researchInterests

As I drudge through what was supposed to be a quick and painless job hunt, which is turning into anything but, I keep reminding myself that I need to be focused.  We need to be focused on  our goals for one, and I’m convinced that we need to be foucsed on our actual interests.  Years in crappy work environments taught me that we can be capable of doing a great variety of things, especially with degrees in fields as broad as Environmental Science and Geographic Information Science.  But to truly feel rewarded we actually need to be passionate about what we’re doing, need to feel like we have some ownership or control of our deliverable.

That’s what I’ve been trying to pin down into a 500 word or so essay here with this blog.  Some days I feel like I’m accomplishing it better than others.   Today I’m going to try and pull together the two main areas, not into full 500 word essays, but into quick exerpt paragraphs; into the thesis statements for the essays that would follow.  So here goes.

Geographic information Systems (Sciences) serve as a mechanism to communicate information to decision makers, researchers, interested parties, and the general public in a fast, acurate, and easily communciated manner.  However, the challenge is drawing a complete and current picture of the situation when much of the information has historically or practically been housed in different environments or formats.  The goal of my work in this area is to streamline the development of what has become known as ‘GIS -centric’ systems that allow for information about the spatial phenomenon of interest to be stored in navtive structures or environemts developed specifically for the particular entity while still allowing for the rapid decimination of the spatial nature of the data.   To date this has entailed the detailed study and devlopment of spatial database structure within the ESRI ArcSDE environment, and most recently in the communication of that data through the use of ArcGIS Server and Rich Internet Applciations.

The second major research interest that I have been developing is within Landscape Geography.  I began study in this area with the study of Remote Sensing technologies and Land Cover /Land Use change.  I then expanded to include the value systems associated with those land uses.  I began this with a small study of how home is classified in the context of landscape, and presented early data at the Landscape, Space, and Place conference in Bloomington Indiana in March 2009.

environmentalGeography

a short note.  I find it interesting how much 15o miles and 200 vertical feet can affect the local climate.  I got up this morning and out the window it looked really crappy (by Columbus standards), meaning that it was perfect Cleveland/NE Ohio weather.  I got out on my bike and had one of the best rides since finishing school, all because it was cooler, the wind was down, and the sun wasn’t out.  It’s amazing how much I took for granted the limited sunlight we get up in the north.

The Home Range Talk, as landscape

Note: As before, images will follow as I get them resampled and scaled to fit this format.  Thank you for your patience

In climbing, range takes on a series of separate connotations. There is obviously the standard ‘Mountain Range’ connotation, and that is the highest level designation. However range gets used differently at different scales, much like landscape gets used differently in different circles. For this essay let’s consider range with climbing as the overreaching definition, but also splash in a little wildlife biology connotation – that being that there is a particular spatial extent or ‘range’ to which mammals will confine themselves to for a variety of reasons.

Landscape of Home

I began taking pictures about seven years ago. At the time I was working with another instructor at an Outdoor Education Facility on the beginnings of a Outward Bound type manual on teaching the fundamentals of survival to younger audiences. With that we thought that it was important that we had some kind of documentation of what we were practicing with the curriculum that we were developing for the facility. Now, as I review some of those early photos I notice two things: the first that I was REALLY BAD, and that I probably shouldn’t have been blowing that much money on film as I experimented and taught myself the fundamentals of photography; and the second was that I was really not comfortable in that environment.

Fast forward a bit, in 2006 I finally relented and acquiesced to the digital world, not because I had come to my senses, not because I wasn’t understanding aperture and exposure and wanted a computer to take care of that for me, but because I was tired of waiting and hoping to find out whether or not what I was shooting made it into the frame like I had intended it. What happened as a result of the transition to digital was that I now have a running catalog of imagery to draw on for just about any purpose.

