Design Fictions and Pushing the Boundaries of Cartography

Design Fiction A lot of current PhD work and research is about using design fictions to push boundaries and develop discussions of what is needed, even when what is needed is not possible in the current world. Design Fiction is a process much like Geodesign, where you have a tool or process that needs investigating […]

Positive Change of Direction For Me and My Future

Some of you may have heard of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s decision to discontinue the GIS Professional Program Online degrees and certificates. I am still heartbroken over this decision. Over the past 7 years, I have enjoyed working with our students and the limited exposure that I had to the Geography Department as a whole. […]

My Cancer Journey – Updated May 21 – Home Again

Treatment Tracker Radiation Left: 0 Chemo Left: 0 Radiation: Mon–Fri Chemo: Mondays I have just been diagnosed with Cancer of the Jaw along with a broken jaw. I am currently in the early stages of figuring stuff out, and all of the appointments. It is overwhelming and scary, but I am optimistic since it is […]

Efficient Field Data Collection: A Survey123 and XLSForms Approach

This is a link to my presentation given at the 2025 GISSIG Conference in Rochester, NY

Gridded NetCDF Basics – You Can Model Climate change with ArcGIS!

Another post over break! This one also comes from a student’s suggestion on how to use Weather data in the form of gridded NetCDFs. This is a common format of the weather data provided by NOAA. The data are set up as a time-stacked set of rasters or spacetime cubes. The downloads have multiple years’ […]

Moving your ArcGIS Online Content

With many students graduating, I have had questions about how long will my ArcGIS Online account live and how can I move my work to another so I can keep a portfolio. Most schools only keep accounts open for a semester or two after graduation, and others right after graduation. So your best bet is […]

ESRIUC 2024 Presentation – A Novel Raster Approach for Creating Maps for the Visually Impaired (Updated 3D Map Printing)

I am excited to be presenting at the ESRI User Conference in San Diego this year. I will be presenting my work on creating a 3D Printed Map. I will be presenting on Wednesday, Jul 17, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM PDT in the Marriott Grand Ballroom Salon 10. If you would like to attend […]

“Quick and Easy” Census Data in GIS – Part 2

In Part 1 we covered the basics of getting the census data and doing a simple join. Now in Part 2, we will work on making this data both more usable and accessible using the database design tools in ArcGIS Pro and also Publishing this data to ArcGIS Online for use in your own web […]

“Quick and Easy” Census Data in GIS – Part 1

Census data is a great resource for any GIS project, but it can be very overwhelming, and using it can be tricky at times. The data are in many forms on the Census.gov website but I have found that using the TIGER/Line with Selected Demographic and Economic Data is by far the easiest method of […]

Using ArcGIS Online to Map Attendance

With school starting back up, I wanted to share a workflow that can help administrators look at the chronic attendance issues. One thing that I have seen is when talking with different school administrators, at the individual school level, they do not know of GIS and that Esri provides many tools to them for free. […]