. 

A Regional Approach

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, agriculture, tourism, fisheries, residential and commercial development all face challenges in response to increasing climate change. The Department of Geography and Geosciences at Salisbury University has positioned itself as a big part of the solution for the communities in the region. In 2004, department faculty formed the Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative (ESRGC), which Dr. Scott directs, to help organize the region’s small towns to pool their resources for much-needed GIS project support.  

“One small town doesn’t have the ability for a GIS staff to do data collection and analysis. If you put seven or eight little towns together, suddenly there are enough resources to hire somebody to actually get that done,” explains Scott.  

[Our students] are able to get this very intensive, on-the-job experience, but the only way that works, of course, is the ESRGC has to know that the quality of the students getting GIS education coming out of the department is great, because they’re going to put them right to work.”

—Michael Scott

An outreach unit of Salisbury University and joint effort between a collection of Maryland Eastern Shore regional councils and the university, the ESRGC has grown to include 10 full-time staff, nine of whom are alumni of the department. In good years, Scott estimates that the cooperative hires anywhere from 25 to 30 interns from the department, where they acquire the invaluable real-world experiences and skills needed to move directly into professional GIS positions, even before they graduate. 

“[Our students] are able to get this very intensive, on-the-job experience,” Salisbury University’s Dr. Michael Scott explains, “but the only way that works, of course, is the ESRGC has to know that the quality of the students getting GIS education coming out of the department is great, because they’re going to put them right to work.”

Photo of students in a Salisbury University GIS class demonstrating mapping on their computers — Photo courtesy Salisbury University

If you build it, they will come…

Students and alumni of the Department of Geography and Geosciences have earned an excellent reputation throughout the region, a credit to the dedication of the department’s faculty, and their student-centered approach. As Dr. Art Lembo, a professor in the department and Technical Director of the ESRGC explains, this starts with the physical building itself: 

“We requested the faculty offices be located in an off-hallway suite that allows our doors to be open all the time, so the students can better interact with the faculty. We made structural changes to accommodate better interaction, because it’s just in our DNA to give the students this kind of experience.” 

It trickles into [our students] bringing their friends, who can become majors as well.”

—Dr. Andrea Presotto

Dr. Dan Harris, a professor and chair of the department, notes that unlike other academic buildings on campus, which typically close at midnight, the Geography and Geosciences faculty years ago made a special request to the president of the university to allow the department lab to remain open 24 hours to provide students with the opportunity to be in the building at any time. This level of attention to detail concerning the physical learning space is representative of the student-first, innovative thinking that has set the program apart.  

“It trickles into [our students] bringing their friends, who can become majors as well,” Dr. Andrea Presotto, Geography and Geosciences professor at Salisbury University. 

“We have faculty who are really good at getting [undergraduate students] in for field courses, and we embed field experiences in their classes. It’s really important to show the students that it’s not just a discipline where we come in and lecture in a classroom, and you walk away and read a textbook. We actually want them to get out and see it,” says Dr. Dan Harris, department chair.

William Laatsch

The geographer who loved nothing more than exploring unfamiliar territory has embarked on his next journey, to a destination not found in any atlas. William Ganfield Laatsch, 84, passed away September 14, 2022.

William Laatsch was born June 20, 1938, in Waukesha, WI, to Wayland and Elizabeth (Ganfield) Laatsch. His lifelong love of learning and exploring began in childhood, nurtured by family trips to Northern Wisconsin and the east coast. An only child, he often joked about how, instead of being chaotic and crowded affairs, holidays were often spent reading, surrounded by aunts and uncles who would do the same until cocktail hour.

I don’t expect them all to become geographers. I just expect them to be better stewards of the Earth and its people.

Photo of William Laatsch pointing to a desk map with students looking on

While Bill’s immediate family was small, his youth in Waukesha was surrounded by a close knit group of families that included Richard and Elizabeth Hunter and their daughter Frances. Growing up on the same block, Fran and Bill would accompany each other to school which was the start of a loving relationship that would see them marry on August 18, 1962 and go on to spend the next 60 years together. Fran was Bill’s partner as he pursued his academic career, and together they traveled widely, across North America, Europe, and Asia. They had a special affinity for the American West. Together Bill and Fran would raise two children, Ann (Shorewood, WI) and David (Wauwatosa, WI).

Photo of William Laatsch pointing to a large wall map with student looking on

In 1956 Bill enrolled at Carroll College, now Carroll University, where his family ties to the institution ran deep. His grandfather, William Arthur Ganfield, served as the College’s sixth president and Bill’s parents, aunts, and uncle also attended Carroll. He continued his studies at the University of Oklahoma where he earned a Master of Science in physical geography, and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. There, he studied high latitude geography, mining development, and town site development. (Decades later, he would be honored with a Yukon ecological reserve named after him in recognition of his 1970’s doctoral dissertation recommendation that the region emphasize ecotourism as a hedge against the decline of mining). After earning his Ph.D. in cultural geography, he accepted a position in the Department of Regional Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Photo of William Laatsch wearing a mouse costume for the annual fall Bill Laatsch Wine and Cheese Classic, courtesy University of Wisconsin library digital archives Bill spent 43 years at UWGB as a Professor of Geography and Department Chair, and postponed retirement to fill the position of Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. For decades, he hosted the Bill Laatsch Wine and Cheese Classic each fall, where he—dressed as a 6’4” gray mouse (shown at right)—would welcome students back to campus with his signature warmth and good humor. Bill retired in 2009, and became the first faculty member to have a classroom named in their honor. During the course of his career he earned numerous prestigious awards for teaching excellence, both locally and nationally. Bill inspired generations of students to pursue careers in teaching, urban planning, cartography, GIS, remote sensing, and other professions related to cultural geography’s focus on the Earth and how humans interact with it. About his students, he remarked “I don’t expect them all to become geographers. I just expect them to be better stewards of the Earth and its people.”

