R is for Render

It’s interesting. You don’t hear women in STEM jobs talk about this enough.

I’d like to talk about how I felt at my first job out of college. I had a Master’s degree in geography, I had just written and successfully defended my Master’s thesis, I’d presented my work at conferences. But at my first job as a GIS Specialist, I felt like I was just that cute GIS chick. Ugh!

Let me tell you how that happened…

I got hired for my first job at an engineering firm while I was still in graduate school. It was kinda like a co-op, I interned part-time while in school, then upon completing my degree, was offered a full-time job as their GIS Specialist for the entire company (which had a handful of branches around the country).

I wasn’t sure what to expect, because all I knew before that was academia, being in a geography department where there are people my age, people from different countries, races, ethnicities, and a good mix of men and women. I loved grad school, the camaraderie and support was awesome. But my first job was nothing like that. It was mostly white men. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with white men, of course, what matters more is how specific people treat one another professionally.

Going in, I kept an open-mind and a pleasant attitude. I was happy to help people better understand how to utilize GIS, since they had never had a full-time GIS employee. I got to learn a lot about the crossover between GIS and CAD, how engineers utilized geography (such as always use a projected coordinate system since most engineers work in State Plane), and how GIS works in the real world with environmental analysis. I did learn a lot during my time there. However at the same time, socially, I felt so miserable. At first I wasn’t sure why, this was all new to me, but I just had this nagging feeling that I was uncomfortable all the time, and it took me some time to articulate what that nagging feeling was. Eventually, I started to get it. It was this subtle feeling of experiencing sexism. Weird, right? Haven’t we moved past this already? Why the fuck am I dealing with sexism in the 21st century? 

I never saw myself as the social-justice-warrior Tumblrina type, but still, this was happening! What do I do? I need a job, I want to work in my field and be treated just like any other GIS person, perhaps not even like any other GIS person, but a very competent GIS person. Anyway, here are some actual experiences I had, that I felt was sexism in the workplace.

I remember when I was working there, the way the good ‘ol boys treated me. The older engineer coming into my cubicle to supposedly ask me about this GIS toolset he heard about for his engineering project and he wanted me to explain how it worked. No problem, I’m happy to help. He took the other chair I had in my cubicle and dragged it right next to me, like 5 inches away from me to my right, and smiled at me with googley eyes while I tried to explain how I thought those GIS tools would work. This guy was a dad, married, middle-aged. And he didn’t say anything inappropriate, which is the tricky part. You can’t exactly take action when a coworker hasn’t explicitly done anything to create a hostile work environment. But it made me so uncomfortable because I could tell he wasn’t fully listening to me. You know how to make a young woman in STEM feel small? By making her aware of her gender and age while she’s trying to talk to you as another coworker.

Then, after I explained everything he asked me about, he patted my shoulder and said “Thanks, sweetheart.” That’s when my gut-feeling was confirmed. But I was 22, this was my first job. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t quite know. This guy had worked there for many years, it was my first year. I didn’t want to make waves at my first job, especially since getting started in GIS was hard enough. Was this enough reason to talk to HR? I didn’t have much to compare this to, other than my days working as a cashier in the lumber section at Lowe’s. But being a college girl working at Lowe’s, it doesn’t come as a surprise. You just roll your eyes and look forward to the day when you don’t have to deal with that shit. But then going into the supposed “real world” and it being the same shit all over again, maybe not as overtly suggestive but the feeling is the same, you wonder how far have we really come?

I want to clarify though, it wasn’t every guy I worked with there. There were some really cool dudes that I absolutely enjoyed having as coworkers. Unfortunately none of them had any authority over my position or influence on my workload.

I felt so aware of my gender and age whenever I had to talk to some of these male coworkers. One of my male coworkers would just go into my cubicle when I wasn’t in the office, and rummage through my desk or log on to my computer without telling me. I would come into work the next day to see his username on my log-in screen, or some binder I was using missing. That didn’t happen to anyone else in the office. But that guy was very chummy with my boss, so when I came forward about those issues, my boss hardly took me seriously. I remember my boss saying to me “Well, if you REALLY want to do something about this, I can bring him in here right now and we can all have a conversation about this together. What do you think?” His tone of voice made me feel like I was being dramatic, I needed to take a chill pill, since I was making something out of nothing. Was I though? It made it so hard for me to want to talk to anybody the more this happened. I just wanted to be treated as an equal, is that so much to ask?

Over time, I became increasingly outspoken because the office hired more outspoken women who encouraged me to assert myself more, since they were doing it too. It finally started to feel like I had some allies. I started calling some of these guys out for treating me like a doormat. You know how that went? Hint: not that well. When I became more outspoken, it became “WHOA HO HO! Look at Rachel, she’s being so sassy! I like this new Rachel.” While they all surround me and laugh about my sassiness. Yes, that actually happened. I started honing in my poker face at that point.

The main thing is, and maybe you’ve figured this out by now, it seemed like from the start they looked at me like I was just some cute chick who wasn’t serious about the job and didn’t know diddly-squat about the the industry. I felt like a source of amusement to them, not an equal, and even though their words didn’t confirm it, as a woman you get a gut feeling when it’s happening. You start looking at other situations differently, and assessing the way other women work in this environment. I looked up to the few middle-aged moms who held their own there, and wondered how they did it. Maybe since they were closer in age to the management, those guys didn’t look at them the same way? Or perhaps those women just didn’t care because they didn’t have to work under them, it didn’t affect their positions.

I will also add that it wasn’t just me that felt this way. I became friends with a couple of other women who held professional roles at the company, and they felt the same way! I couldn’t believe it, for so long I thought it was all in my head. It was funny because eventually it started to feel like that movie “9 to 5″ and had us all questioning what year this was again. 

Over time as we started realizing we all were going through the same frustrations, and we started having each other’s backs. There were some younger men who worked there who saw it too, that we felt were our allies. They witnessed the way these men would talk to us and it pissed them off too. One woman was getting suggestive IMs from a male engineer that was married with kids, another was having some of the men forge her signature to sign off on projects she was managing while she was out of the office for meetings. Truly astonishing how disrespectful some of these men were to us. And when we took action, they all scoffed and downplayed the issues as hard as possible to cover their asses. And of course nothing happened when we complained. So what happened? We all left.

But here’s one thing I remember thoroughly enjoying. Once us women realized what we were all going through, in meetings, we would compliment each other so all the men could hear it. Compliments on feminine things, like our fabulous shoes, a new haircut, or even just a job well done on a recent project. If we weren’t going to hear it from management, someone had to remind us we were still doing good. Because we were! No matter what they tried to tell me, I knew I was doing great. So great that I was able to get another [better] job as a researcher at a huge university, in another part of the country. I patted myself on the back for that accomplishment.

Here’s a funny tidbit–a year after I moved away for my new job, they had the gall to reach out to me asking for GIS help on a project. Apparently the employee that replaced me didn’t know how to do some GIS stuff, so they were wondering if I could call this new employee and walk them through it. I basically responded saying that I found that request inappropriate, and that I had written documentation on that project before I left. Come on.

I apologize this post wasn’t technical or about some helpful technique for using GIS. I know I haven’t done a post like that in a while, and it’s because work has been busy lately. But I also think it’s important to talk about our experiences, so that it might help someone else going through these experiences. 

Not every feminist is a man-hating tumblrina; some women are feminists through their actions and their expectations of being treated just like anyone else. That’s how I like to practice feminism. If something like this ever happened to me again, I think at least this time I would notice it immediately, and call them out on it. Don’t be afraid to tell someone they’re making you uncomfortable, because you have a better chance of nipping that behavior in the bud the earlier you establish boundaries.

Thanks for reading!

This is something I see so much from students. You start taking GIS classes and you love it, so you want to major in GIS and get a job in GIS.

While yes, technically you can do that, I don’t recommend it unless you want to be a software developer for some GIS company, or be stuck doing grunt technician work your entire career.

Why? GIS is a tool. You use the tool for your purposes. But if all you know is the software, how are you going to know what you want to use the software for?

It’s a lot like the difference between an engineer and a drafter. The drafter receives a plan and turns it into a schematic or blueprint, but it’s not their ideas they’re drawing up. If you’re ok with following someone else’s instructions your entire career, then maybe specializing in just GIS is for you. But personally, I see myself as the engineer type. By that I mean I don’t just do the maps, but I am part of the team coming up with what data to look at, how to analyze the data, and then I map it. If that’s what you like to do, you can’t just do GIS.

