Category Archives: Articles

THUMP! goes “The Complete Earth” on my sofa. Wife Wendy is displeased because that’s her reading spot, but I’ll need a lot of space, since I have other maps and atlases deployed. Some are for boredom relief, others are relevant to our current crisis, and others are for our upcoming adventure into the Big Empty.

Even if the libraries and bookstores are closed, we have bookshelves. I’ve been going through mine and finding treasures. I’d planned to give a basic top 10 list of my favorite atlases, but as I began, I realized that would be impossible. How do you choose your favorites if you have over 100? Instead, I’ll explore how atlases enlighten us in ways that other media cannot.

 Atlas was the Titan of Greek mythology who carried the world on his shoulders. That would be 13 billion trillion tons. It isn’t the weight of the Earth, but “The Complete Earth” is hefty, offering hundreds of full-color satellite images of our beautiful home at multiple scales and multiple times.

Atlases take time to absorb. We get drawn into every page. We don’t just type in a place name and zoom in, we have to find it in the book. When we do, we see everything around that place as well. As I said in a previous article, paper maps aren’t keyholes. We zoom in with our brains and eyes, not our screens.

We’re not flying right now…

However, we can still see the Earth from above. Like “The Complete Earth,” Yann Arthus-Bertrand et. al’s “Earth From Above” is a massive book, with fold-out pages that display ancient history, natural wonders, and everyday life around the globe.

Bernhard Edmaier’s “Patterns of the Earth” isn’t quite pocket-sized, but carriable. As much art as geography, it is organized thematically, with sections titled “Bands,” “Spots,” “Webs,” “Swirls” and “Spikes,” among many others, illustrating how the Earth itself is a work of art.

“To Mamie, from Rewie”

That is the handwritten inscription in my most treasured atlas, a ragged “1942 Rand McNally Ready-Reference ATLAS of the World.” More than an atlas, it is a picture of a young lady’s life during and after wartime. Inside the front cover is a pencil list of AM radio stations and ink doodles of butterflies. On nearly every page are handwritten notes, with battle sites in Europe and the Pacific circled and dated.

Another of her notes in Arizona, “double plane crash, June 30, 1956,” indicates this atlas had been in her hands for at least 14 years. That incident was the impetus for the creation of the FAA. Mamie’s atlas was a diary, a textbook, a sketchpad, and her connection with the greater world during a time of isolation.

Atlases have been read and touched.

Several years ago, I had the privilege to visit the workshop of Raven Maps and Images and Allan Cartography in Medford, Oregon. We’ve all seen their beautiful wall maps of states and countries. Stuart Allan was heading for retirement, so they were downsizing and trying to empty the office.

They generously offered me their surplus, so I took as many atlases as I could carry down the stairs. It was a fascinating glimpse into the perspective of one of our most influential modern cartographers, and a reminder that all the work we do as geographers is always based on our cartographic forbears.

In 1994, archaeology wasn’t for me anymore, so what to do? I found geography when I bought a used 18^th edition “Goode’s World Atlas.” It displayed data in a way that I’d never seen, making me realize how maps reveal the world. If I could make good maps, I might be able to change the world for the better. I have used newer versions as textbooks in many courses, but Number 18, you’re always in my heart.

“It’s like an explosion in your brain.”

So says Simon, the London taxi driver. Diana Sinton and others have discussed the difference between real-time navigation and mental maps. I’ll never be as smart as a London taxi driver, but I need a journey right now after so much isolation.

The Big Empty is the vast, beautiful corner of California, Oregon and Nevada, far too big to fit on a phone. I have to get the paper out! It begins as a mess of maps, atlases and pens. Reckless as I am, I don’t want to pull out maps and atlases while I’m driving, so I need a good mental map.

As I explore these different maps, each of which reveal the same places at different scales and tell different stories, I develop a geographic perspective that scales down to smaller pictures. Just turn left at the windmill.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

That dark quote is from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” in which history is revised on a daily basis. Geography doesn’t just reveal space, it reveals changes over time. Using a map app, we see the world in that moment only. Geographic reality can be changed by parties unknown.