He also served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, Wisconsin Department of Transportation and the Wisconsin Department of Development. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the “Voyageur” Historical Review, former chairman of the State of Wisconsin Historic Preservation Review Board, Chairman of the Midwest division of the Association of American Geographers and Fellow of the American Geographical Society. He is a former President of the Heritage Hill Corporation, which operates the Heritage Hill State Historical Park for the Department of Natural Resources.

Photo of William Laatsch taking notes near an alter with religious artifacts A professional interest in Belgian settlement in northeastern Wisconsin culminated in helping to establish the Belgian Heritage Center in Namur, Wisconsin, which is dedicated to telling the story of Belgian settlement in Wisconsin and works to preserve unique elements of Belgian culture. Bill loved leading bus tours of the Southern Door County Belgian architectural and historical sites for students, tourists, and anyone who would seek out his expertise and, to his children’s horror, terrible jokes.

A deep allegiance to his alma mater, Carroll, is evident in Bill’s years of service to the institution. He served on the Board of Trustees for 19 years (1991-2010) chairing numerous committees and ultimately as Chairman of the Board.

Bill revered the Earth’s beauty, and was moved to tears when he saw Mount Everest in person in 1996. He loved Jake’s corned beef, deep belly laughs, early morning fresh cheese curd runs, Door County, and striking up conversations with strangers across the world (whether they spoke his language or not). A champion trapshooter, he loved shooting and found joy in teaching his children to enjoy the sport as well. Above all else, he loved being Papa to his grandchildren. He treated everyone he met with respect and kindness, and gave generously of his time and energy to environmental, educational, historical, and artistic causes.

Bill was preceded in death by his parents and his beloved in-laws Richard and Elizabeth Hunter. He is survived by his wife Frances Hunter, daughter Ann Laatsch, son David (Tara) Laatsch, and his two amazing grandchildren, Elizabeth and Andrew, as well as countless friends, colleagues, and students who he inspired, encouraged, and mentored.

Reprinted with permission from the Feerick Funeral Home.

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Stories

On the Map: The Spot Where Modern Denver Began

August 31, 2022

Confluence Park rapids and beach with a backdrop of the Denver Skyline by Kent Kanouse, Creative Commons

The confluence of two rivers in downtown Denver — Niinéniiniicíihéhe (the South Platte River) and Cherry Creek — marks the 1858 gold strike that launched a major city.

This spot also marks the prospectors’ encounter with the Arapaho, whose winter camping grounds and sovereign land this was, as affirmed in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. In addition to white settlers, Cherokee Nation citizens made up a significant number of the early prospectors, pushed off their own land after the 1828 Georgia Gold Rush and subsequent Trail of Tears.

At the site of Confluence Park, it was William Greenberry “Green” Russell who led the group that began a search for gold there in May 1858. When they found indications four miles south, their temporary settlement became what is now known as Denver.

In the intervening century, the 10.5-mile stretch of the South Platte River where Confluence Park rests fell on hard times, like many urban rivers. By the 1970s, it was a polluted, not only neglected but a frequent dumping site, “Denver’s receptacle for anything they wanted out of sight, out of mind.” according to Colorado State Senator Joe Shoemaker, who led the campaign to restore the riverfront. In 1974, Shoemaker co-founded the Platte River Development Committee with then-Denver Mayor Bill McNichols, eventually transforming it into the Greenway Foundation. The park underwent a long renovation and reopened with more amenities in 2018.

Confluence Park rapids and beach by Kent Kanouse, Creative Commons by Wally Gobetz, Creative Commons — Confluence Park rapids and beach by Wally Gobetz, Creative Commons

Today’s Confluence Park is a public gathering place that offers recreation, paved paths and nature trails, river views and natural landscapes; tubing, and a kayak run. Fishing is permitted, as are wading and shallow swimming at a small beach. Shopping and dining are close by.

Find out more about the Cherokee Nation’s participation in the Colorado Gold Rush

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0118

Sources: Colorado Encyclopedia; “Confluence Park,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation; “RIVER TOWNS: Denver | The South Platte’s dirty past promises a pristine future,” September 18, 2021 Colorado Politics; OsiyoTV; Uncover Colorado; “The Birth of Denver, from Boom to Bust to Boom,” Indian Country Today, Oct. 29, 2013.

Robert F. Austin

Robert F. Austin (Bob), Ph.D., GISP, age 72, of Clearwater, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina passed away on August 14, 2022.

Austin graduated from Southfield High in 1968 where he lettered in basketball and tennis and then attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on an academic scholarship. He earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees while studying Geography and Southeast Asian Studies. He also studied Thai and learned to speak it quite well, thanks to regular practice with a group of his students from Thailand. Upon graduation he was admitted to the doctoral program and spent a year abroad in the United Kingdom, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore conducting research for his dissertation. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Michigan at the age of 27.

After leaving Michigan, he continued in academia at the University of Missouri where he was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Geography department. While at Missouri, he received a Fulbright Fellowship and spent a year lecturing and teaching at Oxford Polytechnic in England. In 1984 Bob left academia to pursue advancing technological opportunities in the private sector; he took his first position in that arena with Chicago Aerial Survey (later Geonex) where he was like a kid in a candy shop with all the computer and photogrammetry equipment on site. He applied his experience working in the field for telephone companies during summers while in college, along with his knowledge of computer mapping and database management systems, to develop large projects and training programs for telephone and other utility companies converting their archives of paper maps and records to digital format. Bob worked as a consultant in the telephone and engineering industries nationally and internationally and had long term assignments in Russia and Malaysia.

