The World of Modern Mapping: Clinton Johnson

Thanks Tim, really glad to be here. Great introduction, hopefully I can live up to it. As Tim said, my name is Clinton, I almost never go by Clint, and my pronouns are he/him/his. I just want to emphasize a little bit of what Tim was saying in terms of why maps are so great. I won't remember everything from the article exactly, but I think it's always been intriguing to me that in the same way people say pictures tell a thousand words, maps themselves are pictures, and with maps you can tell a story. Not all of us are great artists and can pick up a pen or pencil or marker or crayon and draw something in a really robust way, but more and more maps are becoming something that more of us can just go online and start to play with and create our own maps. Those words in the picture, they tell stories. So since more and more of us are getting empowered to create maps and use maps, then we can start to tell the stories about the experiences that we have that are important, or the experiences that other people are having that we think are important. Maps can also be told on their own and with words to add more story to it. One of the other really important things about maps is that just like with a picture, sometimes you can look at a bunch of tables of data if that's something you're interested in, and sometimes I am. You can read through tons of articles that are just trying to describe something, but sometimes you just need to watch a little movie and suddenly you've learned so much about what someone was trying to explain, or you see a picture or a series of pictures and you get what was happening. Likewise with maps, you can take complicated information and make it simple, put it in a visual format so you can actually visualize it. When I think about all that together, and when I think about some of the really important stories that we're all learning about or trying to share that will help us change the world, make the world better, increase racial justice as a big instance, then that ability to convey a thousand words, to tell an important story, to bring together lots of important information, you can help people make better decisions about the actions that they take. To understand, if I do things this way or that way, how will it affect folks? You can use maps to tell that story. In terms of my journey and how I got into GIS, that's a part of how I got there. I was working at the City of Philadelphia for our Streets Department, I think some other folks will call it Public Works, and I had some responsibility for helping decide whether or not something should go on top of the sidewalk or the street, or go above it or below it. There were maps behind me all day every day. The maps that were behind me were on paper, actually on a kind of paper that we don't really make too much anymore, it's pretty sturdy, because these maps were from the 1800s and early 1900s, and they showed where lots of pipes were underground in Philly. I'll never forget one of the first projects someone was working on when I started working at the City of Philadelphia. An intern was trying to find where the snow melting machines were distributed across the city. The first thing I was like, snow melting machines, that's a thing? And we had that. So somewhere scattered around the city, there were these machines that sat underground, and when it snowed they would warm up and melt the snow, and we lost them. Those maps were not digital, they were difficult to read, and as you add more and more things to those maps, the lines cross over each other and it almost looks like scribble scrabble. It was someone's job to try to find those and put it into technology. As I'm working in this organization where we're using maps to inform lots of actions and to make things better for people around the city, I started to remember some of the things I learned about in school about redlining, where cities including Philadelphia, many cities across the country, were segmented, chopped up into pieces, and people made decisions about who could live where and why they could live there and what they'd have access to. I realized that in the same ways that maps had been used to create bad situations for folks, we could use maps to create better outcomes. I started to lean more into GIS and realized that there was a whole set of opportunities to drive change, to make things better for people, but also career opportunities to provide for myself and my family. GIS is one of these really special things that brings together maps and stories and data and technology in really interesting ways. So I'm excited to talk more about that with you all.