My oldest atlas is from 1909, a geography textbook. There was no Panama Canal. Before air travel, the immense island of New Guinea was unexplored and unmapped. Neither world war had happened, but there were portents. Then “Goode’s World Atlas” from 1946 shows the geopolitics of the world just after one of the most significant events in modern history. A stack of atlases, cumbersome as they may be, tells stories through time.

“Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On And Never Will.”

That is the subtitle of Judith Schalansky’s “Atlas of Remote Islands.” As we shelter in place, we realize that we’ll never see every place on Earth. Yet every map of every place can tell a unique story of a unique place and take us there. In “Another America: Native American Maps and the History of Our Land,” Mark Warhus shows us familiar places mapped from a very different perspective, some on paper, some on bison hides.

William Hornaday shocked Americans with his depiction of the rapid decline of the bison after the Civil War, which helped spur the modern conservation ethic. Included in Susan Schulten’s “A History of America in 100 Maps,” it is one of 99 others that illustrate how history is written in maps, and also how maps can write history.

Every atlas offers a different perspective. “Brilliant Maps: An Atlas for Curious Minds“, “The Penguin State of the World Atlas,” and “Atlas of the Real World” blend cartography and infographics. The latter, for example, uses cartograms to distort the land areas of the world based on thematic data such as electricity access and spending on tourism.

THUMP! goes the atlas in the classroom!

Seminal in map-based infographics are the works of Edward Tufte. After attending one of his trainings, in which his three books were the primary curriculum, I used this same technique teaching an archaeology course. Tufte’s books are based on page pairs, with two facing pages each delivering a lesson.

Instead of a textbook, I taught from “Past Worlds: Collins Atlas of Archaeology.” Students laid out their books (THUMP!) as we discussed topics on specific pages. Page pairs made teaching from an atlas not only effective, but far more engaging than slides on a screen. These were their own books—they could make notes, draw on them, doodle like Mamie. When they left, the book was theirs to keep.

The third-grade class at Sage School will also have their book to keep. They wrote “The Klamath Agency: Stories of the Past,” interviewing Klamath tribal elders and making a map that reconstructed the Agency as it was in the 1940s. Most of the buildings they mapped are gone, but they created a record of the past that can be passed on to the future. Years later, these kids can pull their work off the bookshelf. Stories told by elders long passed will still be in their hands.

I could go on and on, page by page…

Obviously, I love atlases. Every individual copy has a story, but not just the information it offers. This one led me to my wife, this one changed a kid’s life, I helped edit this one, I bonded with a colleague looking at this one…

Books offer a sense of permanency. They can smell fresh-off-the-press or they can smell like generations of readers before us. The pages may sound crisp and new or they may sound dangerously close to turning to dust. Like Mamie’s 1942 atlas, maps, books and atlases connect us with the greater world.

Whether you’re exploring map treasures virtually or have the honor of owning a few collections, take this strange time to go exploring from your sofa. With an atlas, you can relive past adventures and plan new ones, visit places you’ll never go, and explore the same world from vastly different perspectives. 

T minus 23 years: Phew, done with grad school. Earned the degree I’ll need to teach and research, or something. What I really like doing is this mapping stuff. At least I won’t have to take any more tests. 

T minus 15 years: Overheard a conversation with some friends at a conference about this new GIS credential program. Know about it? Me neither. Sounds like they’re still figuring it out. 

T minus 13 years: Maybe it’s time to look into this GISP thing some more. A couple of colleagues said it wasn’t too difficult to organize the documents they’d needed. Can’t hurt to get it and I’m curious to know more about the process. 

T minus 12 years: I hear they’re now designing a test that people will have to take in the future, unless you apply now and are grandfathered in. (Or grandmothered, right?) I need to get this figured out now and skip the test, thank you. (That was one benefit of having started with GIS in the early 1990s. Remember when we used to have to type things in at the command line? Remember when you could test for dangles by telling the program to display them in red, and then you could “kill” them and build clean topology? Those were the days.) 

T minus 11 years: Wow, really? The deadline to grandfather in is really this December 31? Like December of this year? As in, a few months from now? Ugh, work is really busy. Hmmm. Maybe they’ll extend it. 

T minus 10 years, 11 months: Bummer. 

T minus 5 years: Yea, I know, I keep thinking about it. I mean, I don’t really need it for my actual day job right now but a few of my students have asked me about it. Not sure what to tell them. Are they aspiring to be a GIS analyst? GIS manager? GIS coordinator? What do the job descriptions say? Are they learning what they need to know? Do I know what they need to know? Do I know what I need to know? Did I ever tell you about when we had to write AML code to get a map to print? 

T minus 2 years: This is silly. Just get the damn thing. You know you’re curious. You haven’t taken a standardized test since the late 1980s but you weren’t scared of them then. Be bold! Be proud! You’ve got this! I create a new folder on my computer called “GISP” and do an online search for test prep materials. Download a mishmash of things. Make a mental note to start reading them. 

T minus 1 year, 10 months: Create an account on the GISCI website and start the portfolio documentation process. Try to remember the conferences I’ve been to, the webinars I’veattended, the papers and articles I’ve written, the classes and workshops I’ve taught — many more than I need right now. Gently kick myself for not having gotten organized to do the grandfathering thing years ago. Wipe up the spilt milk and get over it.

T minus 1 year: I really ought to study one of these days. Almost 45% of the exam is on “Design Aspects & Data Modeling” and “Data Manipulation.” I haven’t been asked questions about those topics in a long time, though I “do” those things with my students and for my own occasional projects. If you do something, you should be able to pick a correct answer from a multiple-choice test, right? Right? Except, let’s be real, I don’t do those things every day. For every hour in a class that I spend on schemas, domains, and user permissions, I spend another hour encouraging my students to remember, “What did you name it and where did you save it?” Hmmm. This is going to be interesting. 

T minus 7 months: Mention to a colleague that I am planning to pursue my GISP. He is the top GIS executive in a nearby county and is amused that I am putting myself through the process. Says that they don’t go out of their way to hire anyone because of having this credential, though it doesn’t count against the person if they do. Well I should hope not! He concurs that it does demonstrate at least a basic amount of knowledge around a breadth of GIS topics. That’s what a credential is — external evidence that one has satisfied a minimum set of standards to be considered suitable or suited for something. He’s reserving judgement about what else the credential may one day represent or offer. We figure the profession and its practitioners own the process and the outcome, so it can set its standards high and follow through. 

T minus 4 months: Take a few hours on a snowy Saturday afternoon to finally complete the portfolio, then prepare to pay a healthy sum of money to submit it for review. Gulp. That’s a lot of money for something that’s not a necessary condition for my employment. Experience a powerful sense of disinclination. Doubt my commitment. Question my motivations. Listen to the voice in my head that says I know I want to prove to myself that I can do this. Hit the submit button. 

T minus 3 months: Woo-hoo, my portfolio was approved. One significant hurdle left. Now it’s really time to study for the exam. Stop by my office to grab a few books about things I may or may not once have known. I stack them neatly and with great anticipation in a pile next to my reading chair. If I make the stack tall enough, it can double as a resting place for coffee mugs.

T minus 6 weeks: Get sucked down a few internet rabbit holes for my search on “Should I get the GISP.” Wow, there are some bitter people out there! Sometimes I envision a GISP plate being balanced and spun about on the tip of a pole. There’s a lot of GIS that we think could fit on to that plate and the process to sample from it can come from anyone in the restaurant, from any professional discipline that might somehow intersect with GIS. Know too much from one side of the plate and don’t know (or care) about the other portions, there’s a good chance it’ll tip the wrong way. Is there enough steadiness with GIS to have it be a meaningfully full and balanced plate? Will a demand for broadly-trained GIS professionals be enduring enough to warrant having knowledge across all parts of the plate? Sideline skeptics need not be silenced, but more people with skin in the game should get involved too. It’s a big tent with space for many voices to make this the best it could be.

T minus 3 weeks: If I review material for 30 minutes every day from here out, I can still fit in about 10 more hours of studying before the test. That will be enough at this point. 

T minus 2 weeks: Well, that didn’t work. If I review material for 20 minutes every day from here out, I can still fit in about 5more hours of studying before the test. That will have to be enough at this point.

T minus 8 days: Manage to carefully read and take notes from several consecutive chapters in a current and well-regarded GIS textbook. Focus on the content that I haven’t dealt with in a long time, much of which also happens to be the stuff that changes most rapidly in this dynamic field of ours. The test is taking place in the days right before the absolute busiest time of my work year but there is no good time. Just get it done.

T minus 4 days: Need to mow the lawn. Need to study. It’s going to rain later today. The yard is big and the grass is long. I mow. My mind wanders to GIS. Push the mower up the fields and across the records. Stop (in a cell) and dig out clippings from the mower vent. If I were in a raster cell, what would the resolution be to have this pixel be considered grass? What commercial satellites could detect how many weeds were in this pixel? What temporal resolution would I need to capture the explosion of dandelions in the last few days? If I classify the whole dang yard into two raster categories of grass and dandelions, what would its table look like if I compressed it with run-length encoding? I struggle to push the mower up the steep slope on the side of the house. Does this show up on a DEM? Forget about the whole slope, I’ll just cut a few swaths across. Like contour lines. A line on a map joining points of equal elevation. . But not truly all equal. I’ll set my mowing standards low, to allow for a high proportion of the lines’ predicted values to be 50 percent plus or minus from its stated value, based on my contour interval. I pause to pick up a small stick and throw it towards the fire pit. It misses. I throw another. It too misses and falls far away from the first one. I have been neither precise nor accurate. I later recount to my husband all that I have reviewed. For both of our sakes, he hopes this process ends soon. 

T minus 1 day: We’re invited to a friend’s home for dinner. I can’t go, I say, I have to wake up early in the morning and drive an hour away to take a long test. Bring your flash cards, they say, we’ll quiz you. Flash cards? Someone should make a set as a study aide. Union! Intersect! Merge! Dissolve! Geoid! Ellipsoid! Spheroid! Datums! Conformal! Conic! Equal Interval! Quantile! What a fun social evening that would have been! (Insert rolling eyes emoji here). 

T plus 1 day: Don’t know results yet. Driving home from the 4-hour exam I had small waves of confidence when I think about a question that I know I must have gotten right, countered with small waves in the other direction when I remember having no clue and laughing out loud (quietly, testing in progress). I had some time at the end of the exam to review my responses. A little exhilarating, a lot exhausting, mixed in with a healthy dose of self-questioning.  

T plus 10 days: Still don’t know results. The more time that passes, I’m increasingly uncertain which way the plate will tip. It was a worthwhile part of the process to be reassured about what I do know. I learned some new things along the studying path, and, sure enough, confirmed for myself that there’s plenty that I don’t know well. Going forward I’m better prepared to coach the students who might want to pursue this on their own. This geospatial credential is definitely not needed for everyone, but I feel even more strongly that if we care about this profession and want to promote it for the long haul, engaging with this one piece of the professionalism process is one small and worthwhile personal step to take.

P.S. Directions Magazine is pleased to share the news that Diana Sinton did indeed pass the exam and will proudly join the ranks of fellow GISP holders worldwide.

You might be interested in:

Podcast: What You Need to Know about GISP Certification – Requirements, Benefits and Study Tips

GIS Jobs: Current Industry Expectations

GIS Jobs of Today series 

Esri’s 15th annual Education GIS Conference began on Saturday, July 12 in San Diego and ran for three full days. More than 750 people registered, about 40% of whom were first timers. The breakdown of attendees was roughly 70% higher education, 25% K-12 and 5% other. Here are the ideas that I think are valuable to share. (There is more Education GIS Conference coverage at All Points Blog.)

ArcGIS Online as a Textbook

New Orleans in 12 Movements is an interdisciplinary three-week course taught at Bucknell this spring. As development proceeded it became clear that the spatial perspective would be key. Janine Glathar, GIS specialist in Bucknell's Library & IT Division, helped the faculty create an online GIS textbook used as the basis for lectures, student exploration, data collection and student assignments. Glathar noted In Time and Space as a resource for those looking into these sorts of texts.