Over the years, he taught courses and/or lectured at several universities including Virginia Tech, University of Tampa and Delta State. Having experienced careers in both the academic and private sectors, Bob spent his last years of employment in public service with the City of Tampa in the Department of Technology and Innovation where he was the Enterprise Applications Integration Manager. Always excited about learning more and sharing the many ways he envisioned GIS benefiting the world, Bob greatly enjoyed collaborating with other scholars and colleagues in several professional organizations. He was an active member of AM/FM International (later GITA) where he was a regular presenter at conferences and assumed the roles of conference Chair and President. He also had the great privilege of serving as a Member and Chair of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee which is a Secretary of State appointment.

Bob was quite dedicated to the use of geospatial to save lives and property. In 2016 he travelled to Vietnam as a subject matter expert for UN-SPIDER (United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response). In addition to his many published papers, monographs and book chapters, Bob was a regular contributor and served on the editorial board of Solstice: An Electronic Journal of Geography and Mathematics. After retiring he continued to write and co-published a textbook on GIS for Critical Infrastructure Protection. He also published The Big Cabbage: A Memoir of Life in Russia in the 1990s.

At the time of his passing, he was working on a book of historical fiction set primarily in Barbados and the American colonies in the 18th century. Like most geographers, Bob had a great love of travel and was happiest when he could take his family along even when, for him, they often were working vacations. He and his wife, Michelle, accomplished their goal of visiting every continent with a trip to Antarctica in 2014. His daughters, Alexandra and Lisa, were also along for many of their excursions and whether they were digging for thunder eggs in Australia, playing with orangutans on Borneo or exploring museums in Cairo he enthusiastically took on the role of tour guide.

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Yi-Fu Tuan

By Mary Ellen Gabriel

Yi-Fu Tuan, a towering intellectual figure and University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus of geography died Aug. 10 at UW Hospital in Madison at age 91, with a dear friend and former student, Charles Chang, by his side.

People think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so on. But it is also about place — its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential.”

—Yi-Fu Tuan

Tuan was a prolific writer and deep thinker who was known as the father of humanistic geography. A movement within the field of human geography, humanistic geography arose in the 1970s as a way to counter what humanists saw as a tendency to treat places as mere sites or locations. Instead, a humanistic geographer would argue, the places we inhabit have as many personalities as those whose lives have intersected with them. And the stories we tell about places often say as much about who we are, as about where our feet are planted.

It was Tuan who gave rise to the recognition among geographers that the intimacies of personal encounters with space produce a “sense of place.”

“People think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so on,” Tuan said. “But it is also about place — its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential.”

Time, age, sadness, loss, goodness, happiness, and the concept of home are all themes Tuan explored at length in his more than 20 books, including his best-known work, “Space & Place,” as well as “Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning.” In his later years, Tuan turned to introspection with his most recent books: “Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit” and an addendum, “Who Am I? A Sequel.” Both works look back on the author’s early life in China and his rise to become one of America’s most innovative intellectuals.

Born in 1930 in Tianjin, China, Yi-Fu Tuan was educated in China, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yi-Fu Tuan joined the faculty of the Department of Geography at UW–Madison in 1983, was named John Kirtland Wright Professor of Geography in 1985 and was named a Vilas Research Professor that same year, before attaining emeritus status in 1998.

His influence on the field of geography was enormous.

“For decades, Yi-Fu Tuan’s work shaped the thinking of generations of geography students and academics,” says Lily Kong, human geographer and president, Singapore Management University. “His place in the geographical canon is undoubted. His shaping of humanistic geography contributed to important philosophical shifts in the discipline.”

By emphasizing humans as thinking, dreaming, imagining beings who experience the world — capable of goodness, beauty and truth as well as greed, cruelty and domination — he showed us how all of these traits are reflected in our spaces, places and landscapes.”

—Tim Cresswell

Tuan was beloved by his students, both graduate and undergraduate alike. He often shared meals with undergraduates and enjoyed visiting the State Street Starbucks to listen in on, and sometimes join, students’ conversations about their studies.

“Yi-Fu Tuan insisted on the importance of the “human” in “human geography,” says Tim Cresswell, a graduate student of Tuan’s at UW–Madison who is now Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. “By emphasizing humans as thinking, dreaming, imagining beings who experience the world — capable of goodness, beauty and truth as well as greed, cruelty and domination — he showed us how all of these traits are reflected in our spaces, places and landscapes.”

Tuan opened geography to scholars in other disciplines, according to Cresswell, and invited thinking on what geography had to offer our understanding of the human condition. Tuan’s work was cited and celebrated by scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as by writers and professionals outside academia.

After his retirement, Tuan remained an emphatic presence on campus. Through his books, essays, and letters, as well as through innumerable conversations with students, Tuan continued to profoundly influence scholarship and thinking. An article about Yi-Fu Tuan in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 years after his retirement from UW–Madison, claimed that the geographer “may be the most influential scholar you’ve never heard of.” His world-renowned stature was complemented by a kind and generous demeanor, an intense curiosity about the world, and a keen interest in how his beloved department was evolving over the years. He was a model university scholar and citizen, says Kris Olds, a professor in the Department of Geography.

Yi-Fu Tuan at work in his Science Hall office in 1998. Tuan was a prolific writer. Photo by Jeff Miller

In Oct. 2012, Tuan was awarded the Vautrin-Lud International Geography Prize, the highest honor a geographer can receive. In 2013, he received the inaugural American Association of Geographers Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography, created to recognize “originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography.”