Yeah, thanks Tim. I'm going to walk through this, and I may use some complicated language, but I'll tell you what it made me discover about my own lived experience. Here we're showing how we're looking at the past in St. Louis, looking at things like the history they had with segregation and redlining. What did that mean? The areas were broken up into sections, decisions were made about who could live where. People of color, Black people in particular, were largely only allowed to be in the spaces that were mostly red, or because they were there, the areas became mostly red. So what is the outcome of segregating people based on their race or ethnicity? As it turns out, redlining and segregation have been linked to temperatures in neighborhoods. What's that mean? This is a map that is pulling together lots of data about what temperatures look like on a very hot summer day in 2019 in St. Louis. We see here that there's A, B, C, D scattered around the map, indicating where those areas were redlined, broken up as A best, B still desirable, C declining, D hazardous. The bluer areas were more cool, and the redder areas were more hot. This map is showing that there's a relationship. When we look at this grade A area, we want to focus in on this one. It was one of the coolest areas in St. Louis on that day, and those cooler temperatures have been linked to high tree coverage, lots of trees in the area, high vegetation, grass and gardens. On the other hand, there's this grade D area, or hazardous, and it was one of the warmest areas, and that has been linked to less trees, less vegetation, less grass, but also to higher proportions of paved surfaces. While it sounds kind of trivial or maybe not that important to think about how hot it is in one neighborhood versus another, what does it mean when it's hotter? People have to run the air conditioner more, so there's higher energy costs for folks who are in hotter areas. The heat actually impacts some chronic health conditions. Some of you may have asthma or know other kids who do have asthma, so the hotter temperatures make it harder for folks who have these conditions. It also affects other health conditions, and the CDC says that these temperature increases are impacting cities all across the country, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, so many other cities, and they're expected to continue to increase for decades to come. What that all meant to me when I learned about this study, I thought back to my life growing up. When I grew up in Philadelphia, I grew up in two areas. I started out in North Philadelphia, which as it turned out was a redlined area and one of the more impoverished areas of the city, and it was always hot in the summertime. Oh my god, it was so hot. You could see the heat radiating off of the street in waves, and it just felt so hot. Then we moved to Overbrook in West Philadelphia, to the neighborhood where the Fresh Prince, Will Smith, grew up. In the neighborhood I grew up in North Philadelphia, there were like two trees on the whole block, and there were like a hundred families on this block. When I got to Overbrook in West Philadelphia, suddenly there was a tree every third house, and it just wasn't that hot. I never made that connection. I thought I was imagining that it was hotter in North Philadelphia than it was in that part of West Philly, but it wasn't my imagination. There was some design to which families at the time of segregation and redlining were going to get access to more trees, and which ones instead were going to get access to more asphalt. It had a lasting impact.

Yeah, absolutely. Those maps were pictures that told the story of my life. You all may have experiences that you're having in your communities that maybe you think other people aren't having in theirs, and maybe it's hard to describe what that is, and maybe you feel like it's just yourself. But imagine if you got together with all the other students in your class and you all documented what your experiences were, and you somehow were able to put that on a map, and suddenly all of that information can come together and tell your real life stories. That helps validate your own experience. You can see that other people may be having your same experience, confirm your idea that maybe some people are having certain experiences and other people are having different experiences. This is what people are trying to understand when they're using maps for any kind of business or organization. Whether it's Postmates and I want to make sure people get their food quickly, are there areas where I need to focus differently? You're trying to deliver a package from Amazon, or you're a government trying to provide services to neighborhoods, and you want to make sure that you aren't making things worse for some neighborhoods while you're making them better for other neighborhoods. Maps can help all of us understand that stuff better.

Yeah, great question Tim. A lot of people quote a saying, and I don't know the source of it, but understanding precedes action. So before you take action, you should probably understand some things first. Honestly, every decision that you're making, you're making that decision based on whatever information you have. Organizations are always trying to make sure that they have the most accurate information every single day, every time they're deploying teams to do one thing or another, making decisions about where to invest money or time or energy. They want to have the right information in front of them. First and foremost, we can turn what we see in the map into information. I wish I had an example to show right now of a dashboard where you can show visually where there are problems and then also quantify where there are problems. People look at those dashboards and say, hey, there's a problem right there, that's where we need to focus our energy today. Or, you've got five locations to go to today, if you go to them in this particular order, then you'll get to all of them in a timely fashion. Just imagine how hard it is for those Amazon trucks, as many as there may be, there are so many packages to deliver. How do they get to us on time so consistently that we can get that two-day free shipping? How does Amazon feel comfortable getting to that point? They're using maps to understand where things are, but you can also use maps to deploy your resources. They're using maps to deploy those trucks, and then as a delivery happens, we get that notification right away. Postmates sends you your order, and nowadays particularly in the pandemic, it's sitting outside and you know about it because you got an alert. How is that happening? They've navigated to your location, they've pressed the button saying it's been delivered, they've taken a picture, and all of that gets geo-referenced and is on a map. They're using it to understand how they're actually doing work, and then someone is making more maps and doing more analysis to understand what all of that means, to get more understanding for the next set of deliveries. So it's understanding, getting information right in front of you so you can make better decisions. It's directing actions, whether it's navigating people, routing folks, picking the best location for the best person for the location, or understanding what we've done. We've delivered, we've provided services, we've sold products. Where have we done that? Who have we done it with? How do we take all that understanding to build the next dashboard to lead to the next set of actions that we track and manage over and over again?

Yeah, you know, my focus is on helping organizations increase racial justice and increase inclusion for folks from all walks of life. That's not a new problem, it's a problem that societies have been trying to address for a long time. But we're starting to use GIS and data, the maps and analysis that goes along with that, machine learning, artificial intelligence, to aid in that. In fact, the analysis that the maps I showed you about St. Louis, how did they determine which areas had more asphalt or which areas had more vegetation? In part, they were using machine learning and artificial intelligence to look at imagery of flyovers of a city to determine what set of pixels on a picture was a tree or grass or a garden, versus which were paved surfaces, sidewalks, or streets, asphalt themselves. So I think there are a lot of really interesting ways that GIS, that maps, are like a platform to bring together so many different things: data, apps, technology, artificial intelligence, drone mapping. All of these things are coming together in some really interesting ways to help us tackle in a new way a long-standing set of challenges.

