A recent opinion piece by Kirk Goldsberry (PhD 2007), visiting scholar at Harvard University, gained a good deal of attention because it advocated for a return of a geography department to that august institution. Sensors & Systems (S&S) special correspondent Matteo Luccio spoke with Goldsberry about his background, about the need to reveal spatial patterns, and about the importance of geography:
S&S: Why did you decide to study geography? Goldsberry: I was an undergraduate meteorology major at Penn State and was required to take some geography courses. I took a landforms class with Cindy Brewer and that turned me on to geography and I never looked back. Cindy had these hauntingly gorgeous slides of landscapes and she had such a conversational style in the lecture hall—it blew me away, and she became my favorite professor at Penn State. I signed up for all of her classes, and she teaches the best cartography classes in America. Years later, as a professor of cartography myself at Michigan State University, I was trying to copy her style, but was never quite as good. So, the decision was accidental in the sense that I stumbled into a geography course as a requirement for my original major at my university.
S&S: What are some of the most interesting research questions in geographic visualization today? Goldsberry: About ten years ago Mark Harrower, who was one of my TAs at Penn State and became a really good professor of cartography himself, said that the bottleneck in terms of visualization was no longer computation but the cognitive abilities of the observers or the users. That’s even truer today and we haven’t really come as far as you’d think in terms of streamlining these things or optimizing communication from a cognitive perspective. For the first thirty or forty years of the field, in terms of computational cartography or visualization, the challenge for Tobler, Clarke, and Dangermond was really just making these maps, building these analytical devices, making data-driven things with the computer. That was hard, but they made incredible strides, and we’ve all benefited from their toil. That’s not hard anymore. Now the challenge is how can we optimize these devices as communicative forms. Unfortunately, Harrower moved on to other pursuits, and I don’t think many researchers today are making the kind of strides we need in that domain.
S&S: How can the applications of geographic technologies help us better understand the world around us? Goldsberry: I don’t think there’s really anything new there. Maps continue to play a huge role in helping “us” understand the world. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. We have a few new buttons to push, but I don’t think we should be seduced by those technological changes and pretend that these recent shifts are more significant than they actually are. What academics are now labeling “GIScience” can help by getting spatial thinking into the minds of more human beings. If there’s one valid criticism of mapping that I think is very fair, it’s about the “us” that you mention. We are a small group and availability of mapping technology has never been widespread—GIScience has certainly not really changed that unfortunate truth. In most countries, most citizens have never even seen things like Google Maps or other technologies so easily accessible to “us.” So, it’s a great question with many answers. The one I’m going to give you has to do with spreading the word, spreading access to the technology, getting it into more hands, helping more human beings achieve basic spatial understandings.
S&S: What is your best argument as to why Harvard, or any university, should have a geography department? Goldsberry: Every university should have a geography department because thinking spatially, reasoning spatially, quantifying things spatially, and communicating things spatially are ridiculously vital in the “big data” era. There are many disciplines that can help you learn to do some of that, but I believe in my heart that geography has a huge seat at that table. I haven’t encountered any other departments at any university where our kind of emphasis on spatial reasoning is nearly as strong, and so as we race headlong into the big data era and all these things have huge spatial components, I think there’s an easy argument to make about why we need these students to have geographic education. Put another way, what is your best argument as to why these departments should not exist?
S&S: Should a college geography curriculum now differ fundamentally from what it was 30 or 50 years ago? If so, how? Why? Goldsberry: Yes and no. I think there’s a tendency in universities to treat GIS as if it is a technology and I think that’s where we run into a wall and why administrators start to doubt us. Universities are not trade schools. The key is to link the emerging technologies with age-old reasoning techniques—the kinds of formulations that the geographers have been doing for a very long time. So linking Ptolemy to John Snow’s map to GIS, for instance. The key is saying that these are new technologies but that they are only helping us understand age-old questions. Where I see a lot of the curriculum running into difficulty is when it becomes about pushing buttons on a software platform and not about problem-based learning. So, it should obviously differ in the sense that there’s more technology in the classroom, but it should not differ so much that it’s not
Editor’s note: The complete interview can be read here; also see the UCSB Geography News article of October 7, 2013, “Alumnus Kirk Goldsberry Stresses the Importance of Data Visualization.”
.jpg)