One of Tuan’s most unique contributions may be his “Dear Colleague” letters, composed over decades and sent to colleagues and friends, relating observations and changes in his daily life against a backdrop of larger political, educational, and social change.

“I do not know what Yi-Fu would like to say to everyone at the department in his last ‘Dear Colleague’ letter on Earth,” says Charles Chang. “But I do know that in his first ‘Dear Colleague’ letter from (hopefully) Heaven, he would like to thank them for their support over all these years.”

Chang also pointed to a story Tuan shared in an unpublished manuscript entitled “Summing Up,” in 2019.

“One day, as I walked down State Street, I heard the voice of a child behind me saying repeatedly, ‘Are you a student?’ Tuan wrote. “I ignored the question, for it could hardly be addressed to me. But I got curious, turned around, and asked the child, ‘Now, look here, do I look like a student?’ His reply, ‘Yes, you have a backpack.’ Well, that made my day! I have a backpack, which means that I am a student still open to life.”

“In a broad sense,” Chang says, “he was always open to life. He remained an active learner of the cosmos, of human goodness, to the end.”

Reprinted with permission from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Keaton Shennan

Education: MS in Geographic Information Science (San Diego State University), BS in Architecture (University of Colorado Denver)

The following profile was compiled by Jessica Embury (San Diego State University) for the Encoding Geography initiative. To learn more, visit: https://www.ncrge.org/encoding-geography/

Please describe your job, employer, and the primary tasks that you perform in your position.

I am currently a GIS web developer for a mid-sized engineering firm of about 600 people that has offices in Minnesota, Texas, and Colorado. My primary tasks are geospatial scripting for various locations and tracking different types of assets, like cranes and street sweepers. I also work on web mapping applications that are generally used by cities and counties to manage tax data, parcel data, or stormwater information. I work on other applications for the oil and gas industry, like helping manage location audits and tracking different types of surveys on job sites throughout Texas.

Previously, I’ve worked on EPA projects, like a common operating picture, which was essentially an emergency response platform. It had various assets and information brought into it regarding wildfires and other things. I’ve also worked on geospatial scripting for generating time enabled smoke imagery mosaics where I took cams and files from the Forest Service’s Blue Sky platform and translated that into a time enabled hosted and managed service.

Other projects I’ve worked on were Native American tribal nations software, like central data management systems for managing water quality, collecting surveys from research scientists, and managing environmental cleanup.

What is your educational background? How did you initially discover geocomputation and why did you ultimately choose a career that uses geography and computer science?

My bachelor’s degree is in architecture and that’s where I was first introduced to GIS, in a natural hazards course. It’s how I got interested in wildfires and learning about GIS and what I could do with it. I also took an architectural cartography course which covered using GIS data to visualize changes in Denver, where I went to school.

After working in architecture for a couple years, I just didn’t enjoy it and I always loved geography so I was hoping I could use some of my experience regarding planning, knowledge of fire, and building codes and somehow apply GIS to work with wildfires. Then, I completed my masters at San Diego State University and did my thesis on geovisualization and descriptive analysis of landscape level wildfire behavior using repeat pass airborne thermal imagery.

During that time, I developed web applications for visualizing different attributes of landscapes and wildfire behaviors, such as reduced spread. I also did a descriptive analysis and worked on a couple other projects using GIS.

I ultimately chose a career in geocomputation because I really liked the programming side of it. I thought it was an interesting and powerful skill set for being able to work with GIS data that not a lot of people have. I felt it also helped to have programming skills when I graduated and got into the job market.

Is GIS usage widespread in architecture education and the industry?

No, it is primarily used by planners but not really in architecture. If you work with site plans for master planning communities then you might get a little more experience. I worked in multifamily architecture so I got some experience using GIS to edit line work for a community master plan in Colorado, but that was the extent of it. Most architects I’ve met never use GIS. They do a lot of 3D modeling and data information modeling, but that’s about it.

When you think about geography, what specific background knowledge and conceptual ideas are important and useful to know?

Something that I feel is really under-represented in geographic education is learning how to work with coordinate systems and geographic versus projected coordinate systems. I run into a lot of issues in my job where people aren’t familiar with those concepts and then they don’t understand why certain tools aren’t working or what data processes are happening.

Working with different data types and understanding how a database is structured is really helpful, but that’s more specific to a development role. Also, being familiar with common tools and processes for editing vector data and evaluating the accuracy of GPS data. I think having familiarity with GIS and data standards are the most important for a geospatial developer.

When thinking about computer science, what specific background knowledge and conceptual ideas do you think are important and useful to know?

For a web GIS developer, understanding how websites work is important, like what happens when you type in a URL and how data is tasked between different services. For example, if you have a GIS server instance, how do you get data from that? A broad level of knowing how a REST API works is really important and critical for using geospatial data in websites. Also, having a general understanding of relational databases and becoming comfortable with certain programming languages are big skills.

What procedural knowledge do you think is important and useful to know, from either geography or computer science?

From geography, or the computer science side of geography, I think it’s really important to be familiar with Esri products like ArcGIS Pro or ArcDesktop, because those are widely used, especially in cities and municipalities. Then, understanding what Esri portal and enterprise are and how to use ArcGIS Online. Even as a developer, I use those tools all the time.

Getting a little more into the computer science part, it is important to know how to use ArcPy and the ArcGIS Python API, as well as open source software. I haven’t used QGIS recently but I think that’s a good one to learn if you don’t have access to other GIS. Then, being familiar with libraries such as GDAL and OGR for Python is really helpful. Also, knowing how to set up a PostGIS database is a specific skill that’s really helpful for the computer science part. I mainly work with Javascript, Typescript, Python, a little bit of C# (C-Sharp).

With web development, I also use HTML and CSS. If you’re going to be a web developer, you need to know the basics of vanilla JavaScript, which is what they call using JavaScript without a framework. Understanding how to make a call to a REST endpoint and how to get data from a host or feature service is really important. Generally understanding the life cycle, like a promise in JavaScript is important, so if you get data you’re leaving that response. Then understanding the DOM, the document object model, and how that works. Essentially, how is an html page structured and then, depending on what resources you use, knowing a rest API and how that works. You could also look into a soap API which uses xml. I did run into that a little bit, especially larger scale stuff. We essentially had a big repository for data that was used by Federal Government employees and now it’s translated from xml. So that’s the specific programs stuff.

Then, for Python, you should know some of the big geospatial libraries and know when it’s appropriate to use certain things and that just takes time. Then, if you want to get a job, it’s helpful to know a framework and have something that you’ve built, have examples of work that you’ve done, no matter how small they are, but have examples of a small portfolio and if you can explain what’s happening behind the scenes – then that’s pretty critical to getting a job in the field.

What is an example of a social, economic, environmental or other issue that you recently investigated in a project at work?

We work mostly with environmental issues. I’m currently working on a stormwater asset management program so it uses some hydrological modeling that’s above my head, but essentially it’s a program which can forecast when stormwater basins and ponds will need maintenance, so preserving stormwater ponds in different communities throughout Minnesota.

Another project I worked on is the EPA common operating picture, and for that I worked on a few different widgets and a web map and one of them, for environmental data, was that smoke mosaic data. We set up a script to run every 24 hours and update daily [to] provide information on particle density for smoke over California, Nevada, and a couple other states in the southwest US. Another component of that was tracking active fire perimeters and if there were active fire parameters within 10 miles of an EPA facility, [then] that would notify people.

What kind of geographic or computational questions did you ask and think about during your project?

I’ll talk about the smoke data because that’s really interconnected with air quality, which can be interconnected to a lot of other social and environmental issues related to people who are disproportionately affected by that. The question is, from a technical standpoint, how do we transform these cams and the files into something that’s useful and time-enabled? Then, how do we convey that knowledge to somebody who doesn’t have a GIS background? And how can we make it useful at the scale? So the scale of this data is multiple states, the lower 48 states of the contiguous U.S..

Knowing how to resample that imagery was important, so how do we make sure that it’s an appropriate scale and spatial resolution for the task at hand? Then, that kind of blended into programming, so this would be kind of a classic geospatial scripting – You’re transforming the data, so you first need to get the data, so you make a request to that site and get the data, unzip it, then you need to organize it. For that dataset we had times in each image file name, so you could just use Python to pull out the dates, and then you need to transform it into the correct projection. You need to reproject those rasters and then, once you do that, you can look at the different types of resampling that you can do. Then, once you have all your data finished and you finished the processing of your data, you then need to work on the final product. So you kind of have these iterative steps to clean the data, get it in a format you want, and make sure it’s displaying correctly at an appropriate spatial resolution or appropriate coordinate system.

And then, once that’s done, you can do the final task, which is essentially creating an image service that you can just put in a web app that has time enabled on it, which is an Esri specific thing, because if you enable time on this image layer, then you can use all these different filtering tools to visualize the data.

What types of data did you acquire to support your project? If possible, please identify up to three data sets you utilize the most.

So we used the BlueSky daily runs from the WebSky platform from the United States Forest Service, which is a research model that they generate for different regions in the U.S..

https://tools.airfire.org/websky/v2/#status

For the EPA, we used a couple different datasets. I don’t know how much I can talk about that, but we did use the classic U.S. main fire perimeter data: the NIFC current wildfire perimeters data set. Currently, we use a lot of parcel tax data, so that’s more specific to city and county level, but I would say we work with that the most.

What type of content knowledge and skills did you use to evaluate, process, and analyze the data that you gathered for your project?

For the remote sensing part of that project, it was about understanding the different types of interpolation, such as nearest neighbor, and resampling methods for raster data. Also, being able to identify your destination coordinate system and apply any projections that you need.

Content knowledge and skills specifically for programming would be understanding how to use Open Source geoproducts, so in that case it was GDAL to work with raster data. Then principles for more general types of skills like Python programming and using Jupyter notebooks or ArcGIS notebooks to schedule a task to run every 24 hours to get new data and republish the image service.

As a developer, I get a lot of hard skills but the soft skills can be ignored a little bit. The most important thing I’ve learned is being able to explain to somebody why something is important if they don’t have a background in GIS and being able to distill the work you’re doing and provide a high level summary. That’s something we have to do all the time. An example of this would be when I built a continuous integration continuous development pipeline for a client. What this does is it builds their application tests and it deploys it to wherever they want automatically. So I had to be able to distill this really technical process of backing up and restoring databases and running certain types of integration tests to a client that doesn’t really have a strong computer science background and I’m just a GIS technician. That was for a Tribal Nations organization. So how you distill that knowledge upwards and explain what you’re doing and why it’s meaningful is the most important part of this process.

How did you apply geography and computer science to communicate the results of your project? Do you have a recent product or publication that you can share as an example?

I primarily use web applications. I don’t usually use maps very often, unless they’re embedded in a web application. So I do a lot of mapping applications where geovisualization is an important part of that.

How to display data in a meaningful way is always important, even at city levels, if they have huge data sets, like a lot of utility data sets and storm water and sewer and parcel. A lot of them have tons of data, so how do you display that data in a way that doesn’t get super cluttered or confusing?

For a recent product, we have a public facing web page. This is another product for oil and gas. There is a video on this website that does a little walkthrough:

https://www.wsbeng.com/expertise/technology/solutions/datafi/

WSB Engineering and Innovate! Inc. are the two companies I’ve worked for. I wanted to work in-person. I think it is important to have that in-person mentorship as a developer.

Reflecting on your work, how does it align with your personal values and your community or civic interests?

I’ve been able to explore some environmental issues that generally align well with my personal values. I feel like I get to make a positive impact, and even with fields and sectors of oil and gas that I wouldn’t necessarily see myself working in, I like that I get to help with environmental compliance and making sure that field workers are safe and sticking to appropriate procedures.

I really enjoyed the work I did for the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s probably been the highlight so far – being able to work for an agency that I admire. Being able to work with the Forest Service is great too. Most of my work is related to environmental issues, which I’m passionate about, but it would also be great to use this data for other civic or social justice projects to see how GIS data can be useful for that.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 2031418, 2031407, and 2031380 (Collaborative Research: Encoding Geography – Scaling up an RPP to achieve inclusive geocomputational education). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

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Akin Mabogunje

By Toyin Falola

As I heard of the passing of Professor Akin Mabogunje yesterday, August 4, incidentally in Lagos close to the house where he spent the last phase of his life, I began to reflect on the odyssey of life and how one needs a compass to successfully navigate the crescendos and decrescendos. What makes life itself is not just the source of respiration in humans’ biological make-up but the hurdles and smoothness that ironically constitute the essence and the extent of life itself. One might need directions to find a pathway to purpose, so as not to fall or get lost in the labyrinth of life, and sometimes the needed guide are people who have walked the land and stretched its excesses. Professor Akin Mabogunje’s life and career have proven to be the needed trajectory to safely surf the turbulent sea of life. He has become a compass, both figuratively and literally, by living a life worthy of emulation and leading a career that helps understand the complexity of earth itself.

Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

In his autobiography, A Measure of Grace, Professor Mabogunje meticulously maps out his life and career in two parts: “On the Wings of Love” and “Towards the Emerging Vision,” each detailing his journey through life and a career. If Professor Mabogunje could look back, I am certain that he would proudly declare “c’est fini” to his vision, which had manifested with enviable expression. When a man can cease to exist, his image and contributions to society are bound to be legendary, and as such, it is safe to say that his very visions have “emerged” and have redefined the trajectory of scholarship and governmental policies alike. Mabogunje sat at the forefront of the echelon of African geographers, and his brilliance and scholarship drew global applause.

Mabogunje’s journey through life was defined by his quest for knowledge and resolution for success. As a young and brilliant child in Kano, with a father working for the colonial government, he was inquisitive, a character that set him apart from his counterparts. He started school when he was four years old and was younger than many of his classmates, which was a disadvantage because the teacher did not make an exception for him by coming down to his level of understanding. However, Mabogunje quickly adjusted and blended with the other students. His desire for success was once met with a hilarious experience. His father had instructed that he and his colleagues should prepare for higher examinations, and they had to do this by studying. However, Mabogunje’s friend had taken him to get voodoo that would make him pass the exams. Unfortunately, he failed and was taught by life itself that there was no shortcut to success. Following that, his lifestyle and achievements showed that he had taken these lessons from life and converted them into a muse that built his determination for success.

Professor Mabogunje attended the Holy Trinity Church School, Sabon Gari, Kano, before moving to the Anglican Church-run United Native African Church School. His father had participated in the facilitation of an Anglican School, which led to the establishment of the United Native African Church School. Upon the establishment of the school, Mabogunje and his siblings were transferred to become part of the foundational students at the school. In Class IV, he emerged as the best student in Geography, laying the foundation for his successful career as a Geographer. His sterling records continued to develop, especially as a student at the University College, Ibadan, where he won several prizes both within and outside Nigeria. He earned his Master’s degree in 1958 and his Ph.D in 1961, both from the University of London.

Professor Mabogunje did more than merely study or teach geography, he also carved a niche for himself, becoming an epitome of excellence in the field and contributing to the nation’s development. His teaching career and ascension to professorship within twelve years set the pace for his remarkable contribution to the geographical body of knowledge. He quickly reached the apex of intellectual stardom in the field, to the extent that he was nicknamed “the Father of African Geography,” a big credit to his many years of aggressively studying and analysing the geographical explanation of societies and the people resident in them.

Some of his early scholarship focused on the effect and process of Nigeria’s urbanisation, concerning the precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial epochs. While most scholars in 1965 found it easy to align with European opinions that urbanisation had a positive and developmental impact on the economy and other social sectors of society, Mabogunje introduced further ideas and examined Nigerian society beyond this context. He equipped himself with the people’s distinct economic, commercial, and social orientations before colonialism, some of which were still evident during the colonial period. Despite acknowledging the positive developments in other sectors, he emphasised the effect of urbanisation on these economic systems that might cause serious constraints for the country. He explained the philosophies and constitutions of the concept of cities in precolonial Nigeria, which were quite different from European systems.

Regarding the impact of the colonial economy and urbanisation in Nigeria, Mabogunje was particular about the interplay between pre-industrial and industrial urbanisation in Nigeria, and he provided a framework for the construction of data and public policies. His understanding and knowledge, especially on the urbanisation process, were put to specific and broader use, giving particular geographical analyses of Ibadan and Kano and becoming materials for laying the foundation of African urbanisation.

