Ever feel like you are special, unique like a snowflake? Part of the challenge of being an egoist is building an ever more complex and empirically-grounded narrative of your own giftedness, so that you can continue the fallacy that you are, in fact, better than everyone else around you (I wasn't born left handed, I learned it to set myself apart from the other crayon-clutching idiots in my kindergarten class - try coloring inside the lines left-handed assholes!). A chip on your shoulder is a good start (because, like a left-handed asshole, nobody else has one of those).

Geographers, in my experience, excel at self-importance. And now, thanks to the Bureau of Labor Statistics we have some data to back up the aggrandizement of geography. The BLS has released its National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimate for 2011. Geographers rank up there with Animal Breeders and Wood Model Makers as being the rarest jobs in America. Now, these figures have to be taken with a grain of salt. There will be thousands of geographers in LA next month for the AAG Annual Meeting, but most of us are classified as postsecondary educators. Ah, the burden of being in the top .001%, not even the BLS can live up to my lofty standards, if only they'd hire some more geographers to help them fix their flawed data...

On a related note, the BLS found that there were over 110,000 Graduate Teaching Assistants in the US in 2011, making us about one hundred times more abundant than geographers. But get this: the mean annual wage of a GTA was $33,180. Come on KU, where's my cheese?! 

Here's looking down my nose at you, Kid.

Blake the Flake

AGS Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey

The American Geographical Society (AGS) needs your help in a matter of vital importance.  We are conducting a nationwide survey of public attitudes toward geography and knowledge about geography.  This is our part in a major study funded by the National Science Foundation.  This “Roadmap” project is a joint effort of the National Geographic Society, the National Council for Geographic Education, the Association of American Geographers, and AGS.  The overall topic is geographic literacy, a matter of serious concern in America today.  We invite all U. S. citizens and long term residents of the United States to take the survey.  The only eligibility requirement is that you must be age 18 or older.  The results will help guide Federal and state policies regarding geographic education.

 

You may access the survey online by clicking the following link:  AGS Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey  (If the link does not take you directly to the survey, please copy and paste this URL into your web browser:  http://webteach.ubalt.edu/UltimateSurvey/Surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?s=F30154FD158241D39265B445E3BD5817 ).  Based on trial runs, we estimate the survey will take 12 to 18 minutes of your time. 

 

Where is the War on Christmas?

Loved Jon Stewart's declaration of war on Christmas the other night (12/6/12). Which got me thinking: where are the frontlines of this war? Where are the battlelines and trenches separating the atheists and secular liberals from the defenders of the sanctity of baby Jesus' birthday? Wouldn't it be great if we see the trebuchets loaded with tinsel bombs, nativity scenes secured with sandbags and machine guns...

Anyway, there are interesting spatio-temporal manifestations of these sorts of cultural phenomena. And now thanks to the internet (and that data behemoth, Google, in particular), we can actually see when and where something like the "War on Christmas" is taking place.

My buddy Robbie and I have been working with Google Insights for search for about six months now (he's been doing some interesting stuff on his blog). The good folks at Floating Sheep have been doing this sort of thing for a while now (using spatial data from the internet to comment on cultural phenomena), but the eight-hundred pound gorilla - search query data - has flown discretely under the radar. So now, back to the War on Christmas: The graph displays web search traffic relative to the importance of all search traffic during a given time period (it is not a measure of the total volume of web traffic). So you can kind of think of it like, when there are spikes on the graph, searches for "war on christmas" make up a greater portion of total searches (it's sort of like a measure of relevance). There was a noticeable uptick in hostilities in the ongoing War on Christmas in December of 2005 - an event now immortalized as the "Family Tree Offensive." This escalation was the result of known soulless ghouls and Christmas war mongers Lowe's relabeling their synthetic, plastic, Chinese cat-traps from "Christmas Trees" to "Family Trees." This total diplomatic breakdown resulted in a media firestorm, which, predictably led to a whole bunch of people searching for "War on Christmas" on Google. These sorts of "media blips"  ('consciousness earthquakes' as Rob termed them - I'm still wary about whether or not we can call this sort of knee-jerk reaction to media "conscious" behavior, but, hey, I'm splitting hairs now) in search data are incredibly important (queue map!) because this data also has a spatial component. Media can track where their messages resonate the most, and following what types of coverage, and advertisers can use this data to target marketing to specific places. Our search behavior is being used to construct profiles of geographic locations, which are then used to determine what types of advertising we see, and potentially, what types of media we will consume. It's kind of a feedback loop, or dialectical process. So when we look at the map of the War on Christmas above, from the perspective of media and marketing, we can draw a couple of conclusions: 1) media coverage of the War on Christmas is affecting search behavior more in places like Colorado and Missouri than in other places (again, we aren't seeing total search volume on this map, but a measure of the likelihood that someone in each geographic location will use the search term 'war on christmas' that is normalized and scaled from 0-100); and 2) people in these places are going to be more interested in stories about the War on Christmas in the future (and Google has even predicted search trends out into the future as well).

