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  1. jgieseking

    Digital Image of the City: Smart City Recommendations for Portland, Maine

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    This fall, I taught the Digital Image of the City in the Digital & Computational Studies Initiative at Bowdoin College. As over half the world’s population now dwells in cities, revolutionary advances in technology such as big data have caused policymakers and activists alike to shift their focus toward a movement of smart urbanism. Smart urbanism includes interventions in urban issues through better uses of technology and data, from gentrification to pollution, access to public spaces to improved walkability. In the course, students conducted qualitative field research and learned the geographic information systems (GIS) open-source platform QGIS. Then then identified an issue in the City of Portland related to the topic of housing, infrastructure, or public space. As the final outcome of the project, students created maps and conducted research to help them devise technological solutions to these issues.

    On December 10th, 2014, the students of The Digital …

  2. jgieseking

    Teaching the Geographic Political Economies of Ferguson

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    My esteemed and inspiring colleague, Kate Driscoll Derickson at UMN, sent around an email of her favorite teaching resources. There are so many of these resources out there but I thought a list with an explanation of what each of these resources affords the student or instructor was worth sharing. I found all of these sources incredibly helpful for prepping my own brief lecture on #Ferguson at Bowdoin today.
    I also want to add a short description of a paper by Sue Ruddick [1996], “Constructing Differences in Public Spaces: Race, Class and Gender as Interlocking Systems,” on the Just Desserts shooting in Toronto in 1990. The way that race, class, gender, and sexuality play out in space is specific to a certain place, especially public space. When we look again at Mike Brown’s shooting through his geography–not just the maps of St. Louis created by Colin Gordon (h/t …
  3. jgieseking

    Talk Today: Sustaining Difference during Gentrification: NYC & Berlin Since 2008

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    I am sharing my slides from my talk today, “Sustaining Difference during Gentrification: NYC & Berlin Since 2008,” at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bundeskanzler-Stipendium (BUKA) / German Chancellor Fellowship Kolloquium in Sankt-Petersburg, Russia. This presentation is a first and high-level response to Desiree Fields (Sheffield, UK) and and Sabrina Uffer’s (SIT Study Abroad) paper, “The financialization of rental housing: A comparative analysis of New York City and Berlin,” published this year in Urban Studies. I draw upon my research in NYC as well as my 2010-2011 research in Berlin as an AvH BUKA Fellow. I am, again(!), deeply thankful to the utterly fabulous Tatjana Nikitina, Director of the German-Russian Center at the State Economic University in St. Petersburg, Russia, for bringing us all together to share our work and ideas across countries and continents.

  4. jgieseking

    Hackathon How-To: Gephi Social Network Software Installation & First Data Set

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    Hallo to those you at the Bowdoin Hackathon tonight and to you far away as well! For those of you new to social network analysis, Gephi is an incredible, free and open source software platform, you can download at gephi.org. I’ll be offering a tutorial using netvizz and Facebook data at 7 p.m. in the VAC 304. For those with a Mac, you must follow these extra steps from our friends the hackers at github:

    1. download and install this: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572
    2. delete your gephi settings dir: rm -r ~/Library/Application Support/gephi
    3. find your java home with /usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6, it should print something like /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home
    4. if there is a message about being unable to find any JVMs matching version 1.6 something is wrong, fix it
    5. edit /Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/Resources/gephi/etc/gephi.conf to set your jdkhome e.g. like this: echo “jdkhome=”$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6)”” >> /Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/Resources/gephi/etc/gephi.conf
    6. start gephi and open the Les Miserables “quick start” instructional
  5. jgieseking

    Steps toward Recognition through Openness and the Virtual (Fifty Years Later Essay)

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    My essay, “Steps toward Recognition through Openness and the Virtual,” below was written for the Bowdoin Museum College of Art virtual exhibit Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting.” My essay is best preface by reading Dana Byrd and Sarah Montross’s essay, “Fifty Years Later: An Introduction,” which describes the exhibit & site, and I excerpt here.

     Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting - A Digital Exhibition. 2014. Bowdoin Museum College of Art.Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting – A Digital Exhibition. 2014. Bowdoin Museum College of Art.

