So long as you get the GIS&T of it
The world presents us with its unbounded complexity, and it is up to each of us to deal with this in our own way. While simplification might save us from sensory overload and decision paralysis, these same simplifications can often be a massive source of friction between the current moment and the desired outcome, and a huge stumbling block in communicating when they are not shared. I truly believe that a well-trained geographer has many of the skills and toolsets needed to slide through that friction to address these complexities, tackling the most pressing questions this world has to offer in a coherent and intelligent manner. GIScience and Technology (GIS&T) is a critical subset of those tools, and a great way to help frame and analyze the space around you, both literally and figuratively. I’ve gotten a lot of utility and benefit from learning, using, documenting, and teaching these topics and it is my hope that I can pass some of that knowledge along to you. I’ve placed a lions share of my teaching portfolio and notes here for the benefit of all and my own selfish desire to streamline my digital footprint. This site, like myself, is a constant work in progress. I’ve attempted to standardize my formatting but you have landed on the accumulation and synthesis of almost every project I’ve worked on, class I’ve taught, and more than a quarter of a century of technical development since I first attempted (and miserably failed) to host a website. That is to say, you might find a few inconsistencies. I also write this site in markdown-ish using at least 2 apps, so spellchekc and local testing only take me so far. If you find errors (spelling, formatting, or otherwise), or if something needs clarification or fixing please reach out!
As a general note: While I reread and revisit the links you’ll find across this site frequently; I point to them as resources and references and you do not need to buy, subscribe, or log in to anything you do not want to. Otherwise, feel free to lurk along with my adventure! I’ve found GIS to be a profoundly useful tool that helps me add structure, reason, and logic to this otherwise variable world, and my hope is that you’ll find your time here well spent, or at the very least take away a few useful tidbits and a flash of inspiration.
Site layout
Update:
Having rebuilt my system and transitioned into a consultant whose job seems to revolve around mimicking a software engineer, operationalizing the new and shiny, and delivering value in micro-increments as fast as possible; as opposed to an academic whose goal is to synthesize the domain for instruction and purposeful process improvements, more of my time now goes to updating my Atlas and not my classes. After losing a hard drive and the source files they were generated from, and a fundamental paradigm shift in content and form, they are in very rough shape. As soon as I find that time machine I’d like to get them back into a serviceable form, but for now, they are what they are.
Each lab will start off with an objectives section that outlines the analyses or skills the lab aims to teach. Following this, the requisite data and question document is attached. Page level navigation can be accomplished with the menu table of contents at the top-left of the page.
Sections (major parts of labs, navigation headings) will have a level 2 heading, and will look like so:
Independent unit analysis
Major steps you take in an analysis will generally have a level 3 heading, and look like this:
Digestible steps
Substeps or other milestones are in a level 4 heading like so:
Sub steps
Writing for technical documentation is awkward and unpleasant, but I’ll try and make it less so. If you need to click or select something I attempt to Bold them. This includes toolbar and options clicks. If I want you to write something out explicitly I’ll “typically quotation it”. If I’m directing you to an option to chose or an intermediate click in some sort of settings or sub tabs I’ll italicize it.
Notes (formatted like this) typically serve as asides, parentheticals, or image credits where appropriate.
{{% notice style=question color=“fuchsia” title=“There may be pirates” %}} Questions in the word documents you have to answer are also repeated in the tutorials like so. {{% /notice %}}
General Lab syllabus & help
The lab is a huge part of my teaching. Lectures can take you pretty far, but what you can accomplish in your own time is what you will be judged for. I have attempted to make these labs as consistent, organized, and followable as I can; but inevitably something would have updated with a breaking change, I will have missed something, or you will encounter an error. Fortunately for you, you happen to be sitting in front of one of the most powerful tools the world has ever assembled. I refer of course, to the magic rectangle you are currently staring at, and our overlords of Google, who make the internet searchable. Being able to effectively Google is critical to success, so if you ask me a question regarding what went wrong with your analysis, the conversation will generally play out like so:
You: I found an error, what did I do wrong?