The purpose here is to expand on a definition of landscape that we have been discussing for the better part of the fall now. When we started, I was still convinced the definition of landscape was what I painted for my keystone piece of my portfolio that I was submitting to Art Schools, which is very reminiscent of renaissance paintings of Europe. The consensus that the remainder of the group seemed to be at the time that landscape actually had to be a physical place in the world that we could point to on a map, which also means that we would have had to have been there (I use the global We, meaning mankind still). I disagreed with it then, and I still disagree, I’ve never seen a waterfall like I painted in 1996 but I still consider it a landscape, even though my definition of landscape has changed, or at least evolved. So here is my definition of landscape, a continually evolving mixture of Place (Px) plus or minus the Time (Ti), plus or minus the Reason (R), and plus or minus the Company (C ).

Landscape =Sx,y,z∫{Ti ± Px ± R ± C}

In developing my definition of landscape, much like in defining soil series I held place constant and varied all of the other parameters, then added scale after the fact, because after further discussion with the group, I arrived at the conclusion that it plays some roll even if I haven’t flushed out exactly what relationship it has. My rational for that comes from these two images of running streams. One is the world famous New River taken from the one road back out of the gorge, and the second is from Chippewa Creek, a small tributary of the Cuyahoga River, near Brecksville, Ohio. Both images include a “rapid”, but what you don’t witness in either is how strong, or how deep either is (the one upstream from the Fayette Station Bridge is a Class 1, the one on Chippewa Creek is ankle deep). So boiled down to a simple equation there is the definition of landscape that I will work with from here on out.

A little more about home, geographically I am from Groveport, Ohio, a suburb that is about twenty miles southeast of Columbus situated outside of Interstate 270, which during my youth meant that I was at no time more than a half mile from a large, primarily family run cornfield. The house I grew up in was right next to the school I attended, and even in junior high school I only had a mile bike ride to get to school, a year of high school was again right next door before graduating from a building two miles from home. So there defines the scale at which my story begins. Today I reside here in Akron, Ohio, but travel back to Columbus as much as I can, as well as to Fayetteville, West Virginia; Slade and Somerset, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; and LaFayette, Georgia. All told a diameter, if Columbus is the center, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 miles in full extent. All of that space however would not be what I consider home.

Having defined the full extent of the parameters for the place portion of this equation, let me back up a bit and explain that this won’t be a long string of pictures of friends and family in scenic locations; there won’t be a long line of vacation pictures here. I am member of the family to catch the photo bug. Dad has had it for as far back as I can remember. The difference between his bug and mine is that I don’t want to fight with family and friends to pose for portraits, or listen to the complaints about how good or bad someone looks in a particular image. So I expanded on the fact that I am an avid backpacker and climber as well as an Environmental Scientist, and I shoot nature photography. More specifically, the classic artistic definition landscape photography – wildlife photography requires far too much equipment in order to get it right. So although people are an integral part of this definition of landscape, there will only be a couple of shots. Continuing on with the definition of the global parameters for this definition, all of the images have been acquired since August 2002 (Labor Day Weekend). Reasons I won’t elaborate on other than to say again that I’m a climber, and that I explore the world with that frame of mind. The company is the same as the reason parameter, unless otherwise stipulated they’re climbers and we’re sharing that experience.

OUT FROM THE CENTER

Since 2002 I have had one constant travelling companion, and she’s been wonderful in that she has allowed me to revisit some of those ideological/ symbolic landscapes from my childhood that I had all but forgotten, like this one. This is George’s Creek, and runs about a half of a mile south of my house. As a kid we used to swim back here during and after soccer practice. I only ever stopped because I got my foot stuck in a tire and rolled my ankle pretty bad, but on a hot afternoon I hiked Loki back for a dip to cool off in the pool. The hike back to the pool leads past one of the few remaining fields in the area, so from that regard this little outing is a trip back in time for me, although it’s the first time I’ve taken the dog to this particular spot. There’s actually a much better one another mile or so down the road, but I felt like the walk, and Loki just likes to get wet.

