Geoff Edwards

Links & images test

2011-11-08T23:30:00+00:00

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2011-11-08T22:40:00+00:00

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Test post with title

2011-11-08T22:40:00+00:00

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My top ten of 2010

2010-12-18T05:30:00+00:00

Deerhunter, "He Would Have Laughed" (from Halcyon Digest). The transition to the last melodic section of this song—beginning at about the 5:20 mark—is my favorite musical moment of 2010.

Killer Mike & T.I.P, "(Grandhustle) Ready Set Go." The best hip-hop production of 2010.

Nicki Minaj's verse on Kanye's "Monster." The album itself is good but in no way essential or classic. The production already sounds dated and "Power" may be the most boring song ever to generate so much hype. But Minaj nails everything on this verse: lyrics, timing, intonation, and—most importantly—menace.

Catfish. Don't read anything about it, just find a way to watch it. (Guilty pleasure: Kick-Ass. Chloe Moretz kills it as Hit Girl.)

"The Rejected" (Mad Men season 4, episode 4). My favorite episode of last season is the first time we see 1960s counterculture begin to bubble-up through the slick, modernist facade. ("The Suitcase" is also very good.)

This Ask Metafilter thread from May. Reading it still gets me a little choked-up. One user of the service sought the help of his fellow MeFites in convincing two Russian friends not to fall victim to a human trafficking scam here in the United States. The massive outpouring of advice, support, and donations eventually resulted in a happy ending and at least one poignant interview on a Newsweek blog.

2 Years in Prison—A Man's Story. You may think your impression of prison has been sufficiently ridded of naiveté. Prepare to have that impression reupholstered.

Lagunitas Brewing Company's Little Sumpin' Sumpin' Ale. West Coast pale ales are my favorite genre of drink. This is tops.

Jason Hayward's first at-bat. My sports highlight of the year, ranking just above the Olympic hockey final and group-winning US goal in the World Cup.

The ash cloud. The sub- and superterranean tangled in April when Eyjafjallajokull led to the biggest disruption of European air traffic since World War II. It also spawned some neat visualizations and Stranded, a MagCloud issue produced by a bunch of stuck travelers.

Shifting focus

2010-12-13T18:30:00+00:00

The past few months have seen their share of tumult. The good kind. Let me explain.

A muddled proposal

Up until early-November, my academic project was marked by disorder and confusion. I welcomed it, I guess, because the research I'd been doing all summer—which I'd always assumed would feed into a dissertation—had gotten stiff and boring. I needed to shift my focus. More regular meetings with my advisor did the trick. Conversations with him freed me from what was fast becoming the type of in-the-weeds dissertation proposal that makes my eyes roll.

My new and improved dissertation topic is really just a more inspired version of the previous one, which focused on the structures of airport ownership and operations. That was a little too public administrationy for my tastes. My newly proposed dissertation is more closely related to my One True Academic Love: critical spatial theory and practice. With this dissertation, I want to conceptualize airspace as the culturally and technologically constructed urban space produced and affected by ongoing processes performed by diverse assemblages of human and non-human actors within 1) airport facilities, 2) adjacent space, and 3) global aeromobility networks.

Meetings with my advisor over the next few weeks will give me a better impression of the holes I'll need to fill, but I think I've done a decent job of tracing the contours. I'll try to spend more time filling these holes online than offline.

What else has kept me busy?

More muddle: presentations, past and future

I presented a poster at NECoPA in October. It wasn't anything fancy—just a basic summary of some preliminary exploratory data analysis (EDA) I thought I might have needed for my dissertation. It turns out I probably won't use the data or the analysis anytime soon. Still, it looks pretty cool.

I also had the following abstract accepted by the joint international conference of the Pan-American Mobilities Network and the Cosmobilities Network:

Maps of Time and the Representation of Uneven Mobilities

Movement through space is also movement through time. Even if we remain perfectly motionless, the world still happens around us as our being is "stretched along" between birth and death (Heidegger 1962, 442–443). But what about less existential matters? What if we're more concerned with the between-ness of Newark and Philadelphia, say, or of the office and the train station? We know from experience that time is often the more important factor in our personal mobility decisions. How soon can I be there? When does the next bus arrive? Is it faster to get there by train or by car? The answers to these and related questions determine the possible forms taken by our everyday mobilities.

Most everyday maps—e.g., of weather, roads, the subway, or campus—privilege representations of space at the expense of representations of time. Maps and cartograms providing spatiotemporal information are used primarily to identify and track patterns of change in the past and to predict occurrences in the future (Vasiliev 1997). These maps of time also have potential for use by mobility activists. New approaches to mobilities in motion require cartographic experiments that call attention to the ways we experience spatiality as temporality. This paper organizes a number of temporal mapping examples to trace the development of the methods involved and discusses their potential for representing uneven mobilities, especially those regarding different temporal experiences of equivalent spaces.

Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.

Vasiliev, I.R. 1997. Mapping Time. Cartographica 34 (2): 1–51.

Getting started

2010-08-27T10:38:10-04:00

You can edit this article by opening content/pages/example.mdown in your text editor. Make some changes, then save the file and reload this web page to preview your changes.

Checkout the Markdown Cheat Sheet to find out how to format your text to maximum effect.

If you want to add attachments to your pages you can drop them in the content/attachments directory and refer to them using a URL such as /attachments/my-file.png (my-file.png doesn't exist, but you get the idea). You can obviously refer to inline images using the same URL structure.

The benefits of Pears

2010-08-27T10:38:00-04:00

Pears are good because... blah blah.

You can change this article by editing content/pages/pears.mdown.

The benefits of Apples

2010-08-27T10:38:00-04:00

Apples are good because... blah blah.

You can change this article by editing content/pages/apples.mdown.

The benefits of Bananas

2010-08-27T10:38:00-04:00

Bananas are good because... blah blah.

You can change this article by editing content/pages/bananas.mdown.

Templature

2010-08-27T03:10:00+00:00

This post is going to test some of the markdown items I have recently learned how to implement.

Subheading

Blah.