Samhir Vasdev

Presentations & Workshops

My first career was as an academic and I'd been a teaching assistant, tutor, and grader prior to becoming a lecturer, then professor. I enjoy sharing what I know, consider being able to explain something an order of magnitude harder than simply being able to do that thing, and it's rare that I don't grow as a result of interacting with an audience. Over the years I've presented on subjects as varied as historical photographic and printing processes, cartography, and digital literacy at the dawn of the public Internet.

Here's a list of recent presentations and workshops with links to abstracts (), decks (), and videorecordings () if available.

Bookending the Lincoln Highway: The Monumental Sculpture of James Earle Fraser

• American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (25 Apr 2015)
  Chicago, IL

Let’s Talk About Your Geostack

This aggressively ambitious workshop was given at numerous locations around the country in 2014 and 2015. In retrospect, the kindest thing to say is that it was Quixotic to believe that, on a voluntary basis, it would be possible to track changes in open source mapping technology across three different operating systems. It was enthusiastically received and I met many remarkable people over the course of delivering these workshops.

• Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (24 Apr 2015)
  Chicago, IL
• FOSS4G North America (9 Mar 2015)
  Burlingame, CA
• Avid Geo/Maptime Boston, Harvard University (18 Oct 2014)
  Cambridge, MA
• Maptime NYC, Mapzen (14 Oct 2014)
  New York City, NY
• Annual Meeting, North American Cartographic Information Society (11 Oct 2014)
  Pittsburgh, PA
• FOSS4G (8 Sep 2014)
  Portland, OR
• MaptimeSF, Stamen Design (20 Nov 2013)
  San Francisco, CA
• MaptimeSF, Stamen Design (13 Nov 2013)
  San Francisco, CA

Which Way Is Inbound? A Journey with SF Muni and Directional Statistics

• Bay Area useR Group/Predictive Analytics World (31 Mar 2015)
  San Francisco, CA
• FOSS4G North America (12 Mar 2015)
  Burlingame, CA
• Bay Area GeoMeetup Group (10 Dec 2014)
  San Francisco, CA
• GIS Day, Geospatial Innovation Facility, University of California, Berkeley (19 Nov 2014)
  Berkeley, CA

Deprecated, Ported, Forked: On the Fates of Programming Languages

• Living with Endangered Languages in the Information Age, Root Division (15 Jan 2015)
  San Francisco, CA

The Zeon Files Mapped: Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

• Annual Meeting, North American Cartographic Information Society (10 Oct 2014)
  Pittsburgh, PA

TileMill and the Tower of Prince Henry, Reversed

• FOSS4G (11 Sep 2014)
  Portland, OR

Lessons Learned from Experimental Film

• State of the Map US (13 Apr 2014)
  Washington, DC
• Annual Meeting, North American Cartographic Information Society (10 Oct 2013)
  Greenville, SC
• Geospatial Innovation Facility, University of California, Berkeley (3 Oct 2013)
  Berkeley, CA

Rrose: A Leaflet Plugin for Edge Cases

Rrose is designed to be used with Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library for interactive maps. It does one thing–alters the default popup behavior in a way that makes sense for some desktop-oriented applications–and it does it well.

• Bay Area GeoMeetup Group (6 Dec 2012)
  San Francisco, CA

Bringing Rails down to Earth: Building Geospatial Applications with RGeo

• East Bay Ruby Meetup Group (17 Apr 2012)
  Berkeley, CA

Bringing Rails down to Earth: PostGIS and RGeo

• San Francisco PostgreSQL Users Group (29 Mar 2012)
  San Francisco, CA