MapBrief™

With the arrival of autumn my Saturday afternoon meditative trinity of couch, college football, and napping is occasionally interrupted by one of those IBM Smarter Cities commercials. Though I’m generally irritated by anyone cheerfully telling me they’re building a “smarter planet”, I find the case studies interesting enough for 30 seconds of my attention. Their website has additional info on their urban problem-solving–infrastructure, public safety, education, etc.–invoking terms such as sensors, analytics, and modeling. You know what term doesn’t come up in their pitch?

GIS

Despite the inherently spatial nature of their problem solving, when smart, handsomely remunerated folks such as IBM show little interest in an acronym that supposedly defines an industry, I take notice.

How then are we to reconcile the increasing prominence of mapping with the ever-more-obvious inadequacy of the ‘GIS’ acronym?

GIS as a Desktop Paradigm

We all learned the textbook definition of GIS being a system of storing, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying geographic information.  In a workstation/PC world, having these disparate functions in one place made eminent sense.  With the ascent of the web, and now mobile, GIS has remained a steadfastly desktop paradigm with its nested-menu workflows, file-based data management, export-to-PDF outputs.  To be clear, this market isn’t going away:  indeed the embrace of the GIS paradigm by state/local government + DoD/DHS  mean a continuing stream of entry-level analyst jobs calling for tasks that haven’t changed dramatically in 10-15 years.  When a vendor touts new Excel-to-map functionality in 2012, it’s like Microsoft MapPoint 2003 never happened, let alone that little beta project known as Google Fusion Tables.

 
Geodatabase Management is to Database Management as Military Music is to Music

The continued presence of GIS database middleware in an era where SQL Server, Oracle, and Postgresql/PostGIS all come equipped with native spatial capabilities (the latter two handle raster) has important consequences. First, DBAs in IT want nothing to do with GIS implementations mediated by quirky middleware.  So all of that training and background in database management best practices, etc. doesn’t reach the GIS department.  Instead some GIS analyst with time-in-grade but with little database background and less SQL, is “managing” geospatial data via wizards and dialog windows.  In our era of “endorsed skills” in LinkedIn, GIS remains the only branch of IT where folks talk confidently of database experience without having a rudimentary grasp of SQL, let alone views, triggers, and other everyday DBA tasking.

The Enterprise has Yet to Reckon With the Costs of the GIS Silo

…and they’re staggering.

We talked about geospatial having its own special databases siloed off from IT’s primary database cluster.  But let’s not kid ourselves: what ends up in the geodatabase is a fraction of an enterprise’s valuable spatial data. Behold the typical  C:\ drive in a GIS shop:   shapefiles, MrSID files, and linked Excel spreadsheets ( attributes!).  Because that’s where we do our everyday work (“what if the SDE goes down?”).

In the Utilities and Oil & Gas sectors, they talk about the “Big Crew Change” when the Baby Boom cohort retires en masse.  Leave aside the institutional knowledge and the informal know-how that only comes from experience:  think of the disk drives.  Tens of millions of dollars worth of information left behind as files fall innocent victims of lax data management inside the GIS silo.

GIS Doesn’t Grok the Web

Try finding the “authoritative” version of your property boundary on the Internet. Your county has an enterprise geodatabase and a bewildering map portal, that may or may not be linked from the local gov homepage that channels www.yahoo.com circa 1997.  How about Googling your address?  Sorry, real estate folks figured out the web long before GIS people, and they have the SEO to prove it.  Web users come to us for (quick) information, but instead we too often we give them…

Geographic-Information-System in-a-browser™

When Google Earth and Google Maps stormed onto the scene, GIS professionals sniffed that it wasn’t “real GIS”. Of course, Google proved the masses didn’t mind that it wasn’t real GIS–whatever that was–and their basemaps and new easy-to-use file format KML led the web mapping revolution.  GIS seems slowly to be letting go of their fascination with portals by making it easier to publish to the web directly from, you guessed it, the desktop.

With wizards and such.

The GIS Career Trajectory Ends Up In a Cul-de-Sac

By all accounts, GIS is a “hot” field: especially with the DoD/DHS post 9/11 environment, entry opportunities abounded.  Leave aside what’s happening with government budgets at all levels, simply sidle up to an industry veteran between, say 35 and 45, and simply ask “how’s it going?”  Because the fork in the mid-career road leads to either “Programmer/Developer” or “Project Manager”.  And because GIS operates in its own silo-ed world away from IT, you might have worked with geodatabases but don’t know SQL or may have published web maps but don’t know much Javascript/CSS.  Suddenly spatial doesn’t feel so special.

