Rice Seminar Public Lecture: Smart City Geo-Imaginaries: How maps and GIS are Spurring a Nascent Urban Nervous System by Allen Carroll

Thursday, March 2, 2017

The early days of the digital revolution saw the conversion of analog city maps to multi-layered digital geodatabases which, powered by geographic information systems (GIS), enabled cadres of networked professionals to manage urban infrastructures. A new revolution is distributing urban data to vastly wider audiences, enabling citizens as active mappers, expanding the language of urban discourse, and making possible a new urban nervous system. Two related phenomena are fueling this revolution: Story Maps enable GIS professionals to interpret their data for non-specialists and empower non-specialists to use maps to tell stories. An open data movement is evolving into “Hubs”, where “smart cities” not only emancipate their data but encourage and support a sprawling neural network of developers, entrepreneurs, community activists, and citizens. Please complete your registration. All lectures are free and open to the public but sitting is limited. 

Biography of Alen Carroll: 
Allen Carroll is Program Manager for Storytelling at Esri. He leads Esri’s Story Maps team, which develops open-source web apps that enable thousands of individuals and organizations to tell place-based stories combining interactive maps and multimedia content. The team also develops its own story maps, prototyping innovative user experiences and demonstrating best practices for map-enabled storytelling. The team’s website is at storymaps.arcgis.com Allen came to Esri after 27 years at the National Geographic Society. As chief cartographer at NGS, he was deeply involved in the creation of the Society’s renowned reference and wall maps, globes, and atlases. He led the creation of the Seventh and Eighth editions of the World Atlas, incorporating satellite imagery and innovative thematic maps into the editions and integrating them for the first time with interactive Web resources. He spearheaded the publication of many new maps and Web resources, ranging from decorative wall maps and supplement maps for National Geographic magazine to special projects featuring biodiversity, conservation, and indigenous cultures. He is a former member of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee.