MapBrief™

Is there anything more tedious than some middle-aged dude spewing advice to the “young people”?  Of course not.  But because I’m writing it down, you can skim-read: win/win for both of us.

That you’re going to leave school and be ejected into a crap economy is now a certainty. Rather than say “sorry”–not a wholly productive emotion, to be honest–I’ll merely observe that in our emerging Information Economy, you’ve been particularly ill-served by bits of received wisdom whose sell-by date has passed.  You reserve your constitutional right as a twenty-something to blow off anything someone more than two years older says to you, but here goes anyway:

Portfolio instead of Resume

Let’s be blunt: we loathe reading your resume as much you hate writing it. That Word doc attached to the unsolicited introductory email promises us nothing but guaranteed irritation: font choice, layout decisions, and especially the ‘objective’ blurb. Resumes are for HR, and we’re not HR–you clear on that?  Happily though, we oldsters are almost as ADD on the web as you are, so if you send us a link to something you’ve done and posted on the web, that’s different. Because you only have to command our attention for 10 seconds i.e. the time it takes for your resume attachment to open.  It can be niche (“Couldn’t afford Spring Break, so snapped geotagged iPhone shots of the different turf grasses within a mile of my mom’s house and put them on Flickr“), it can be obscure (“Check out my statistical proof that Bubby Brister is the most effective backup quarterback in the last 40 years”), just don’t be bland or predictable. The Portfolio approach enables you to display a mind engaged with the surrounding world while the Resume is an artifact specifically designed for a bureaucrat’s needs.

 

Statistics instead of Calculus

In 2006, about three times as many students took Calculus AP exams as Statistics AP exams.  Naturally that pays dividends down the road as the best and brightest are integrating and deriving their way to a Comfortable Life.

Actually, no.

While not dismissing the virtue of intellectual rigor, nay beauty, of Calculus, nonetheless it’s statistical reasoning gets slaughtered on a daily basis, from the front-page of the newspaper to the quarterly earnings report.  And the dirty secret of the Information Economy is that it’s largely still a Raw Data Economy: organizations have wrestled with collecting and storing data, but deriving meaningful insight from these efforts? Illusive. At best.  Armed with a semester or two of stats, an inquiring mind, and a free copy of R Studio, and you could do major damage right from the get-go. Is Stats too often the lamest class ever? Of course–but search for your inspiration. Check out this breakdown of Rory McIlroy’s dominance at the US Open using z-scores:  geeky, but very do-ably geeky, and fairly straightforward to explain to the uninitiated.  In a word, money.

 

Programming as a Liberal Art

In the Information Economy, the traditional gulf between Engineering and the Liberal Arts ill serves you. Again, the challenge is to see programming not through prosaic eyes as a cryptic jumble of curly brackets and odd indentations, but as a method for gathering, inspecting, and re-presenting the world around you. If you’re already have a bit of a bent in that direction, then you can already dive in courtesy of MIT.

“That’s a little too technical, I’m more of a creative type.” False dichtomy: do not pass Go.  But I’ll let Ben Fry of Processing fame explain it better than I ever could:

 

Narrative Instead of Mere Facts

Those with the ability to intuit meaning from rows and columns of numbers work in finance: the rest of us tell each other stories. And there are those who know this too well e.g. a political discourse that cherry-picks facts only to serve the larger cause of simplistic emotionalism.  But you’re the generation that plowed through 4000 pages of Harry Potter, so you know the power of narrative as well as any. With the world ever more complicated there will be a greater need for nuance yet a greater temptation to fall back on the cheaply sentimental. Or a dry recitation of data that doesn’t convince anyone of anything. Far be it from me to insist on seeking out masters such as Chekhov and Munro, so I’ll back off and merely suggest strongly that you check out masters such as Chekhov and Munro.

 
Initiative and Experience

A mistake of youth is to engage in all manner of contortions to mimic the experience of their elders: if you’re in your 20s, no one expects you to have a ten year track-record in anything.  But what you can demonstrate is initiative. Sure, the job market is tough, but the opportunities for self-learning are unprecedented. While the college admission process in place now severely penalizes the Knucklehead Teenager, if you pull yourself together as a Motivated Young Adult, top-drawer institutions such as Stanford and MIT are giving the knowledge away. In the everyday world self-reliance and initiative are the great differentiators, not SAT scores.