This announcement or GIS Coordinator in Steamboat Springs is all too typical:  a variety of disparate responsibilities and a large breadth of technology with a salary that doesn’t make it to $60K.  But look at the requirements for  SDE Administration and Versioning.  Imagine instead whether had experience in administering an Oracle Spatial database using SQL and mainstream DBA practices.  A few years of that under your belt and you’re looking at $90K plus you’re liberated from the expectation of administering the HP Plotter (as listed in the above job announcement).  The GIS silo:  relatively painless to enter, but an all-too-easy place to stagnate.

Who Will Tell The Kids the Future is in Databases, Algorithms, and Visualization?

Anyone who works in technology has to be prepared to be whip-lashed by change. But those who make money imparting wisdom and skills to the younger generation have a particular obligation recognize the contours of the new landscape.  I sense that students planning to enter the job market of 2014 will be largely equipped with a 2004 set of problem-solving skills.  This will be the subject of a future post.

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An Acronym Falls Victim to the Law of Diminishing Returns

Spatial analysis,”location”, “geospatial”, and mapping will only increase in prominence and importance.  But to continue to jam all of that manifold possibility into a fusty, catch-all acronym may serve as a convenient marketing hook, but the costs to our companies and our careers of this self-limiting definition of what we do are too significant to ignore.

The future has a way of arriving on one’s doorstep without calling ahead, albeit not neatly packaged nor clearly labelled.

 
—Brian Timoney

In the final weeks of grad school, I asked a seemingly natural, innocent question of a classmate–

“What kind of job are you looking for, something in GIS?”

<with contemptuous snarl>

“GIS? I’m a cartographer.“

And so it goes:  cartographers are the artists and we GIS people are mere data drones.  But there are a couple of shortcomings to this divided state of affairs.  First, there are way more GIS people cranking a lot more maps than our less numerous cartographic brethren.  Secondly, not only do GIS people give birth to many, many more maps than cartographers, the majority of our offspring are homely, with some downright ugly.

The Economist was apparently running low on 'Y' and 'M' ink that week

Most Don’t Have Time/Inclination for the GIS + Illustrator-Photoshop Workflow

It’s not about the GIS masses throwing on black turtlenecks and plopping down $1100 for Adobe Creative Suite: most of us will never get beyond the five things we’ve figured out in Photoshop (that can now be done for free in the browser at pixlr.com) and rudimentary vector editing in Illustrator.   The biggest issue is that we don’t have ‘the eye’ that can easily translate between tool and effect, and even a modestly complex .ai or .psd file is completely bewildering when trying to tease out from the layers window exactly “how did they do that.”

TileMill--advanced visual effects without the Adobe Creative Suite overhead

TileMill to the Rescue: Simplicity + Attainable Elegance

TileMill is a free, open-source cartographic studio that I’ve used for creating decent-looking web map tiles (it also exports to PDF, PNG, and SVG) without needing a desktop GIS in my workflow.  But with the new release, a whole slew of sophisticated compositing and masking effects have been added to the Mapnik rendering engine that bring Photoshop capabilities without Photoshop complexity.

I see what you've done there--and now I'm going to help myself to that CSS

CartoCSS:  Emulation through Copy-and-Paste

You can’t overstate the importance of having all of your styling specifications in one place, human-readable, and eminently copy-and-paste-able in a CSS grammar already familiar-ish from mainstream web development. Now we GIS people who freely admit to not having an eye for quality cartographic technique can do what we do best: steal from the more talented.  While ArcGIS has added considerably to its cartographic capabilities, I can’t copy great technique because those specifications, as Mr. Fee points out, are buried in multi-level, multi-tabbed, modal form hell. As for the SLD standard put forth by the OGC, its XML-ish awkwardness and verbosity has prevented traction in most everyday workflows.

Let’s Spread Cartographic Best Practices Far and Wide

As a non-dues-paying, non-member of NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society), I nonetheless offer the excellent advice that CartoCSS + free cross-platform design software offers an unbeatable opportunity to disseminate best practices and techniques far and wide.  Throw a few grand at a couple of talented grad students to show us aesthetically-challenged what we should be doing…with data and CartoCSS samples: we can figure it out from there and make our world of GIS maps noticeably more aesthetically pleasing.