So what can you do? Whatever you want. I like human geography, frankly. If you’ve followed my blog for a bit, you’ve probably noticed I like politics, demographics, census data, why different groups of people act certain ways, and how geography plays a part in that. On the other hand my boyfriend Guillermo, also a geographer, likes the environmental side of geography. He studied watersheds, land use & land cover, basins, geomorphology, and planning. He works as an environmental planner and makes those kinds of maps.

My point is, take things that interest you, and use your GIS skills to explore these interests. If you can’t think of any interests that you have, then maybe you should start reading something or taking different classes to get those creative juices flowing.

Just a GIS professional’s two cents!

Happy GIS-ing,

I’ve probably mentioned it here and there, but since late 2014 I’ve been working at USC (University of South Carolina - Columbia) as a GIS Analyst. I’m not just doing GIS for the campus or whatever, I’m actually at a research institute that works under the umbrella of the university. It’s called the Institute for Families in Society (ifs.sc.edu if you’re curious…you can find my hawt bio on there where my hair is still wet), I believe we’re technically a part of the College of Social Work here. My research institute has a few different divisions, and the one I work in does Medicaid policy research. So like, we get Medicaid data for SC from the state, and we analyze various things like disease prevalence, access to doctors, clinics, areas of high need, etc.

Even though in practice I do GIS analyst-type work, in the office it feels like I’m more of a research assistant. I get work from senior researchers, and my bosses are professors and researchers with PhDs who deal directly with the heads of various state agencies. They give us an issue they’re planning to present on at some meeting, the senior researchers sit down with my bosses to hash out a project, and the GIS team does it. Our senior researchers do work too, but on top of that they manage the projects we’re working on. There are also miscellaneous papers being worked on for publication, conferences, lectures, etc. We have other researchers here to that don’t do GIS, but maybe do stuff like SAS, SQL, policy analysis, economic analysis, field work, etc.

How work typically goes (very simplified):

Maybe hypothetically some state agency decides they’re having a problem tracking some very commonplace condition, like kids with ADHD. They feel kids in Medicaid are not being diagnosed enough. They contract out my research institute to do an analysis on that and present them with our findings. If we find trends or issues that the state has not been addressing, they may change policy to fix that. The work I’m actually doing might be like I have a point feature for all kids on Medicaid with ADHD. I’ll do maps and tables showing where they are in the state, pull other indicators that are associated with kids who have ADHD, and give the senior researchers maps/tables I made or observations I had after working with the data. Sometimes the stuff I make is simple, like choropleth maps, other times I’m in the weeds of spatial analyst trying to get the data distribution to correctly show the patterns I’ve seen in the data. Sometimes I’m fiddling around with new color ramps or trying to make something look cool in Illustrator. Sometimes the data is jacked up and I have to spend hours cleaning it up just so I can finally geocode and then make a map. Then once it’s all done I have to document my process on everything. If I did something new or different I have to write up how I did it.

Our senior researchers go back and forth with our bosses on the findings, things get tweaked a lot until everyone is on the same page and we have interesting work to present. My boss presents it, policy may or may not change. Then we’re on to the next project. Rinse and repeat.

I guess it’s pretty academic compared to other GIS work I’ve done professionally, but I like that. I’ve learned a lot already. It’s nice to have superiors that want us to put out very high-quality work, plus I can take classes at USC for free. There are definitely pros and cons to any job, but I do feel comfortable working as a researcher.

I’ve noticed that people don’t talk about their work enough, like the actual day-to-day aspect of it. I find it really interesting. Obviously there are some things you’d rather keep to yourself so as to not jeopardize your job, but I wonder how many people really care about the work they’re doing? With the way I work, it’s so easy to forget that each point I’m mapping is an actual person. I try to remind myself that even though I’m sitting at a desk everyday aggregating those points and summarizing trends throughout the state, this work could actually improve people’s lives. And not just any person, but people who can’t afford healthcare. If you can’t afford healthcare, you probably don’t have access to a lot of things in life, and it’s likely there are not that many people out there trying to help you. I like to think maybe, albeit indirectly, I’m improving the lives of people who need help. So sue me for being idealistic. :)

Elastic Terrain

Web project by Jonas Buddeberg and Bernhard Jenny gives cartographic terrain data jelly-like physical properties:

Elastic Terrain Map implements a new method for terrain visualization that uses animation. The application renders digital elevation models with WebGL and offers many configurable parameters.

