Mapping with elementary school students

Late this spring I visited Picadome Elementary School here in Lexington to give a talk about geography and mapping. I wanted to convey what geographers do, and how mapping is more than just state lines and capitals. Here is my presentation.  Many of slides are linked to videos and online visualizations. The students were really taken with the idea that the internet could be mapped, and the Japanese earthquake visualization, as it often does, had their full attention. The grade levels ranged from second through fifth. After the presentation, the students and I made smell maps. We walked around the school and wrote down what we smelled on post-it notes. Then they tagged the smell locations on the large air photo of their school shown in these photos. From there, we talked about how what smells we mapped would differ for an old person and a younger person, and among people with different sets of experiences. We discussed how time of the year would matter too - December would produce a different set of smells.  This tied in to the overall theme of how representation and the senses are part of geography as well as science. How we sense and categorize is a basic attribute of knowledge production, and geographers foreground these lines of inquiry in their work. Of course, we didn't have such an explicit discussion of these topics. I just wanted to give them an inkling of how mapping is much more dynamic and complex than what they might think. More of what we talked about was how to describe the smell of a crowded playground on a hot day? Exactly what do sweaty fifth graders smell like?  Wood chips and warm tennis shoes under a salty beach blanket. Thanks to Ms Courtney the science specialist at Picadome, as well as Jeff Levy at University of Kentucky Department of Geography for printing out our air photo poster.  Ms Mullins and Ms Exterkamp also allowed me to come into to their classes - they taught my kids this year, third graders.

Microgeographies of my summer

I grew cherry tomatoes and three large tomato varieties, okra (grew like a weed), tomatillos (pests set in, I won't try these next year), banana peppers, zucchini (I'll plant more next year but be choosier about the variety), green beans (attack of the Mexican bean beetle), parsley, basil. My blackberries were in the their first year of growth so they did not produce berries. My garden is hemmed in by mint, various Aster species, and some ornamental flowering plants planted by someone who lived in the house before me.

Data structure and resilience properties

In my 2017 article in Geomorphology, I describe more of the theoretical basis for linking the multivariate data structure of state space to its resilience properties. It could be considered a followup to my 2005 paper in Geomorphology. I wasn't in a rush, but back then the availability of lidar data and the software tools to manipulate these data weren't quite as on hand as they are today. I had thought about making topographic state space back in 2005, and added a preliminary figure in my Ecological Complexity paper.

Inferring barrier island dune resilience from multivariate topographic data structure

Are severe thunderstorm warnings issued equitably?

Space and place are the new DNA

Space and place are the new DNA

Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality

Back in the early 2000's I had an interest in the digital representations of animals online, and how animals cams create an imaginary biogeography. I read this 1999 book below, "Holding On To Reality" by Albert Borgmann. It has a lot to say then about the importance of the context of information, and how the internet separates us from that context and creates a slippery slope of ambiguity. I am struck now by its prescience and how it anticipated the rise of fake news and alternate facts.

Taoist Tai Chi Society

These are photos from a Taoist Tai Chi intensive we had in Lexington last year. We now have classes at a couple of locations in town three days a week.

BioScience

In this BioScience article, we describe barrier island dune topographic state space. Presently, my PhD student Li-Chih Hsu and I are characterizing dune topographies along barrier islands in Virginia and Maryland. We want to examine where these islands will plot in the larger state space outlined in this BioScience article, as originally developed in Monge and Stallins (2016) in Physical Geography.

Space and place are the new DNA

Genomics, postgenomics? Omes, omics, proteome, transcriptome, exposome?  Here is a primer on some of these biological concepts.  In our recent article in GeoJournal, we describe how this new biology relates to geographical concepts about the productivity of space, spatial fixes, and the fallacies of spatial inference.