We Can DO This--or at least someone with talent can do this and the rest of us can happily imitate

—Brian Timoney

There’s no more persuasive evidence that we’re in the twilight of the “Rock Star” than its appropriation by the tech sector to mean little more than someone with a penchant for wearing black and an inflated self-regard. But there are still a few true rock stars still plying their craft, including Bruce Springsteen who, in his 40th year touring as a major-label artist, is criss-crossing the US in support Wrecking Ball, his latest record, album, melange of mp3 tracks.

Though Kennedy Center honors and long New Yorker profiles threaten to enbalm him in Icon Emeritus status, the current 3½ hour shows he’s doing now are as much about the loud, vital present as reflections on the passage of the decades. As a geographer, 1500+ shows over 40 years is an opportunity to map Springsteen’s career as a study in spatial diffusion–how phenomena such as innovation, fashion, or disease spread geographically.  Except in this case the contagion is rock ‘n roll:

To understand what you’re seeing in the YouTube video above, keep the following in mind:

• each red dot is a performance (data courtesy of the Killing Floor database)
• the intensity or “heat” generated is a function of the location of a show, the size of the venue, and inversely correlated with the overall population within 40km of the concert location. So for instance, a single arena show in New York City will generate less heat than a single arena show in Omaha, NE
• there is a tapering effect applied so returning to a particular area within a few months will reflect a cumulative heat effect (**Click here for interactive map version)

Here are some of the things I observe–

Two Advantages of Starting Out in Central New Jersey

From strictly a population geography standpoint, in the early 1970s you couldn’t do better than being equidistant between New York City (largest city) and Philadelphia (#4): over 20 million souls within a two-hour drive.  Just as important, the Jersey Shore provided a unique, accessible symbolic resonance to audiences that resonates as a Place.  (In stark contrast to the way a million bands from Brooklyn today fail to convince the rest of us of the intrinsic awesomeness of…Brooklyn.)

How To Go Viral In the Pre-Internet Era

The persistence of Springsteen’s popularity along the I-95/I-80 axes has its origin in racking up serious mileage on the college gym circuit (Stony Brook, Grinnell, Niagara, Widener, et al).  In larger cities, as was more of the custom back in the day, he often played a couple a shows a night for multiple nights in a row.  Think of the difference in the word-of-mouth impact when someone gushes over an unknown act they saw the night before:  today you might file it away and hope to catch them the next time they’re in town months down the road, back then he was still around playing shows for the rest of the week.

And if you’re staking the success of your band on the power of your live show don’t be the opening act.  Better to headline a smaller venue than to tag along as the opener in a larger venue.

**Click image above to launch interactive Google map

Big Hits Trigger Hierarchical Diffusion

We can see both on the map, as well as record sales, three notable inflection points in Springsteen’s career:

1. “Born To Run” in 1975 was the spring-board to being a truly national, with the follow-on records “Darkness..” and “The River” consolidating his status as a successful arena act.
2. “Born in The USA” in 1984 was his monster disc where you see the clearest distinction between ordinary expansion diffusion and hierarchical diffusion, where a mass phenomenon readily hops among large population concentrations less impeded by mere distance.
3. “The Rising” in 2002 saw the combination of very strong new material and the pent-up demand for a recently-reunited E Street Band result in a strong slate of both arena shows as well as stadium dates.  It also added a younger cohort of fans to the ever-loyal “base” that have made successive tours more vibrant than mere exercises in Baby Boomer nostalgia.

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In the broader context of 500 years of a Western culture becoming  ever more individualistic, its major creeds increasingly more domesticated, the rock concert as an intense celebration of communal emotion is an echo of a type of religious expression many, many centuries old.  Indeed, what was following the Grateful Dead or Phish from city-to-city other than a contemporary analog of medieval pilgrimage?  Only from the cramped perspective of pop culture’s fixation on youth is a Bruce Springsteen or Leonard Cohen (77 years old and still doing four-encore 2½ hour shows) commanding the stage an oddity: our ancient forebears would immediately recognize that it’s the wise-man/shaman/entertainer who is best equipped to channel both what the audience wants to hear and what it needs to hear.

—Brian Timoney

UPDATE (9/14/2012): Nice shout-out from the Washington Post Wonkblog.

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