Yeah, one thing I want to point out for sure is that GIS is a broad field. When it comes to any tech space, any STEM space, there are lots and lots of roles that people can play. Certainly some people are making maps all the time, some people are doing analysis all the time, some people are creating data sets, some people are creating apps, some people are building pieces of technology, and then there are other people who are managing projects and managing work to ensure that folks' needs are getting met. There are some people who are just engaging with customers, trying to understand what their needs are. I spend a lot of time overseeing the work of several teams of people who are doing lots of those things. There are folks who are creating maps and data and story maps that will help inform action for some of the organizations we're supporting. There are people who are building training resources so that people can learn how to do some of this stuff on their own online. There are people who are just trying to figure out where to get started and how to start doing this work. I spend a lot of time overseeing a lot of that work, talking to a lot of people about what their issues are, trying to understand what their priorities are, so that we can then make the best maps and the best apps to help address their needs. Meetings all day. I take some time sometimes to plan what comes next, understanding what patterns we see, and taking time to build presentations to make that work, and then working with teams to get the right maps created.

Great question. We really do see ourselves as trying to help folks solve some of the world's toughest challenges, so problem solving is a big skill set. That's something that people may or may not value in your life. You may feel like sometimes folks don't value your ability to solve problems day to day, but I do. I personally feel like when I was 9, 10, 11, and 12, that's where I was really developing a capacity to solve problems. You're dealing with issues all the time, and it's not always easy to share them with folks. So that problem solving that you are doing right now, bring that same energy into a career in GIS. Then of course you'll want to take that and apply it. Maybe it's, how do we take what people are experiencing and turn that into data? How do we create the right surveys and the right data tables, and then how do we do the right analysis to really reflect what folks are experiencing? Some ways you're going to apply that problem solving: I've got all this analysis, I have all this data, someone's done all that work, well how do I tell a compelling story with all that information that will solve a problem? And then you've got folks, there are all these capabilities available, but your organization has a certain thing that they're focused on doing. You're Amazon, you're delivering packages. You're Postmates, you're delivering food. You're a health and human services agency, and you are trying to make sure that everyone is as healthy as they can be. Well now, how do you take those priorities and use the right combinations of maps and data and analysis and machine learning to solve those problems? So I'm harping on problem solving, and then you can take that problem solving and also storytelling and apply it anywhere you feel most comfortable.

Absolutely. In some ways, it really is important to bring your perspective to things. Part of it is the questions that you ask about what you're seeing, the questions that you ask about what other people are experiencing. Being really curious and pushing boundaries and just asking questions all the time, I think in a lot of ways I move through life through questions, and the answers to the questions tell me what to do next. In this work of GIS, there's nothing more important to us than being interested in what other people are challenged with, being interested in what people are experiencing, and being interested in trying to create better outcomes for folks. So it's a curiosity, being more interested than you're trying to be the person who is interesting. It's something really important to us.

Yeah, one maybe it's too high level and then you'll ask me better questions. But a big question around the outcomes that communities experience in terms of education, who's getting high school diplomas, who's able to go off to college, that sort of thing, it really begins with what we have access to. When I was growing up, I went to a high school that did not provide certain math courses, and I wanted to go to college for engineering. So how was I going to do that without the right math courses? That was the school that was available to myself, it was a school that was available to people in a certain community. So what could you do about that? Fortunately, my mother was savvy and crafty, and she found a different path. Part of it was, where is the program that we can get to that'll close that gap? In a lot of ways, people are trying to find the right resources to help close those kinds of gaps. Maps help. They tell us, okay, this community, if they're being served by that school that does not have AP courses, if you're in a school that has AP courses, then you have access to things that will prepare you for college in a way that people who are in a school that doesn't have access to. So maps help us figure out which communities are going to be impacted by that. Maps also help us figure out how do we get people from this community access to those resources that do have it. What is the closest school or the closest program that does or doesn't have those resources? We can talk about health care too. Where are prenatal clinics? Are there enough in the communities? Are they equitably distributed across communities? Are they where the needs are greatest? Where is quality health care? Where can I get great treatment to manage my chronic health conditions like asthma, diabetes, and so on? We can really use maps to figure out which communities do or don't have access and where they can get access to other resources.

Yep, that sums it up nicely.

Thank you Tim, and thanks for the great work your org does.