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 …

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.

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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

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.

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 …

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 …

On October 30th, 2014, I appeared on Huffington Post Live “Queer Voices” to discuss my first blog post, “On the Closing of the Last Lesbian Bar in San Francisco: What the Demise of the Lex Tells Us About Gentrification,” for Huffington Post. Click on the image below for the video.

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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, …

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.…

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!…

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 …

In 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 …

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 …

The 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 …

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 …

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

THE ISSUE

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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, …