OK, you have things to do; I have things to do.  Best of luck.

 

—Brian Timoney

 

 

 

That the web mapping explosion of the past few years has ushered in a new Golden Age of Cartography has been noted more than once (here, here, and here). But what is really exciting is that the increasing variety of tools for map-making are engaging folks from a variety of disciplines, including the emerging field of Information Design. For those of us with traditional GIS training, the delight of encountering great cartography in unexpected places is tempered by the realization that while we GISers are good at making maps, we seem especially adept at making ugly maps.

Recently, this issue of Ugly got an interesting airing on LinkedIn (of all places). Opinion ranged from aesthetics-are-important to just-get-the-data-to-line-up to the reliably defensive you-callin’-my-map-ugly?  I think back to my first introductory GIS course where we learned the old chestnut that 80% of a GIS project’s budget is taken up by data acquisition and whipping it into usable shape.  By the time it comes to making the final product–a map–there’s been enough wailing and gnashing of teeth that the default color palette and the generic symbol set seem plenty OK.  That, and your project is over-budget and past its deadline.  Little wonder then, that Ugly in GIS became Good Enough.

 

 

Another equally important thing I learned in grad school is that one never wants to be accused of heteronormative essentialism. Around the grad school seminar table, that’s the male equivalent of being Hester Prynne. But even though I’m a guy, I occasionally notice things.  Like my first line of defense against the onslaught of Ugly is the indispensable Color Brewer, the brainchild of Cynthia Brewer at Penn State. Like looking up “GIS cartography” on Amazon brings up Gretchen Peterson’s  GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. Like ESRI’s Mapping Center, headed up by Aileen Buckley, is almost evenly divided between men and women. In an industry numerically dominated by front-pleated khaki-wearing dudes (author included), such data points are something other than mere coincidence.

And since the singular form of data is anecdote, I’ve noticed in my own consulting work that my female clients are much more willing to articulate their reactions to my design decisions.  At the other end of the critical spectrum are my overwhelmingly male Oil & Gas clients for whom there is no combination of garish yellows, reds, and greens that will elicit more than a grunt or a shrug. Like being on a group camping trip, as long as no one showers, the pungent funk goes unnoticed.

 

Besides being a well-intentioned shout-out to the design eye of the ladies, why does any of this matter?  Because good design enhances comprehension.  As the stories we are trying to tell with maps become more multivariate and nuanced, the penalty for thoughtless design is at best puzzlement, at worst misunderstanding. We have arrived at a point where the ‘general user’ does notice the difference in cartographic presentation between Google Maps, Bing, Mapquest, and Open Street Map. And as we’ve been told ad nauseum in the past week, the genius of Steve Jobs was understanding average folks form intimate attachments to great design.

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This past weekend, we were inundated with online maps of Hurricane Irene and its menacing of the East Coast. In the aftermath, I came across this interactive map by the New York Times –the pace-setters when it comes to online information design. Clean layout, easy navigation, and a variety of thematic mapping techniques all making bulky, multivariate data accessible to the average user.  Scrolling down to the bottom, I noticed the authors: Joe Burgess, Amanda Cox, Alicia Parlapiano, Archie Tse, Lisa Waananen and Tim Wallace.

A new golden age indeed.

 

 

—Brian Timoney

There comes a time around late morning of the second day of a vendor conference where it dawns on one that particular terminology, certain phrasings, are echoing from the keynote stage to the demonstration kiosks. The presumption of authentic communication misplaced, one despairs not of Orwellian doublespeak (let’s not flatter these people), but of the sales pitch masquerading as naturally volunteered information. Sometime in the run-up to the show, the in-house indoctrination orientation slide deck became mandatory reading, lovingly crafted by someone with an MBA, probably in Marketing and Communications.

 
At FOSS4G next month in Denver, one needn’t fear the company line–there won’t be one. Instead we’ll have a republic of voices: deeply knowledgeable voices that belong to real people not regurgitating pre-approved mantras. I’m looking forward to talking in person to so many folks whose stuff I’ve read and learned from online. Not only the bigwigs of geospatial blogging, but also more niche voices with a knack for passing on well-timed nuggets of specialized know-how.

Glancing over the RSVP list, here are a few of those voices who will be in Denver: