Even though I am a GIS graduate (my diploma says “Major in Geoinformatics”), I say everywhere that I am a geographer. Partly this makes it easier for me to explain questions like “What is geoinformatics?” and partly because I never really considered myself a “GIS guy”. To me, a GIS person is someone who can program a GIS server, or rather, when I was a student, the good ones could run Minnesota MapServer, for the younger years – it’s an opensource map server developed in the mid-90s (downloadable here). Those were the “real GIS guys” for me when I was in college. The rest of us who avoided programming are more likely to be geographers, maybe quantitative geographers, or geodata scientist, or cartographers (I’m not either), etc.
I started studying geoinformatics at Palacky University Olomouc (Czech Republic) in 2004, and although I took a few classes where we learnt different programming languages or tools – HTML, CSS, Avenue, or R, I never enjoyed it or was good at it, so I graduated without being able to write my own website, edit a Python script, or start a MySQL database. With today’s job market and GIS, it may sound crazy, but 10-15 years ago it wasn’t so sci-fi (avoid programming).
A detour to Avenue, who of you do you remember:
myProject = av.GetProject
myView = myProject.FindDoc("Atlanta")
myViewDisplay = myView .GetDisplay
I believe my classmates will probably not forget these lines 🙂
However, I find that I’ve missed the train the last couple of years, that without programming (or at least a basic ability to customize the code), there’s not much you can do in GIS, especially if you’re trying to use primarily open-source tools like I am (I work primarily in QGIS). To make matters worse, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend the next academic year in the US, where I’ve been accepted as a Fulbright-Masaryk Fellow. So, thanks to the Fulbright Commission, I will be working for six months in Prof. Helena Mitasova’s team at the Center for Geospatial Analysis at North Carolina State University. The combination of the need for personal growth and the pressure not to look like a moron in the US resulted in my resolution to start (in my “old age”) programming.
My goal is to work with touch and virtual tools combined with GIS in the field of (participatory) urban planning. My role model, goal and motivation are projects developed both at NCSU (Tangible Landscape) and at MIT in the Media Lab team under the name CityScope (augmented reality demonstration). That’s why I decided to start such a programming “diary”/blog, which I will publish here on GeoParticipation blog – most of these texts are also available in Czech at GISportal.cz.
I think it makes more sense to write it for a community that is close to the topic than to start a new blog that maybe nobody would even read. At the same time, my suffering/effort will hopefully be a motivation for others, and a demonstration that it makes sense, and that maybe it’s not even completely impossible to start programming a few years out of college.
I would be happy if you would share your experiences, ideas, or insights ideally as comments directly on the blog here. Keep your fingers crossed, it’s going to be a struggle!
Jirka Panek
geoparticipation 