Also, Mabogunje was the epitome of the relationship between the town and gown. His scholarship extended beyond academic endeavours and research and included public assignments aimed at societal development. This was not surprising, as the icon was among the best brains in Nigeria in the fields of geography and urbanisation. His first contribution to society and policy was his participation in the 1962 census, which was considered long overdue after the failures of previously planned ones. Towards the census, he also led the section in charge of listing demarcation areas and was material to the 1963 census, following political factors and tensions in the country.

Additionally, the brilliant geographer played a significant role in the creation and generation of hydroelectric power in Kainji, Niger State, and was part of the discussions on how to relocate the people originally situated in this environment. He participated in research into the region’s situations before, during, and after the dam’s construction, as well as the socioeconomic implications on the people and Nigeria in general. Mabogunje’s contributions to the establishment of Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye (known as Ogun State University at inception) cannot be forgotten. He contributed his wealth of knowledge and wisdom to the Public Service Review Commission and the Western Region Forestry Commission. His role in the development of the Federal Capital Territory, including other national duties he performed diligently, are some of his remarkable contributions that are instrumental to the fabric of contemporary society.

Mabogunje was not just a national hero; his international reputation helped him to make Nigeria and Africa proud in the international community. As the first African to head the International Geographical Union and United States National Academy of Sciences Foreign Associate, he became a trailblazer in positioning Africans for more international developmental roles and performed his duty with such emulative vigour and determination. Given his accomplishments, it is not surprising that he has won several awards and honours, both on a national and international levels, including the 2017 Vautrin Lud Prize for Geography, the highest award in the field of Geography.

As many have stated, Mabogunje’s movement from different locations and staying among different people must have contributed to his versatility and was instrumental in the foundation of his geographical knowledge that showed him to the world. Aside from his career, he led an exemplary life that touched individuals and served as an inspiration for those who would love to understand life. Indeed, he was a compass for understanding both society and life itself. Mabogunje had a vision for development, which was clear enough for others to build on, thus laying the foundation of Nigerian geographical studies and African urban development.

Although Mabogunje has left us, his legacy will live on like that of every other hero. When he was alive, he asked me to write a book on education in the Western Region in the 1950s; however, I could not deliver. Now that he is gone, I will request him to do a map of heaven, locating the longitude and latitude of hell and Satan, angels, and the abode of God, especially the city of gold, where he has gone on to continue a glorious and well-lived life. I intend to put his findings to good use. This is one hero we are sure to miss, but his hallowed presence will always hold a place of honour in the closet of our hearts.

Toyin Falola, a professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at The University of Texas at Austin, is the Bobapitan of Ibadanland. Reprinted with permission from The Premium Times, Nigeria.

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Tom Paper

Education: B.A. in Economics (Williams College), M.B.A. in General Management (Stanford University)

The following includes an interview conducted with two colleagues at Webster Pacific. Although the conversation with both Tom Paper and William Blomstedt is included below, a duplicate profile is also available for William Blomstedt, who is GIS Expert and Project Manager at Webster Pacific.

It was compiled by Jessica Embury (San Diego State University) for the Encoding Geography initiative. To learn more, visit: https://www.ncrge.org/encoding-geography/

Please describe your job, employer, and the primary tasks that you perform in your position.

Tom Paper (TP): Our company is Webster Pacific and we provide analytical consulting services. We’ve been in business for almost 20 years and our clients are in a wide range of industries. I used to be a strategy consultant at Bain and Company a long time ago.

We use tools like Python, ArcGIS, Tableau/PowerBI, CRM/ERP, Cloud Databases, and SQL Server to perform coding, geo-analysis, marketing analytics, web scraping/research, interviewing, and financial analysis. I can’t use any of these programs but I understand the logic of all the work that we do, much of which is geocomputational.

William, do you want to add anything? You have a background in geoscience.

William Blomstedt (WB): I studied geography as an undergrad and then I did a master’s course in GIS so I came to the field that way. Tom, geospatially, you only started more recently doing geospatial stuff? The work evolved to geospatial analysis.

TP: That’s right, seven years ago, one of our clients – a private school based in Manhattan – wanted to open up schools in cities all over the world and asked us to help them analyze cities as opportunities for locating new schools. And that’s what launched us. We evolved our geospatial capabilities for this particular client to help other clients and other schools think geospatially about new locations. We just helped a preschool in Washington DC and we also helped a private school think about why a location in San Francisco had not been performing as well.

What is your educational background and how did you initially discover geocomputation and ultimately choose a career using geography and computer science?

TP: My background was liberal arts. I studied economics and environmental studies at Williams and so I don’t know whether the career chose me or if I chose the career. It feels a little bit like it chose me. I think for William – he chose it, he was more curious geospatially early on.

In the last five years, pretty much since we started geospatial analytics, I got interested in antique maps and that process of discovery. I think there’s a very real thread between our work and the kind of work that people did to think about exploration. For example, I have a map of California as an island from the 17th century. I think it was George Box who said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Examples of things being wrong fascinate me because we see that every day, or we know our models are wrong, but the question is whether they are helpful.

When thinking about geography, what specific background knowledge and conceptual ideas do you think are important and useful?

TP: I think that the ability to think in the weeds and then to think about the forest is the most important skill that we have. To be able to go back and forth between details and the big picture. I don’t have a geographic education but I think that ability is critical to what we do every day.

WB: When I was choosing to go to school to pursue geography, someone told me that you could take a GIS course that just teaches you how to use the program and do GIS. However, they advised me to go to a course where you do a thesis where you have to solve a problem, and GIS is the tool. Instead of just learning the tool, you need to use the tool to do something with it and think about the big picture, rather than just doing geographical analysis.

