What does a GeoHipster listen to? — Everything!

Music & Maps : A GeoHipster Mixtape

On most days, we listen to the soundtrack of work:  phones, email notifications, office chatter, or the sound of the city. For some of us, our daily soundtrack is a carefully curated playlist of our favorite tunes. Being in the latter group, music can provide the white noise needed push through an hour of getting the labels “just right”, or the inspiration that sparks the fix for that problem with your code.

I was curious about what others are listening to during the day – What does a GeoHipster listen to?

As you might expect, asking anyone who likes music to pick a few songs can be a near futile task. A desert island playlist would be drastically different from a top side one, track ones playlist. Making a mixtape is subtle art, there are many rules – like making a map. I recently talked to several of our interesting colleagues in geo to see what tunes get them through the day. I asked the impossible: pick  3 tracks they love to share for a mixtape.

A GeoHipster mixtape. 

For your listening and reading  pleasure we have hand-crafted a carefully curated playlist from the GeoHipsters below, complete with liner notes of the cool work they do while listening to the tracks they picked.

Ps. i couldn’t help but add a few selections of my own.
Sorry/Not Sorry
jonah



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Joey Lee @leejoeyk // Open Science Fellow at the Mozilla Science Lab

A font made from satellite imagery. WAT. Joey is one of the minds behind  Aerial Bold  – a kickstarter funded project that finds letters in buildings, ponds, trees, and everything else  in satellite imagery.

Generationals – “Reading Signs”
Banoffee – “With her”
Kings of Convenience – “I’d rather dance with you”


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Vicky Johnson @hurricanevicky // GIS Specialist at USAID via Macfadden

A self-admitting geogrump, Vicky regularly talks about maps, all things Buffalo, and nostradamus-style death predictions. Her writings on maps, like “The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids”  are some of best out there. Seriously. Read her stuff.

Ludovico Einaudi – Night
Michael Daugherty – Lex
Grimes –  Kill v Maim


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Jereme Monteau  @jerememonteau  // CoFounder & CTO @ Trailhead Labs

Jereme works on making trail data accesible and open. Through the smooth OuterSpatial platform he’s working on, organizations can provide beautiful maps of their trails, like the Napa County Regional Park & Open Space District

Jereme provided some DJ set links with the caveat:
“……Basically, for any kind of work, especially geo/maps. I’m into DJ sets, which is also kind of the only time I’m into DJ sets. :-)……”

https://soundcloud.com/atish/atish-038-september-2013-anti …
https://soundcloud.com/odesza/no-sleep-mix-04 …
https://soundcloud.com/robot-heart/eric-volta-robot-heart-burning-man-2014 …


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Amy Lee Walton @amyleew // Designer @Mapbox

Amy Lee’s recent map stylings like “Vintage” and “Blueprint” have wow’d us all and she continues to produce amazing examples of modern cartographic design.

The Beatles – I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Fetty Wap ft. Drake – My Way
Drake – Hotline Bling


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Jim McAndrew @jimmyrocks // Developer, CSU Research Associate at the National Park Service

Among many of the cool OpenStreetMap related work at NPS, Jim is working on synchronizing ArcGIS Online Services with the OpenStreetMap API via Places-Sync

Kraftwerk —Computer World
Boban I Marko Markovic Orkestar — Devla (Khelipe Cheasa)
Mad Caddies — Down and Out


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Lauren Ancona @laurenancona // Sr Data Scientist at City of Philadelphia

When she’s not sciencing the shit out of data, she’s learning all the things by making projects like Parkadelphia – a project that let’s everyone from Von Hayes to the pope view when and where they can park in Philly.

Farrah Fawcett Hair / Capital Cities
Genghis Khan / Miike Snow
Light Up / Mutemath


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Chris Pollard @CRVanPollard // Manager, Geospatial Application Development Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC – Philadelphia’s MPO)

When Chris isn’t fracturing bones from shredding rails, he’s spinning up apps like RideScore & CyclePhilly and for the greater Philadelphia region’s planning authority.

Beach Slang – “Ride the Wild Haze”
Interpol – Heinrich Manuever
Band of Horses – Laredo


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Mamata Akella @mamataakella // Senior Cartographer, CartoDB

Mamata’s cartography as inspired so many of us over the last few years. She cooks up fancy visualizations at CartoDB, and is giving us a special sneak peek at a current project – only to be described as….seismic!

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Ant Banks/ Mac Mall / Too Short / Rappin4Tay / E-40 – Players Holiday
Whitey Morgan and the 78s – I’m On Fire
Phoebe Ryan – Mine (The Jane Doze Remix)


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Will Skora @skorasaurus // Operations Manager at SVDP Cleveland

Way back in March of 2015, we interviewed Will for GeoHipster where he talked about his awesome project Marilliac , a hot meal finder app for Cleveland. More recently, he’s been working on transit data and isochrones with OpenCleveland’s RTA project.

BT – Dynamic Symmetry
Tim Hecker – Virgins (Virginal I or II)
The Future Sound of London – Lifeforms (Life Forms End)


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Atanas Entchev @atanas // O.G.

Our very own OG, Original GeoHipster , resident cross bike, definitely not fixie, driver and all around shaman of neo-modernist-post-classic-pre-retro map enthusiasts to the realm of geographic hipsterism.

The Alan Parsons Project – Turn of a Friendly Card
Marina and The Diamonds – Froot
Ryan Adams – Style


Got an idea for a topic (any topic) you want us to talk to GeoHipsters to? Let us know!