University of Richmond Engages Students with Campus Map

Andrew Pericak, who just graduated from the University of Richmond and will attend Duke in the fall for graduate school, was a key player in enhancing the campus map. He helped the Geography Department enhance its map with valuable, meaningful, student-collected data. Getting students involved, getting access to a physics department drone to capture photos, and using the technology were the easy parts. Convincing administrators to adopt the changes was the hard part, per Kimberley Klinker, Professor of Practice, Geography, Director, Spatial Analysis Lab. As is true outside the university: tech is easy, people are hard. Still, the successful engagement of students in authentic work suggests to me that it’d be worth the “people-side” effort to explore such efforts on other campuses.

Defining and Rewarding Spatial Universities

Jack Dangermond appointed University of South Carolina’s Dave Cowen professor emeritus to explore defining and perhaps creating a “top ten list” of spatial universities. We had an energetic discussion about the why, how and who of such an idea. While details are still in development, there was general agreement that setting a bar to which universities might aspire would only enhance use of spatial technology and thinking across campuses. Keep an eye on this effort; Cowan expects to share some details for how the project will move forward next year.

Engaging New GIS Students with Messy and Active Lessons

Richard Kos of San Jose State University tackled a favorite topic of mine: student engagement. He offered a few simple but memorable and active projects to get “new to GIS” students engaged.

• peeling oranges to understand the challenges of projections
• locating themselves on the grid on a tiled floor to make sense of coordinate systems
• using Model Builder early in the class

These and other techniques have remained in his curriculum because they work. Some students roll their eyes at the initial suggestion of such “childish” activities. My experience suggests that activities that work with young learners work just as well (and sometimes better) with more experienced learners. Others agree.

Archiving Mobile Student Apps

Jennifer Swift of USC teaches mobile geospatial application programming. For many of her students, this is their first real programming course. The final project is, of course, building their own app. She has students make videos of the app for future reference as they are likely to be deleted from a current phone. And, they may not run on a future (different OS) phone. We had a lively discussion about her choice to run the course on Android devices rather than iOS.

ArcGIS Online as Content Management and Grading System

Mary Beth Booth of Austin Community College teaches GIS three ways: residence, hybrid and fully online. And, she teaches each using both ArcGIS for Desktop and ArcGIS Online. She has her students work in ArcGIS for Desktop, but upload map packages for her review and grading via ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Online, she observes, acts very much like acontent management system (which it is). She doesn’t worry too much about credits: students do mostly “non-credit requiring” tasks in ArcGIS Online such as uploaded map packages.

SpatiaLABS: The Next Generation

SpatiaLABS was at one time a “for fee” package of lessons from Esri aimed at universities teaching GIS. Then Esri removed the fee. Then Esri added a Creative Commons license so teachers could repurpose parts or all of the content of a lesson. That progression is admirable. Unfortunately, tools to search the materials are still limited. But, help is on the way! Diana Sinton,the series editor, has a prototype toolset on her TeachGIS website. For now, it allows searching and sorting of the lessons. To download a whole lab (~8 Mb file), users are directed to the Esri website. I’m in favor of any tools that make any lesson easier to find and use.

GIS in Language Learning

Trevor Shanklin of the Language Acquisition Resource Center at SDSU isn’t a GIS person, but a language person. He sees the value of integrating mapping and geography into basic language study and study abroad programs. The center’s students who studied abroad in Italy took photos and wrote about cultural sightings during their time in the field via an app byPriyanka Torgalmath, who used the project as his master’s thesis (pdf).This kind of implementation of GIS seems like a great and natural way to extend use of GIS on campuses that teach foreign languages or offer study abroad.

Lack of an Esri Plenary

There was no Esri Education GIS Conference plenary where Esri told attendees “what was new” for educators at this year’s event. Instead, there were three nearly-two-hour, three person panels on K-12 education, highereducation and campus sustainability. (I recapped the first two, but was unable to attend the third.) I was disappointed attendees did not hear from the Esri team about efforts that I see as important to this community, such as:

• ConnectED– What is it? How might the education community help?
• Learn ArcGIS– How might educators and students leverage the new, free website (Directions Magazine coverage)?
• GeoNET– How might educators use this new social network (All Points Blog coverage)?
• Esri U – What might be coming down the road to unite Esri education/training offerings for users and their potential for educators?
• Going Places with Spatial Analysis– How might educators and students leverage the upcoming Esri MOOC?
• Coaching Points Wiki on Practices for ArcGIS Online – Were all attendees aware of this resource for managing AGOL licensing/credits (All Points Blog coverage)?
• Changes in ArcGIS Online Credits for Educators – Are educators aware of the changes (noted in the Wiki)?