Me: What was the error?
You: It was XYZ…
Me: What did you Google?
You: Not XYZ…
Me: What happens when you Google XYZ?
You: I find the 200,000 other people who have had this same issue along with a solution… and the 800,000 AI generated regurgitations of those solutions… and documentation 12 years ago on the first page… and then documentation from 2 weeks ago that is now obsolete once you limit results…
When in doubt, you can always try to execute something and then reverse engineer your way back. These are just PC’s and nothing we’ll do is mission critical. The worst thing you’ll do is cause the computer to BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), and although those aren’t great, they are not the end of the world and your work is backed up. It is backed up, isn’t it?
The following is my general checklist to follow as I debug:
Most of the time that gets me past my problem, and if the error message is less than helpful and there are no relevant Google results, you now have all the pieces needed to ask for help in public.
Grading
I dislike touching on this subject as I find it a bit counterproductive to the goal behind attending university, but it seems warranted given that is likely how you’ve ended up on this page :) There are many things I love about teaching, but gatekeeping is not one of them. A 4 year degree is a great signpost on your resume that says you are a well rounded and capable individual with the requisite background and theoretical foundation necessary to excel in your chosen field (and who has hopefully learned how to play well in the sandbox). However, I dislike that my say so (in the form of a pass or fail grade) can act as that barrier to your perceived success or failure. Even more so, a grade is one of the last things you as a learner should be concerned about. If you find yourself chasing points, in my mind you’ve playing the wrong game. You should be concerned about whether you understand the steps and rational behind the material, and how well you are able to apply that understanding to new situations. Although I have no wish to contribute to grade inflation via grade leniency, the bulk of the grading on these labs are as positivistic as math in that there is a right and wrong answer, and I do not grade on a curve. I will of course push you to do your best and go the extra step, but many of the labs are cut and dry when it comes to assigning a points value. If you do well, you get an A, and I’d rather not explore the alternative end of what that range is.
Finally, although it should be obvious at this point in your academic careers, under no circumstances is cheating tolerated. This includes but is not limited to plagiarism in papers; I’ve got a whole page dedicated to how to cite sources here, using previous students’ course material in quizzes and tests, and submitting others’ work, (including trained word vomits from learning algorithms) as your own. Not only does this detract from the overall integrity of the department and the school (the lesser of the evils in my mind), but cheating in these classes sets you up for disappointment and misery further down the line. You’ll have failed to adequately learn foundational concepts which lead to the more advanced skills that the world (and employers) are looking for and which all subsequent material will stand upon. In short, it is counterproductive to the very concept of attending college in the first place and sets you up for a world of friction down the line (credit to Dr. Brian Harvey as the inspiration for this framing). I am always available through email, slack, and office hours (or by appointment) and am here to help, so don’t do yourselves the disservice of cheating through what should otherwise be interesting and simulating material.
A note about “what language do I program in?”
I code out of necessity, not out of love, and I’ve been told my more than a few that I write awful code. More than half of the community will also think I code in the wrong language. If you forced me to “pick a language” I think I’d go with JavaScript, specifically the GEE flavored variation. Then it would be R. Then it would be Python. GUI driven tools are great for the one-offs or cartography, and I’ve recently made the switch to QGIS for almost everything exploratory. These days, the only reason I reach for ESRI solutions is for specific tasks like digitization and orthorectification. Almost everything else is markdown or a pdf in Zotero. Based on that ordering, you can probably infer how sweet I like my coffee (syntax sugar is key). However, software is simply the means of teaching those foundations and concepts; and it’s those that I hope to transfer to you. Regardless of the method, I’m Googling syntax errors in English so my real answer is “the one that works”. Where I have skill and time I’ve demonstrated how to accomplish a given task in as many different forms as possible, but if I were a real pro I would be doing this in Powerpoint using Word as my IDE. In a year this will all be outdated anyways, so again, focus on the concepts first and the vehicle second and you should be set up for success both now and 3 years from now once we’ve experienced a technical revolution or two. If you’re really interested, see my workflow for more on my setup.