Will Skora: “I scraped an electronic list of pantries and set up a website”

Will Skora
Will Skora

Will Skora (Twitter, blog) likes to make and read maps and do geospatial analysis to help others understand the world. During the day, he manages food pantries for a Cleveland non-profit; he’s a member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team; co-organizes Cleveland’s Maptime chapter Open Geo Cleveland, and Cleveland’s Code For America Brigade, Open Cleveland.

Will was interviewed for GeoHipster by Atanas Entchev.

Q: On a scale of Clojure to Leaflet how hipster are you?

A:  I’ve used Esri products for about 10 minutes of my life.

Q: How (and why) did you get into GIS?

A: I was a recent college grad, still uncertain with my career direction, and looking for a map of Cleveland’s neighborhoods to hang on my bedroom wall. I couldn’t find one, so I decided to make my own. Growing up in Cleveland (the actual city, not a suburb), I’ve always been fascinated with cities. I never had taken any geography or GIS classes, so I wasn’t sure where to start. In my free time, I found OpenStreetMap, began editing my neighborhood, and used Osmarender to make my first map. Soon after, I found Tilemill, became addicted to editing OpenStreetMap and making web maps in Tilemill. I’ve participated remotely and in the field with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. I’ve fallen in love with maps, geography, and facilitating the use and creation of open data to help people understand things in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

Q: You work as food pantry manager in Cleveland, Ohio. Tell us about your job, and how GIS helps you and the food pantry clients.

A: I directly oversee a pantry and am a liaison at 3 others. I spend my time picking up and coordinating food purchases and donations, managing volunteers, answering policy questions and technical support from volunteers; anything that needs to be done so that the 400+ households who need food receive it with dignity. Unfortunately, geo (GIS) is only 5% of my job, although I would love to spend more time on it. I geocode to find out locations of our clients, I do some routing, and I work on the Marillac Hot Meal/Pantry Finder.

Q: I found out about your Marillac project (presumably named after Saint Louise de Marillac) from your blog. This is very unique. How did it start? Was it your initiative?

A: A couple times a week people call me as a pantry manager and ask where they can get food that day. Or clients will ask where else they could go to receive food when they are at the pantry. There was a paper list of locations sorted by zip code that pantries used to skim through and try to find places that would sound close to the client. This process was slow, not always efficient, paper lists would become outdated, and some clients don’t know their zip codes. There had to be a better way than this.

I scraped an electronic list of pantries and hot meals from the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, geocoded them, and using bootleaf, set up a website. Now you can just put in a person’s address, the map will zoom in to the person’s location, and help the user visually see the closest places for clients.

I worked on it quietly on my own initiative until I had a working prototype to show its value. The reaction from my volunteers was mostly positive. They have a wide range of technical literacy and comfortability, so there’s a few who continue to use the paper list. The Food Bank, they’re excited about it. It’s an upgrade from the paper list for them, and they’ll eventually integrate it into their website for other pantries to use. My boss was also impressed.

Q: Open source: Why?

A: I was likely sick of Windows and its lack of customization, and started using Mandrake in high school.

Coming from an outside background, the innovation that I saw happening in the geospatial/GIS communities was from companies and individuals that embraced open-source software (Mapbox and Leaflet; CartoDB) and crowd-sourced/liberally licensed geo data (OpenStreetMap). They enabled me to do things like the neighborhood map that I’m not sure I could have done with closed-source software and proprietary geo data.

Open-source gives people the ability (at least to those who can program) to customize software for their needs. I wouldn’t be where I am right now if I could not have accessed free (as in money) open-source tools when I first started. I would have likely given up (making that map) after a few weeks of trying to run a pirated ArcGIS in Wine. I contribute back by writing tutorials and documentation, some code examples, answering questions on IRC and stackexchange.

Q: Few know that you penned the @geohipster Twitter “bio”, and that you originally registered the account and later let us use it (THANK YOU!!!). You proudly identify yourself as a geohipster. Tell us what the term means to you.

A: A geohipster has a strong sense of curiosity. You’re always very open to trying new software, technologies, ideas, opportunities, and techniques to accomplish your work, and not being afraid to go outside of your comfort zone to do so. You love to learn. I’ve seen these qualities in a lot of fellow interviewees.

Q: Not until I got involved with GeoHipster did I realize (to my surprise) that the word “hipster” — a benign label in my mind — rubs many people the wrong way. Why do you think that is? Do you think Einstein was a hipster? Edison? Tesla?

A: People referred to as hipsters — whether rooted in myth, reality, or both — have been described as judgmental to those who have less dedication, curiosity, or the circumstances (access to resources, time, money) to learn as much about certain interests (particularly music and film) as they do. They also have the reputation of being snobbish to those who don’t already have that knowledge, and those who don’t become aware of something until it becomes widely adopted or increases in popularity.

I’m relieved and happy that the geo community doesn’t fit that stereotype: Maptime intentionally aims to be a very welcoming environment for learning about maps. In the past couple years open-source carto/gis/geospatial tools have become more accessible to users through improved documentation.

With my definition — curious, open to trying new things to accomplish their dreams — all three of them were hipsters.

Q: Any parting words for the GeoHipster readers?

A: I want to thank everyone in the community along the way who has helped me and others learn — through sharing their knowledge, writing tutorials and documentation, given encouragement, and being welcoming. I attended my first FOSS4G-NA recently. Although I was atypically timid there, I really enjoyed it.