Outside Columbus the park system is trying to maintain the “classic” Central Ohio through the creation of a number of parks, some of those are Historical Farms, some of them highlight the unique ecology of this part of the Scioto River Valley, and others still attempt to preserve the legacy of how the region has changed in appearance. An example is the park pictured at left, which is takes some care in signage to remember Dutch elm disease. All the same, a couple of people I trained for soccer with and I used to use the trails to run on in college

I’m still within the center of my home range I should add a little bit about Groveport Cemetery, which as a child was where we used to go sledding the image at left is where the sled hill used to be, as you can see when the concept came down of turning this section of the cemetery into a memorial for the large population of Veterans in the village no one complained. There are a few small towns within a three or four mile radius and like all high school bands, they all tend to march in the parades, except Groveport’s Memorial Day parade. GMHS is the only band that plays, mostly because of the ceremony pictured above, they play the Independence Day parades in all of the other towns, but they’re the only ones who play Memorial Day.

To this point, I’ve described the physical locations, some physical elements, some time stamping, if you include my dog my company, and a small piece of the reasons/ cultural pieces of the closest scale of home. Our hometown is easy to describe as our Landscape of Home, but if time weren’t a factor many of us would never leave our hometown if all of the pieces were static, our opinion of our home as a landscape would have been formed at a very young age.

GETTIN’ THERE

Being a climber from Ohio is difficult. It means that we have to spend a considerable amount of time travelling, and with the amount of gear that we require it makes getting there a considerable part of the landscape, or rather that we get to witness a number of landscapes as we get from wherever it is that we start, and where we climb. So there’s my climbing home, driven in, slept in, eaten in, lived in. The Jeep is at both times an element of, and when you consider the remaining portions of the definition a landscape all to itself. However I wouldn’t call it a landscape, it is though the primary means with which we have experienced the landscape, and that ground level within the space context is important to this discussion.

I’ve been travelling to Kentucky for vacations and athletics for the majority of my life, and this series of Road signs has been in place as far back as I can remember. There are a number of them, and they go through the Ten Commandments with us at 70 to 80 miles an hour and they make this section of interstate unique. But ultimately, they’re just fly –by country between pieces of home, ribbons of asphalt that link far disconnected locations to a single common jumping off point.

All of the ‘landscapey’ images for these farther off places have the same common elements, mid latitude deciduous forests with a good deal of topographic relief, so I’ll fly by them in this discussion. These are the places where the reason and the people earned their place in the definition of landscape. Compare the image of the two bridges above with the two images of the same location below. These were taken on two separate trips to Fayetteville, and one is one of those quasi –vacation pictures that I promised to limit. What makes the third different from the first two, beyond the wonderful butt shot of Kevin Rich, is that it puts all of the elements of the equation in one image(shot on my camera by one of my climbing partners – that’s how I to be in the picture). We (old friend and climbing partner, company) were there to show the bridge off to Kevin (reason) in the fall for Bridge Day (Time). This also happens to be a bit of an icon, considering it is the largest single span in the Western Hemisphere, but that’s really just an afterthought. Incidentally, as an afterthought, this picture represents the moment that I wanted to fully get back into climbing after about a two year hiatus, and has burned Lookout Rock into my head as one of those particular places that more or less bring the definition of a landscape into focus.

So briefly I’ve mentioned how the people we’re with (company) can affect our perception of a place in the narrow context, and the landscape in the larger context with the purpose (reason) for the visit both framing the perception of the landscape (had we been there to go rafting, we would’ve been discussing the way the river bends and opens up which is why the more difficult rapids are further upstream, not the bridge) and the company.

RESIDENCE VERSUS HOME

First a time statement, it’s cold and snowy here in Akron at writing, which always affects my opinion of anyplace in a negative way.

If home is the larger form landscape in this discussion then there are still places where we can live that don’t receive that declaration, but still contribute our ‘home range’.

Akron, in a time compared to knowledge continuum, falls at a point where I have become fairly comfortable with my camera equipment. I can generally speaking capture the image such that it will convey the message that I want to convey at the time. Take for instance this picture from mid-semester last spring as I was prepping for a Remote Sensing exam. I’m thinking I was worried about staying awake for it, all the same this image is a good jumping off point for my purpose for being in this landscape.

It’s pretty fair to say that if it weren’t for school, my range would never come this far north except for vacations to visit friends and see their new homes and babies.

So with that here is where I tie all of the pieces to Akron, Ohio. This shot, aside from the inside joke that I have running with the individual, is from a spot near Cleveland, and represents how the even this definition of landscape can be subject to change, that there are factors that can affect the magnitude to which any of the components are included in the equation.

At this point in time it’s shows the hope and optimism I have for this new extension of my range. Since that point I haven’t taken many pictures in Northeast Ohio that haven’t been with relation to a class in one shape or another, but at the end of my time here I want to part with two images that more or less have defined the landscape for me here in Akron: it  has seemed that I’ve always missed the good weather opportunities to do anything outside here, and as such maybe haven’t fully experienced the culture and all of the good that Akron and Northeast have beyond the large tourist attractions.

However we did get to tip a few back from time to time.

The Bad Geographer Rides again

I am sitting in the lab on a “snow day” banging my head against a wall trying to understand the differences between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic.NET.

This isn’t interesting to anyone, from one side I’m just some NooBcomelatelyCodeHacker and from the other I’m just a pretentious, overachieving GIS analyst/developer.  What may be interesting is that since I’m banging my head against the wall I’ve had some time to contemplate the week so far:

The entertaining event of the week, and the reason for the “rides again” is that I was asked to cover a friends class on Monday… Now think of me as a college professor… you can’t.  But, I was asked to cover a lecture all the same, and on no more of a classic geography topic as Lattitude and Longitude/ as well as map projections.  The bad geographer has never really put a whole lot of stock in worrying about these things as long as I can get my analysis output to report correctly — I don’t drop bombs on unsuspecting terrorists in farflung mountains, so positional accuracy isn’t one of my chief concerns — the things I work on; heavy metal toxicity, groundwater contamination, etc. don’t really exist in very acute spatial instances.  But all the same, I gave the lecture, and when you actually boil it down to non-major undergrads, I may actually have given them what they need — but who knows.

To me this is interesting in a larger context as well, I have spent much of my time trying to NOT become some academic.  I may be loosing this battle in order to win the larger war.  I volunteered to speak at a conference later this semester on my landscape discussions from last semester (you can find how I defined the concept/ spatial scale of landscape here) to which I have to slightly retool a couple of papers, and write the abstract to submit yet this week so writing this is helping me organize my thoughts.  I was also volunteered to give a poster presentation on the Remote Sensing of Lake Ice on Lake Erie — to which I won’t link you to anything (it’s that boring).  So now, with less than 12 weeks until I am released back into the wild, I’m being coopted by the Ivory Tower types…  God help me (we’ll talk about the possibility of continuing on to completely become one of those Ivory Tower Types at a later date).

so I’m procrastinating

What is Landscape?

I prefer to begin my stories in the middle, this way it gives me latitude to meander forward in the story through the “exciting parts” and fill in what details I need as I need them. This tends to make every tale I tell considerably longer than it would otherwise have to be, but isn’t that the purpose of a story, to pass the time?

I look at definitional matters such trying to define landscape the same way, and to this end I start with a photo of an element, or portion of a landscape. Not because the photo is the landscape, or that it contains the definitional element that I associate with what a landscape is. But more because of the fact that the image, and its relation to a number of others I have taken from the same physical space throughout my time as an amateur photographer can act as Tuan describes as an ordering of reality from different angles.

This particular picture is a) of my dog, who has been a constant companion on nearly every outing I’ve made in the last six years and as such has been a vehicle for me to view what has become vernacular for me from a different perspective, but that is one of those side little details that I’m filling in, but more importantly b) this image is of the landscape, in the broader, vertical view, of a considerable portion of Southeast Ohio, otherwise regarded around this place as my home, which is another useless detail in a story in which I intend to define what Landscape is or is not.

Back to the photo, for me this is a very common sight, a common occurrence, even from the addition of Loki, part of what is a vernacular place or landscape for me. Though I grew up a few miles from where I was sitting in 2006 when I gathered the photo, I had in fact been venturing into those Eastern Hemlock forests for the better part of my entire life, and the specific spot where I had knelt to capture the reaction to my dog first hearing the specific and unique sound that the ice makes as it breaks from the top of the cliff line at the top of the adjoining gully as winter attempts to give way to spring late into March in this part of the state, was not new to me. But as Tuan describes, it takes time for children to develop the complex image or description of what is or isn’t a landscape; the fact that I instinctively knew exactly what that fierce, cracking sound was and dismissed it almost as quickly made for a chuckle for me when I knelt down to capture the intensity with which my baby girl crooned over the edge of the cliff –line to inspect the brand new sound. In hindsight, I vertically had conceptualized the landscape at that moment of time, but my dog was experiencing from a side view for the first time.

The specific element or locale here is twenty feet off of the main trail, part of the Buckeye Trail that circumvents the entire state, but all the same many people don’t venture away from the cliff band and look out over this gully. It isn’t entirely picturesque, which again follows with Tuan’s argument that people’s perceptions tend to develop lives of their own, and drive what they envision as the landscape of this particular portion of the state. The road is particularly winding, even by Southeast Ohio standards, and is bordered here by a operation that offers trail rides through the park, a small community church, a pole barn for the farmer that grows wheat and soybeans most years on the lands north of the State Forest, and maintenance buildings for the State Park just south of where I sit in the picture, so not too many people actually make their way back to where I sit, something about hiking past the manure pile from the stables making the part of the trailhead difficult to access. But this gully, and the hallow that it opens up into, to me, is indicative of the region as a whole. I use region not in the political, geographical or even ecological (vertical) sense of the term, but more towards the cultural construct of this portion of Southeast Ohio, and it’s relationship to Appalachia and the political economy of the region, as a greater entity.

“PLACE”

This spot is the image I draw in my mind when I think of Landscape; I know I essentially said that this image had NONE of the elements that I would practically require to make a landscape image. As importantly this is the image that comes to mind when someone mentions either Southeast Ohio, or Appalachia. From this spot I can see an open space, open in the Great Lakes, Midwest, Northeast sense of the word open, that is rather complicated to access, that from the outside appears unwelcoming and harsh, but the beauty lies much deeper than postcard depth, and much of this can be attributed, again the same way that Tuan describes the way that the Industrial Revolution tipped the balance of power between nature and man, as the rich in Brittan efforted to exploit the tenant farmers and laborers, the Scotch –Irish emigrated to what is now parts of Appalachia, bringing their ‘strict’ distrust of outsiders with them, and instilling it on an entire region. But as I diverge here into a tangent about, why this picture, and its depicted landscape is an iconic depiction of a landscape, I haven’t even begun to define the term Landscape itself.

Every author, every geographer, every artist, in fact everyone has a definition for landscape. I had the opportunity to hear the brains on College Gameday refer to the “Landscape of College Football” while waiting to watch a game over the weekend, and at the same time I am writing this piece for a seminar within a University that is attempting to brand itself as the “New Landscape for Learning”. So the concept of a definitive definition seems almost humorous, given that everyone will ALWAYS maintain an independent perception of, or depiction of reality. All the same, in the context of trying to identifying a particular geographic extent by which to describe spatial phenomena, putting a definition to what we are attempting to the word would be good for the general discourse.

TIME

Back to the image above, in March with four inches of snow and a veneer of veriglass ice on all rock surfaces, the hike to my perch takes around half an hour. In early December before the winter truly reaches into this hallow, as in the image below, the hike takes ten minutes. So holding place constant for a case study on the definition of a landscape, time has play an important factor in the definition. Every place, every subject changes as time passes. This is as true for this particular place in the Hocking State Forest as it is for Lower Manhattan, as it is for the landscape of College Football.

Time changes perception, just as the sixth graders that Tuan references identified more, or different elements from the images they were shown different from the same images shown to first graders; the nine months between Loki’s first encounter with the spring thaw in Hocking State Forest and my first trip as an actual climbing guide for the same hillside changed my perception of the spot from a place where I grew up, to the landscape of my refuge.

PURPOSE

The above image is from the end of a day climbing. For a while I trained with a fairly large group of people who were beginning to develop an interest in not having to travel quite so far to enjoy climbing outside on real rock, and “My season” for climbing really only starts later in the fall when the temperatures are cool enough to allow the body to maintain a particular level of activity without developing a lot of sweat, dealing with a large number of bugs, or large crowds, generally speaking means that I am gearing up to start a season of climbing about the time that the rest of this group was winding down for the year and getting ready for a long Ohio winter of drinking and watching television. However, early in January a couple of years back, somebody in the group suggested that my training partner and I should show the rest of the group around this area to show off some of the climbs that we had developed and were projecting. At the time, it seemed like a good enough idea, and everyone enjoyed a day out in the fresh, crisp, dry air in the hallow as winter finally started to take hold, even if they didn’t enjoy the climbing.

After a long, dejecting day of not completing my project climb I hiked over to my perch overlooking the entire hallow to collect myself and to catch my breath, I had to run back to the real interior of the area to recover one of my camera lenses (about a half mile of moderate terrain). As I sat there and watched as everyone worked their way down the hill to the bottom of the gully and back to the trailhead I took a couple of moments, to snap this shot that I thought would be part of a slide show for a presentation my friend and I were putting together for the Access Fund to demonstrate our need for help to increase access to climbing here in Ohio, but what actually happened was an epiphany about how I fit into this landscape. That I didn’t necessarily agree with the idea that we needed to increase access to these areas in Ohio – that the rest of the climbing world can believe that Ohio is a flat, wasteland of a state, with nothing to contribute in terms of climbing – I know, and my close friends know the more complete truth and we are just as well to keep it that way, which again fits with the external stigma of Southeast Ohio as part of an Appalachian landscape, how John Boorman depicts the backcountry in Deliverance.

In terms of definitional lessons learned from this narrative, this demonstrates how the purpose of the experience can change the appearance or presence of a landscape. Tuan references the Cemetery as a type of landscape that receives a special perception in people’s minds. We all have our own variety of reasons to visit a cemetery, and we each carry a perception and reason for frequenting on any given day. Just as my purpose for crawling up “my hill” and taking a nap at the base of one of those hemlock trees has changed, and my perception of that space, that landscape has changed and inevitably will continue to evolve as I age and the hillside erodes.

CONCLUSION

Although Landscape can and is often tied to scenic images of nature, or urban settings, the most important factors to consider are the place, time, and purpose surrounding the description of the landscape. As the “Landscape of College Football”, changes on a weekly basis throughout the course of a season and changes depending on where the snapshot is taken as well as which football analyst or fan is making the description of the landscape. So as a matter of distilling this meandering story down to its final point:

Landscape =S_x,y,z∫{T_i ± P_x ± R ± C}

I break one final time to draw attention to my perch one more time, only this time I take it from the valley /hallow floor on a day in April of last year as winter finally let go of its hold, but before spring gets complete control, to demonstrate a quick final point about the concept of defining landscape. I make this argument from a particular perspective or perception, but that perception changes, as does the weather, as the fog lifts from the valley floor, you still can’t see my spot… So who’s to say that it’s an actual place, or some fabrication of my mind? But at the same time, what difference does it make?