See below:

A quick google search and I found a map of Seattle population density made by the Dept. of Planning and Development with almost the exact same metric:

Do I need to explain my frustration with map #1, or can you figure it out?

Remember my post a few weeks ago? If you don’t, here it is.

Quick recap of what is wrong with the first population density map:

Divergent hot/cold color scheme used to map population density, increasing from low-high. This is a divergent color scheme most often used for hotspot mapping and things similar to that. Typically centered on a middle value, like a descriptive statistic (mean, median, etc).

The seafoam green color used for water in the background is distracting. I would’ve used a very pale light blue or the gray basemap like above. We don’t want the water to be what we notice when looking at the map, so why force it on us?

Ambiguous roads. I’m assuming the red lines are roads, but as the viewer, especially one that’s not from Seattle, I don’t know what these roads are, if they’re highways or local roads, etc. They need context. Also, without including them in the legend yet making them very noticeable, the viewer might assume that the local roads are the census block groups. Most non-social-science folks aren’t familiar with census area units, so can you blame them if they assume the grid-like city roads are census block groups? With the second map, you can look at it and tell that the population density areas do not exactly correspond to the lines running on top of them, so it’s easier to relate those lines to being city roads. In addition, they don’t include every road because why? A few major roads provide added context to the audience. Adding all local roads provides unnecessary distraction and a confused audience.

And there you have it. 

I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but don’t assume everything presented on a map is cartographically sound. Any mapmaker worth their salt would raise an eyebrow to that first map. The color choices were confusing, it doesn’t guide the eye to the interesting ebbs and flows in population density, and the classification is poorly explained. I hope this reminds you of the pros and cons to the wild west we call the internet.

Happy Mapping,

I made a Möbius transformation visualizer together with Taketo Sano in a hackathon(http://hackday.jp/), and we got GOLD prize!

Parabolic Möbius transformation has a fixed point, and other Möbius transformations have two fixed points. (cf.http://hyrodium.tumblr.com/post/138314686744)

Reversal of Fortune: Garden of Virtual Kinship

Art installation by Stephanie Rothenberg presents the process of charitable crowdfunding using a robotic waterer and a world map made of plants, questioning the process of what happens with the actual funds:

Reversal of Fortune: The Garden of Virtual Kinship is a telematic garden, both real and virtual, whose lifeline directly correlates to monetary exchanges between the developed and developing world. The project examines the cultural phenomena of online crowdfunded charity, or microfinance, through philanthropic social media websites. These websites enable more affluent individuals primarily located in Western countries to collectively donate small amounts of money to individuals and small communities in extremely economically challenged regions such as East Africa and Central America. The funding is intended to finance small-scale “entrepreneurial” goals. Examples of these pursuits include small retail businesses, local agriculture and farming, transportation and health needs. But contradictions abound within this economic model. What goes unseen are the exorbitant interest rates and fees, borrowers must pay. These can range from 30% up to 60% or higher, and for a loan of only a few hundred dollars. Who profits? It isn’t the lenders with good intentions, but an entire network of banks, starting at the local level and up to multinationals.

The Garden of Virtual Kinship makes this controversial economic circuit visible. The live garden takes the form of a global map with the plants residing in small containers within a dot matrix grid. Each plant correlates to a borrower on the social media websites requesting funding. An overhead computerized watering system (CNC) is connected to the Internet.  The amount of water the plants receive is dependent on investment information data collected from the websites. Successful entrepreneurial ventures trigger appropriate nourishment while failed ventures may lead to dying plants. Yet the plants that do receive water, only receive a few drops. The majority of the water is pumped into a second tank — symbolizing the high fees and interest rates microfinance borrowers pay (in Version 03 at ZKM).

You can find out more about the project here

A Quiet Desert Failure

Algorithmic Tumblr blog artpiece by Guido Segni uses an internet bot to gather pictures of deserts in Google Maps and uploads them, a process which will take fifty years to complete:

In its own way, it’s a monumental piece about internet contents, emptiness, time, storage, memory, oblivion and - ultimately - failure.

I programmed an Internet bot to traverse the datascape of Google Maps in order to fill a Tumblr blog and its datacenters with a remapping representation of the whole Sahara Desert, one post a time, every 30 minutes.

The whole performance will approximately take 50 years to be completed, but it is still not clear if the audience, the Google’s servers, the tumblr archive or the Internet itself will last enough to see the end.

So, be patient, don’t hurry.

The desert is coming.