About me
I'm a geographer. I hold three degrees in geography and am currently employed as a Assistant professor in geography. My BS emphasized GIScience, my master's degree is in applied geography, and my Ph.D. has a heavy public health leaning, employing quantitative geographic methods. As a professor, I love teaching courses on Geographic Information Systems, and my research passion is in GIScience theory. I consider my work under the branch of technical geography and have been involved in research on a variety of spatial problems.
Before deciding to be a geographer, I considered several career paths. As a child, I wanted to be a paleontologist, and wanted to be a doctor of palentology just like Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. My parents discouraged this, warning me that it would take a lot of school and would likely never pay well. As a teenager, I wanted to be a pilot and took flight lessons for several years in pursuit of a licence, soloing a plane before I could drive. When I started college, I began as a history major and joined AFROTC with the intention of becoming a pilot for the military, with the major just being a box to check. I decided the Air Force wasn't for me after a few semesters, and switched away from a focus on aviation. Athough I didn't continue down that path, it influenced my passion for maps and navigation, and I'm still interested in planes today. After dropping AFROTC, my choice of major became much more important, and after I was told that most of the program graduates worked in the insurance industry, I decided to find something else, ultimately settling on geography after browsing the University course catalog. I ended up with an minor in history in addition to my geography degree instead. This experience with history has helped me read and digest literature for publications, and it is beneficial when lecturing on any topic. All this is to say, I have had many false starts resulting in a range of interests, and while I can't always apply this knowledge base to my day job, I can while editing Wikipedia.
Motivation for Editing Wikipedia
I started editing Wikipedia to correct an error on the Spatial analysis page. Then, I used it to procrastinate real-world responsibilities while waiting for replies from journal reviewers, editors, and advisors. Since then, working on Wikipedia has motivated me to review literature and practice writing. In addition to forcing me to read papers on topics I'm working on, this helps encourage me to read material outside my narrow focus and older material central to geography. This has resulted in improvements to my professional writing, as I often find myself referencing material I would never have read otherwise. I recommend grad students and researchers try this a few hours a week by either editing as they read and come across information that could be included or finding pages that require sources and hunting them down. When I first started editing Wikipedia, I found the state of representation of geography to be lacking, to say the least. The main page for geography was a mess, in my opinion, and many topics I consider incredibly important had no representation at all. The state of maps on the project is even worse, with an entire category on category in Wikimedia Commons filled with misleading Choropleth maps that are used throughout Wikipedia, as well as many other examples of poor, and possibly intentionally misleading, map blunders. While this is still largely the case, I hope to help promote the discipline and avoid the misuse of geographic concepts by improving geography pages.
On a broader note, I believe it is the ethical responsibility of academics, cartographers, and subject matter experts in any field to improve the public-facing crowd-sourced literature when possible. This moves high-level academic knowledge into the sphere of public knowledge rather than hoarding it in the Ivory Tower, guild halls, or behind paywalls. As technology continues democratizing capabilities, ensuring the general public has access to the background information they need to employ the capabilities is essential. As many geographers know, others greatly misunderstand and misrepresent our discipline during this democratization process. Many disciplines have stumbled into the geography domain and rediscovered or appropriated our techniques, spreading our support thin. In a world dominated by specialists, broad generalist umbrellas like geography can be seen as redundant (a view I obviously reject), and while this is a problem for geography departments, it is a bigger problem when these techniques are misused and either accidentally or intentionally used to spread misinformation. The only way to correct this problem as Geographers is to Set A Good Example, which is my main motivation for editing Wikipedia (and the origin of my username). In the future, I hope activities like editing Wikipedia will be considered part of faculty outreach duties at universities. |
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