    The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting was a landmark exhibition organized by and exhibited at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art during the summer of 1964. …[i]t attracted high-profile national attention, including visits and praise from Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. … Organized at the height of the civil rights movement, The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting was recognized

  6. jgieseking

    Opening for Virtual Exhibit “Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting”

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     Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting - A Digital Exhibition. 2014. Bowdoin Museum College of Art.Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting – A Digital Exhibition. 2014. Bowdoin Museum College of Art.

    Tonight at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, we will be hosting an opening for the virtual exhibit, “Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting.” As a faculty member of the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, I played a part on the leadership team, along with Professor Dana Byrd of Art History and Curatorial Fellow Sarah Montross, to help design the architecture and structure of the site, and chime in on the shape and meaning of the site when possible. I also contributed an essay to the site which I will reblog here, and it was exciting and important work to think about who remains unrepresented and underrepresented not only in art but also who hangs in our museums. This was a new space …

  7. jgieseking

    People, Place, and Space Reader is Top Selling Routledge Planning & Urban Design Book of 2014!

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    Routledge Books. November 4th, 2014.Routledge Books. November 4th, 2014.

    We are pleased to announce that The People, Place, and Space Reader is the bestselling Planning & Urban Design title of 2014! While we are second on this list, our editor at Routledge shared that we just moved to the #1 spot!

    The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the writings of scholars from a variety of fields to make sense of the ways we shape and inhabit our world. The included texts help us to understand the relationships between people and place at all scales, and to consider the active roles individuals, groups, and social structures play in a range of environments. These readings highlight the ways in which space and place are produced through social, political, and economic practices, and take into account differences in perception, experience, and practice. The People, Place, and Space Reader includes both classic writings and contemporary research, …

  8. jgieseking

    My @HuffPoGay Blog Post: On the Closing of the Last Lesbian Bar in San Francisco: What the Demise of the Lex Tells Us About Gentrification

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    On the Closing of the Last Lesbian Bar in San Francisco: What the Demise of the Lex Tells Us About GentrificationOn the Closing of the Last Lesbian Bar in San Francisco: What the Demise of the Lex Tells Us About Gentrification. Huffington Post Gay Voices. October 28, 2014.

    After reading the recent announcement that The Lexington Bar, the last and only lesbian bar of San Francisco, would be closing, I got pretty fired up and decided to blog about it. In an effort to get scholarly work out to larger audiences, I teamed up with Huffington Post Gay Voices and will be blogging there every other month or more with other reflections. Here’s the link to the most recent post.

  9. jgieseking

    Talk at Yale Tomorrow: Dyke Publics, Privates, and Queer New York

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    Forthcoming work from Queer New York.

    I am en route to New Haven to give a talk at the invitation of the Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Program, American Studies Program, and Public Humanities Program at Yale University. My talk, “Dyke Publics, Privates, and Queer New York,” will trace how notions of public and private have undergirded much of the work in lgbtq studies. I suggest that there has been a prioritization of publics alongside visible claims to collective spaces. In turn, many lesbians’ and queer women’s spaces have been obscured or invisibilized by overlooking the profound role of private spaces. These arguments are part of my monograph-in-progress, Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queer Women, 1983-2008.

    The talk will be at noon on October 8th, 2014, in York 212. Hope to see you there!…

  10. jgieseking

    Sharing Student Research from Data Driven Societies (Bowdoin 2014)

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    In the spring of 2014, I (Jen Jack Gieseking) taught Data Driven Societies with Eric Gaze. A geographer and a mathematician, a social scientist and a natural scientist, working together with 35 students with very diverse backgrounds and interests sought to answer one question: what can data visualization reveal and obscure about the world’s increasing obsession with all things data?

    Students selected a social justice hashtag of their choice that related to issues of identity, privacy, economics, politics, or the environment. Over a month, students scraped Twitter data on their hashtag. (A hashtag is a term with a # in front of it that hyperlinks to all uses of the term that can range from #stopandfrisk and #smog to #gobears.) As students read media and conducted research about the issue they had chosen to study, they also began to create graphs, maps, and network analyses from the …

  11. jgieseking

    Queer(ing) New York Course Videos Now on YouTube

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    image-CLAGS-Syllabus-for-Queering-New-York-finalIn May 2013, I taught Queer(ing) New York (CLAGSqNY) at the Center for Lesbian and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. With over 50 in-person students and over 230 students online, the course provoked exciting conversations with students around the world about the shfiting production of and political economies within lgbtq spaces in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course was and is free and open to the public. No prior knowledge on this topic is required; only an open mind is necessary.

