Yet Another Geographer

Columbia GSAPP Lecture Series

Tuesday, I present on some of my research at the Lectures in Planning Series for the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The work is on some of my current papers & methods for boundary analysis, understnading the structure and shape of boundaries in urban envionments. I’ll talk a litte bit about my Geosilhouettes paper (with Eli Knaap and Serge Rey), as well as two other papers (one on Kernel Learning and another on information theory, with no preprint availble).

Disabling Technologies

On “Routine” Computing at Scale as a Disabling Technology Ever since I read Mark Gahegan’s discussion and definition of Geocomputation in preparation to run the AAG 2019 Urban Data Science Panel, something he wrote about has really stuck in my mind. Namely, his discussion of disabling technologies is both very cogent and intellectually flexible: Disabling Technology (Gahegan, 1999) The late 1970’s and early 1980’s saw the rise of databases; large monolithic systems that standardised on interfaces, file structures and query languages.

Q-Step Festival & Geosilhouettes

On the 11th, I’ll be speaking at the Q-estival at the University of Exeter’s Q-Step Centre. The Q-Step program is a program to promote a “step change” in quantitative social science skills in the UK. I’m the Bristol Geography lead for the program. I’m real excited to take my first trip out to Exeter, see the place, and talk about some interesting computational social science! In my talk, I’ll present some work I’ve done with Eli Knaap & Serge Rey on urban social boundaries.

Deep work and the reverse todo list

I recently finished reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work: rules for focused success in a distracted world. While it’s pretty reasonable advice (like the nugget “When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.” p. 154), there are a few really powerful parts that I found very affecting and reasonable. Since I bet most folks take one message from Newport’s very well-publicized media appearances, and that’s his digital minimalism message. While that’s a pretty important concept, it actually isn’t the main message in Deep Work.

Open Code is Not Enough

Towards a replicable future for geographic data science Levi John Wolf, Sergio J. Rey, & Taylor M. Oshan Over the next few days, I’ll be attending the Conceptualizing a Geospatial Software Institute Workshop at SESNYC. The original submission is here. In it, I detail how important it is to ensure that open source community is built along side open source software. Given the role open source plays in Open Science and the Open government initiative at the NSF, my collaborators and I felt it was critical to represent this perspective at the workshop.