So in this post I went from trebuchets and images of "We Three Kings" charging out on the battlefield in an up-armored Humvee ('Seriously, who brings frankincense!'), to a totally dweeby analysis of search data and its implications for media and marketing. But theoretical rants aside, this is really interesting to me, because this is literally the most accurate measure we have of where the War on Christmas is being fought. And if the media blip of 2005 is any indication, we can assume that many of the places highlighted on the map above have had some sort of local controversy (a local elementary school, for instance, doing a "Holiday" program that draws the ire of some pill-popping conservative radio host) that drives search data (lest we forget - this is a huge and fairly representative dataset). Our behavior in cyberspace has real relationships with, and implications for, actual space.

With that, I bid you all a Merry Solstice...

First map!

The other day, Tina and I are sitting in the office together, talking about Lena (seriously, when you become a parent, it's like the only thing you talk about!). Tina says to me: “she’s really starting to imagine herself in the world.” At three (shit, almost four!) years old, it seems like her cortex is just exploding, making so many connections, recalling, projecting. She’s grasping abstract concepts, spatial and temporal scales. It’s like she is constructing an inner world for herself to compliment the outer realm of sense perception that was her sole reality until now. The outer perceptory world of sensations and emotions is now being put into the context of an imagined geography of memories, stories, and knowledge, of past and present, of here and there. I know one day she will look back on her childhood and resent me for treating her like a research subject in a spatial cognition experiment, but I can't help myself. 

She gave me a drawing the other day, crayons, with big green circles, and in the swirls were scribbled and spatially segregated swatches of brown, beige, red, green and pink. I asked her what it was: “a map.” Pointing to the green circles – this is the United States. And the green swatch “this is where we go hiking in the forest” and the pink swatch “Kansas”. It was her first map…predictably, I nearly broke out in tears. But this map was just such a beautiful visual expression of the complex inner world that is growing inside of her mind, memories and emotions and experiences spatialized in an interactive map being written with every thought. 

All I want for Christmas...

It's weird if I think that 4000 euro is cheap for a 1630 Gerardus Mercator . . . right? The fact that I'm even posing this question obviously displays that I even think it's weird . . . but if I was self-conscious about being rhetorical then I wouldn't have a blog now, would I? (That's two rhetorical questions in a row, in case you're keeping score at home...oh snap, that's three, because I know  you are!)  But seriously . . . I would kill (my neighbor's dog) for this (and I like my neighbor's dog).

Santa . . . if you're reading, this is at: www.sanderusmaps.com

Continuing the geography nerd theme for today...

A former student in one of my intro geography classes sent me this link (thank you!) from xkcd.com. It needs no further explanation, except to say that I always preferred pseudoconic projections like the Bonne or Sylvanus (because I'm a lover, not a fighter), or even a straight up conical projections (because I have a dirty mind, and they always looked like butt cheeks to me!). Anyway, enjoy:

Ken Jennings is my hero!

My two favorite things in life when I was a kid were: my tattered cardboard globe, and watching Jeopardy! (I actually used to sleep with my globe...I'm sure my parents were frightened that I either had an unusual obsession with large balls and Alex Trebek, or that I was destined to become a geographer - both options did not portend well for my future. Alas, my obsession with balls remains - though I found an outlet through the joga bonita - I did eventually become a geographer, and Alex Trebek, as with all my childhood man crushes, aged gracefully but has fallen out of favor) Anyway, Ken Jennings, that mythical Jeopardy! champion who crushed all opponents with the unassuming grace of a nerdy flaming sword on his way to become the winningest (is that a word?) Jeopardy! contestant of all time (yes, I do have to use the exclamation point every time I mention the show...!), has replaced Alex Trebek for me in the pantheon of dork-men hero worship. His game-show exploits have launched his new career as a writer, and his latest book Maphead: Charting the wide, weird world of geography wonks is a revelation, even in the now dork-saturated media universe. His latest post on Slate also confirms that he is (to borrow a quote from Herman Cain, that Herman Cain borrowed from someone else) my 'brother from another mother': Globes in the age of google maps