I understand some of these topics were covered in two “resources” sessions, one for K-12 and one for higher education. I think those sessions, or at least selected content, should have been highlighted in an Esri-focused plenary.

Our December 9th podcast
exploring PhDs in geography and GIS included a request to listeners to
share their experiences and thoughts on these advanced degrees. Many
shared their personal stories and experiences, while others involved in
education offered their insights. This roundup may prove valuable to
those considering these advanced degrees.

Mirjam Maughan, of EPA Townsville, Australia, is exploring
how a PhD might be viewed in state government in that country. The
goal of such a degree? "My goal is to move away from being seen as a
GIS technician who pushes buttons, to a spatial analyst who can suggest
new ideas or methods in someone's project, or lead my own projects:
doing something that is 100% my interest."

Adam Spark at Kansas State is mixing
and matching his degrees. "I'm a PhD candidate, but not in GIS.
Rather I have a graduate certificate of GIS that I've completed along
with my PhD; that's a nice complement to my PhD work in Plant
Pathology."

David DiBiase, from Penn State University, thinks it will be some
time before PhDs really take off. "I think that the emphasis on the
vertical differentiation among credentials (e.g. PhD, MS, BS, AS) is
less important at this time than the horizontal distinction between
academic and professional degrees.

"The fact is that although more than 80% of graduate degrees are
professional (practice-oriented) master's degrees, very few
professional graduate programs focused on geographic information
science and technology are offered. I believe that PhD degrees in
GIS&T will remain rare until professional master's degrees in
GIS&T take root and prosper within colleges and universities."

Lucia Barbato, from Texas Tech University, shares the
story of gaining respect without a PhD. "With a master's degree I'm
considered 'non-tenured staff'. … A lot of people think I have a
doctorate, but I quickly correct them. But if I did have a PhD, I
believe I would have a lot more respect from other faculty. It has
taken a while for my colleagues to recognize that they need to bring us
in to help them write the GIS component 'before' they submit a
proposal. In the early years some of our colleagues thought of our work
as an add-on to their grants and treated us more as add-on
'contractors' and not as 'co-principal investigators' (an important
distinction in recognition at a university)."

Independent consultant Grady B. Meehan, Ph.D. has done
some work to integrate GIS and business education and thinks a PhD in
GIS is a good idea. "I developed a proposal to integrate master's
level GIS education with management education. The goal was to produce
'geo-aware' managers who could formulate clear business questions that
included a geographic component. … Furthermore, I also ran this idea
by an academic dean (who is a friend) who said if his school tried to
teach something called GIS in management, the business school dean
would tell him that business management is in his domain. From this, I
realized that many integrative, cross-disciplinary programs, (including
a business-GIS program), no matter how valuable, would run into
university political resistance, requiring much deliberation before
being implemented.

"…So, is a PhD in GIS a good idea? Yes, but its time is yet to come
in the business world. Some issues must be resolved as GIS develops in
the direction that the business world will understand. The business
world must see geography/GIS as it does applied statistics, a
discipline that offers value to business organizations. Advanced GIS
solutions require knowledge of business processes, (spatial)
statistics, geographic principles and theory, and how the technology
can be applied to provide valued business solutions."

Diana Sinton, director, Spatial Curriculum and Research, University of
Redlands, shares her take on current
geography PhDs and spatial analysis. "I think you'll find that
there are MANY people graduating every year with a geography PhD
focusing on 'GIS and GIScience.' The types of institutions that are
members of UCGIS – http://ucgis.org/ – would have GIS concentrations
within their geography programs for sure.

"Also, the growth recognition of 'spatial analysis' as associated with
other domains/disciplines has also spawned things like this new program
– a PhD in Spatially
Integrated Social Sciences at the Univ. of Toledo."