    Now I am pleased to share that the course videos have been archived on YouTube and I am posting them below as well as on the CLAGSqNY website. While the course was held in May 2013, you can still take the course via the readings and watching the videos via the CLAGSqNY website as participation in …

  12. jgieseking

    Spring 2014 Reflections upon the Start of a New Semester

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    Syllabus planning overlooking spring on the Bowdoin quad. CC BY-NC Jen Jack Gieseking 2014Syllabus planning overlooking spring on the Bowdoin quad. CC BY-NC Jen Jack Gieseking 2014

    It’s surely the beginning of the semester at Bowdoin College this week but I am grabbing some time to reflect on the spring semester of 2014. I am starting my second year of my postdoc as a member of the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative (DCSI)–how did that wondrous year go? I share it here so that I do not forget.

    Teaching Data Driven Societies with the most excellent mathematician and my dear colleague Eric Gaze was absolute bliss. In this course, we explored the possibilities, limitations, and implications of using digital and computational methods and analytics to study issues that affect our everyday lives from a social scientific approach. This course tackled a number of cutting-edge issues and questions that confront society today such as what sorts of questions can be asked and answered …

  13. jgieseking

    New Publication: Environmental Psychology in International Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology

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    International Encyclopedia of Critical PsychologyThe International Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology began as a project of Thomas Teo’s some time ago and my friend and mentor Michelle Fine connected me to this project. Critical psychology is a branch of psychology that draws upon critical theory, i.e. theory that challenges mainstream thinking in order to work toward social justice. Critical psychology can most readily be found in members of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues: SPSSI. As an environmental psychologist and critical psychologist, I was eager to contribute. While I originally aimed to produce an entry on queer work, the absence of an entry on environmental psychology was a key hole to fill.

    I am pleased to share that my entry, “Environmental Psychology,” in the International Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology is now published. For those of you new to environmental psychology or environmental social science, seasoned obsessionists, or fans of The

  14. jgieseking

    The Political Economy of Mobile Screen Geographies

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    Screenshot from my Yo App. August 12, 2014.Screenshot from JGIESEKING’s Yo App. August 12, 2014.

    One of students recently emailed me about the Yo App. Like many people (including the “The Colbert Report”), she was not at first terribly impressed with its seemingly simple functionality of sending you push notifications. Yet, then it began to “make sense” to her. As she pointed out, Yo works by sending you alerts on anything the could range from how long it will be until Mom gets home in today’s traffic and you have to really stop playing W.O.W. to when the muffins come out at your favorite bakery.

    Take note: I said “could.” For now there is a limited index or you need to code your own. My chosen Yo notifications? Yo will now tell me when it is snowing in Buffalo, there is an incoming missile anywhere near the State of Israel, President Obama releases a new executive …

  15. jgieseking

    Setting Borders and Padding on Images *and* Caption in WordPress 3.9(.1)

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    This post explains a quick fix for those needing a border around their caption as well as their image.

    THE ISSUE

    Where have all the borders gone?Where have all the borders gone?

    For those of you who have not been obsessively working on laying out your images since the WordPress 3.9 upgrade (i.e. me as it’s summer–you know this, yes?), I woke up to an incredibly frustrating layout of my homepage (see left).

    And look! No margin as this text touches this image! Yeeghads. What is the WordPress world coming to?

    I am delighted to share I used this thing called The Internet to ask what the hay was going on–and it knew! Hurrah for the interwebs.

     

    THE ALMOST FIX

    Where have all the borders gone for the caption?Where have all the borders gone for the caption?

    WordPress eliminated borders and padding from their 3.9 upgrade. Why in the world? No idea. But someone has, of course, already coded the Advanced

  16. jgieseking

    New article: Notes from Queer(ing) New York: Refusing Binaries in Online Pedagogy

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    My new article with the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy just launched this morning. You can read Notes from Queer(ing) New York: Refusing Binaries in Online Pedagogy by clicking here or read the abstract below.

    In this paper I reflect on the construction and instruction of the outcomes of the Queer(ing) New York course (QNY). The case study of QNY demonstrates the pedagogical work of refusing norms and hierarchies that pedagogical models, particularly online courses, are assumed to maintain. QNY created an open course that queered the binaries of the public/graduate seminar and local/virtual. I draw from queer, feminist, and critical geographic approaches at the moment of the massive, open, online course (MOOC) fervor in order to queer models of online and open education. I also reflect on the impact of the course through in-class notes and data visualizations produced from social media and course analytics. I suggest that

  17. jgieseking

    Talk Today at EuroPride Oslo: Where Does Queer Life Go after the Gayborhood?

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    Today I am speaking at EuroPride in Oslo: “Where Does Queer Life Go after the Gayborhood?” If you happen to be in the land of the midnight sun, join in!

    Here is the abstract and info:

    Reflections from Queer Spaces in New York City, 1983-2013: Scholars, activists, and journalists have recently proclaimed the end of the radical and welcoming lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer (lgbtq) neighborhood or “gayborhood,” both in North America and Europe. The affordable and marginal qualities of these spaces that helped to bring together diverse socioeconomic groups of lgbtq people have been eroded by global processes of intensified gentrification and the objectification of lgbtq bodies and experiences. Where does queer life go after the end of radical gayborhoods? Drawing on interviews with 47 lesbians and queer women who came out between 1983 and 2008 and archival research from that period, I trace the processes of gentrification …

  18. jgieseking

    Arriving in DC to Talk the Future of LGBT Monuments

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    LGBTQ Yarn Bomb in Soho. June 2014. CC BY-NC Jen Jack Gieseking 2014LGBTQ Yarn Bomb in Soho. June 2014. CC BY-NC Jen Jack Gieseking 2014

    I am one of the 18 LGBT Studies scholars invited by the Secretary of the Interior to come to DC this week and give recommendations for policies in selecting future US LGBT monuments. I am honored, thrilled, and inspired. I never would have imagined when I was coming out in the early 1990s that such monuments would ever exist, let alone I would be part of this conversation.

    Representing the gender, racial, class, generational, age, and geographic diversity of our history is the top priority of those scholars who will be coming together tomorrow to discuss this work. As the geographer of the group, I will pay special attention to making sure we speak not only to the urban or the coasts but the rural, suburban, and other parts of our countries. We may not associate certain

  19. jgieseking

    My Advice to College Graduates

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    Over the last week, my graduating students have been asking me again and again for advice. Since I began my career in business, my advice has tended toward advice for those entering that arena first but I think it can be applied elsewhere. These seem to be the things I am repeating and as a shoutout to those students who asked and to remind myself for next year, I am including them below.

    1. Have a mentor in your new digs who keeps an eye on you and you stay loyal to too. However, mentors change so be prepared for change too.
    2. Always send handwritten thank you notes within 24-48 hours, even if you are unsure if whatever just happened warrants a thank you. If you want to dazzle, stick to Crane’s.
    3. Put yourself out there and offer to help, especially when you can learn new skills, extend the ones you
  20. jgieseking

    New publication: Two Chapters in Queer Geographies: Beirut, Tijuana, Copenhagen

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    Queer Geographies: Beirut, Tijuana, Copenhagen, a collaborative work of artists, activists, and scholars, showcases the work of queer art installations in these three very different cities throughout the 2000s. The art and its very smart, beautiful catalog highlight the identical processes of neoliberal capitalism that touch each of these places and brings queer life into sync more and more from greater distances. Two chapters of mine appear as the bookends: the academic/personal introduction in “A Queer Geographer’s Life as an Introduction to Queer Theory, Space, and Time,” and the conclusion “What and Where Next? Some Thoughts on a Spatially Queered Recommended Reading List.” I remain delighted and grateful I was asked to reflect on this work and reflect on what queer theory, critical geographic theory, and work on the geographies of sexualities can bring to this radical, important, and exciting catalog. I am also thankful to the lead editor, …

  21. jgieseking

    Announcing the launch of The People, Place, & Space Reader Website at PeoplePlaceSpace.org

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    We are pleased to announce the launch of the website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, for the forthcoming The People, Place, & Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking and William Mangold, with Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert. The People, Place, and Space Reader includes both classic writings and contemporary research, connecting scholarship across disciplines, periods, and locations to make sense of the ways we shape and inhabit our world. Essays from the editors introduce the texts and outline key issues surrounding each topic.