When thinking about computer science, what specific background knowledge and conceptual ideas do you think are important and useful?

TP: I think the willingness to accept that you don’t know everything and that there are things that we still learn. Repeatedly, we learn things and how to do things that we didn’t know before, so I think the willingness to accept that you don’t know everything is critically important.

Can you mention any procedural knowledge that you think is particularly useful from the standpoint of either geography or computer science?

TP: We see geography and computer science, or geospatial, like they’re melded together: geography and computer science and our use of programs.

We use Excel and Google Sheets all the time because it’s how we get into the details and also get to the big picture. Now we’ve had a lot of young people join our firm and want to use Python instead of Excel. I’m not sure I would say that I have embraced it, but I can see the power of it. No matter how programmatic they get, it is important that our team understands how to come back to the larger questions and more conceptual ways of displaying what we’re doing.

We’re fortunate in the sense that we are driven by our client and their strategy. Every client has a different definition of what is a customer to them and their market position. The priorities are the activities that support that market position and determine who is a customer, and how to spatially define a customer in a particular space. We often think about time. We do find that mileage is not good because a mile in New York City and a mile in Los Angeles are very different due to the time it takes people to get to and from things.

What’s an example of a social, economic, environmental or other issue that you recently investigated in a project?

TP: Our client wanted to find a location within a metropolitan area and the customers who would go to their store. Customers are only willing to travel so far. So we wanted to locate in a place where there’s more demand than competing supply for this company. We created a map to show demand and supply in the market. The basic point was to figure out where there’s more demand than supply. Geospatially, where does that exist? We took the demand and subtracted out the supply to get our answer. If all you were doing was looking at the demand, you’d get an answer that looks very different.

What kind of questions did you ask and think about during this project?

WB: It’s all about location, place, and interconnection. If we need to write a code or an algorithm, we do it to either iterate faster or to make a model. For a simple supply model, we can say the supply is all in one point. In a more complex model, we will say the supply is not exactly in that point but it’s around that point (e.g. within 10 minutes) and so we have to build a model which spreads that supply out and then computationally figure out where all the supply is.

What types of data did you acquire to support your project, and are you able to identify up to three data sets that you use frequently?

TP: We use Census data a lot.

WB: American Community Survey.

TP: We use lists of schools or stores on the web. Our client will also have data about their customers and information that we will integrate into our analysis.

But Census data is by far the biggest one. For the census data, we deal with shapefiles. Sometimes we get data by Block Group, Census Tract, county, or something else. Then, we have to turn that data into data that meshes with us.

We use road network data sometimes. We used to build our own road networks, and now we use outside services who have data about traffic speeds. Road networks are really important to conceptualize something timewise. Sometimes we’ve thought about not just drive time but walk time or subway time. We analyzed some things in Tokyo once and we had to make a road network, if you will, that was based upon subway travel times.

What types of content knowledge and skills did you use to evaluate, process, and analyze the data you gathered for your project?

TP: I have a whole presentation, called the consulting toolkit, about the kinds of thinking that we have to go through to work successfully. People don’t necessarily know all the data that they’re going to need and they don’t necessarily have all the skills to solve a problem, so being able to pick things up quickly is really important.

We’ve talked in our firm about letting the data guide you and being careful to let the data explain to you what it says. Our customers have questions and we need to be careful to not over interpret the data or over explain the data.

We always have to look at the work that we’ve done and ask whether it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense because we made a mistake. There are so many calculations involved in what we do, so we need to go back and see if we made a mistake. For example, William and I just got through with a particular city and there was a pocket of demand close to the core area. It didn’t make sense to us that it would exist there, so we went back and checked the calculations and discovered that there was a river creating a barrier. So, in this case, there was a geospatial reason.

How did you apply geography and computer science to communicate the results of your project?

TP: This map is for a retail fashion company. They sell their products to wholesalers who resell the product to consumers. They wanted to know which stores (wholesalers) they should sell their product to, so we found out where the competitors were located.

That’s the coloration of the dots. Every dot is a store and the reddest dots have the most competitors located inside of them. The black circle around the dots indicate stores where our client is located. Our client was in only one store where there were a whole bunch of competitors and they were in a lot of stores with smaller numbers of competitors. So maybe the client should be in the other red dots, whereas we might not want to be in these green stores as much.

So this is an example about displaying our results. We try to think about the ease with which somebody who knows nothing about this could understand it. How hard are we making the viewer work to understand our results and how much mental effort do they have to expend? That’s an information design problem. It’s a bit of an art and a science. The best presentations are the ones that take the least effort to understand while still projecting the appropriate amount of complexity. You have to get the answer across with the least amount of work for the viewer.

Reflecting on your work, how does it align with personal values and community or civic interests?

TP: We work for clients who want to serve their customers and make money, and I appreciate helping our clients and being paid for doing that work. Are we saving the world with our work? Probably not, but we are supporting ourselves, our families, and our clients. There are certain clients that I wouldn’t work for because their values don’t align with ours.

I feel good about our work. We have a great team that appreciates the adventure, discovery, and services that we give to our clients. We have school clients and we’re proud of helping them do a better job of educating their students.

We get paid to do this really interesting work. I tell people I don’t travel around the world physically, but I do in my brain. We get to discover things and we learn – and that is part of the great wonder and joy of this work. We get to learn all the time. There are all sorts of discoveries happening in these realms that I think equate back to when these people were making antique maps and discovering the shape of California. We’re discovering the shape of things that exist. Where is our demand? Where are our competitors? Where should we go? Where should we advertise? So there’s discovery, and that’s fun.

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