    In that there are specific online and open access components of the volume to share, I wanted to send on word via email. The editors are committed to open access (OA) to public knowledge and as such have made their introduction to the book and the twelve section introductions of the book available on the website. We provide links to OA versions of excerpted readings when

  22. jgieseking

    Repairing Twitter Tools Plugin When It Fails to Sync / Update

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    My Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress recently stopped updating / syncing with the server. I spent a lot of time reading online forums and found this post by Shekhar Govindarajan to be the most helpful until I found an even easier workaround.

    1. Under Settings in Dashboard, go to Social.
    2. De-link your Twitter account.
    3. Save the settings.
    4. Now re-link your Twitter account.
    5. Go to Twitter Tools settings through the Plugins option under Dashboard.
    6. Choose to sync now at the bottom page.

    That’s it. You’ll notice if you delete and add Twitter Tools again it saves your Twitter feed info. The only way to reset the Twitter Tools access to the Twitter server is to de-link and the re-add the account. Enjoy!

  23. jgieseking

    Data Driven Societies at Bowdoin College

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    This semester I am teaching Data Driven Societies as part of the new Digital and Computatial Studies Initiative at Bowdoin College. My co-instructor is the awesome Eric Gaze, Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Program and President of the National Numeracy Network. With 35 very excited students, we are where the social data sciences meet.

    In the first week of class, students will select a hashtag on a social issue of their choice, and  scraping their hashtag data off of Twitter for at least a month. In labs, student will apply graph (Excel, R), spatial (GoogleMaps, Social Explorer), and network analysis (Gephi) skills learned in class to create data visualizations from their dataset and interpret the data. The readings we read in class will help them deal with some of the major issues framing issues of the web today, including Defining Data, Private(s), Public(s), The Life of Code, Sociality and

  24. jgieseking

    Visualizing ‘Queer Exchange’ Friendships

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    I am increasingly interested in the social networks of queers, broadly and self-defined. One of the largest queer groups on Facebook that I know of is the Facebook group Queer Exchange with 7,855 members as of December 1, 2013. Each node or dot represents a person and the lines or edges indicate the friendships between them. Rather than a top-down culture, Queer Exchange repeats the interwoven and overlapping descriptions of queer spaces and lives that have described lgbtq life across cities, states, and times. In other words, many cultures often demonstrate relationships and dynamics that show some dominant voices overtaking others, or friends being connected to only one other person so they wander on the periphery. Instead this graph shows an interwoven society.

    If you click the here or on the graph below, you can interact with the social network analysis graph of Queer Exchange I created.

    Social media sites

  25. jgieseking

    Collecting Data, Que(e)rying the SpaceTime of the Lesbian Herstory Archives

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    On founding the Lesbian Herstory Archives:
    Deb Edel: We began talking about how easily our history had gotten lost.
    Joan Nestle: That we didn’t want our story told by quote “a patriarchal history keeper.”  I didn’t want our story told by those who told us we were freaks to begin with.
    Deb: If we didn’t do it, nobody was gonna do it for us.
    Joan: This wasn’t gonna be a one night stand.  This was gonna be a long-term relationship. We had a commitment to the archives that…it had to be a lifetime commitment… If an archives doesn’t outlast at least one generation it’s not an archives. … This was an archives who belonged to the people who lived its history. (Lesbian Herstory Archives 2009)

    There is a need for lgbtq people to unearth and even create their own history, especially lesbians and queer women who face erasures of their

  26. jgieseking

    Generationally Speaking Across Qualitative and Quantitative Data

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    Historian Marc Stein contends that a sequential narrative of lgbtq history can reflect “the critical study of change over time, with special emphasis on human agents of change” (2005, 623). The narrative of such change has the power to inspire and begin to enact that change. I designed my research to embrace multiple generations of participants and let them share their experiences across and within generational focus groups. Throughout my qualitative interviews with and research into lesbian-queer everyday lives, the issue of generations came up repeatedly independent of my interest in the issue as it clearly framed these women’s life experiences.

    I’m keen to explain the generational breaks you are about to see in my future data visualizations. They are far from haphazard. They are based not only on trends and shifts in these archival data, but also from patterns I found among women who took part in my

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