aggis.org

About Me

Aaron Goodman←Geographic Information System

The trajectory of my life has been shaped in no small part by my relationship with computers. Growing up on the internet and spending my free time in open-world role-playing games, I've long understood that our world(s) can be represented with an arbitrary coordinate system and a library of associated names and attributes. I was not a GIS user as a kid, but I loved maps, because maps can communicate information that is otherwise too complicated to share verbally—information about land, people, and life.

In undergrad, I changed majors a couple times before settling into Anthropology and Ethnomusicology. I didn't take any GIS classes in undergrad, but my studies nonetheless fostered a passion to learn about the diversity of human life, to question inherited structures and assumptions, and ultimately to try and make sense of culture's relation to space. My senior thesis in Ethnomusicology, titled "Music Festival Participation and Memory as a Work of Art: Embodying Community Encounters and Problematizing Application of the Carnivalesque" (2021), explored the sensational and participatory nature of rock and roll music festivals.

After several months of post-grad unemployment, I enrolled in Esri's free Cartography MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), because I was eager to learn how to make maps with GIS. I found ArcGIS Pro to be intuitive and fun to use, so before the end of the MOOC, I had already set my sights on UCLA Extension's GIS and Geospatial Technology Certificate.

As I learned more about GIS through these classes, a lot of material just clicked, and it all felt very serendipitous, because if I hadn't spent some Saturday on the computer learning abc as a teenager, then how could I possibly wrap my head around xyz today? Recognizing that computer literacy is a privilege, I'm very grateful that I was afforded the time and resources to learn as a young kid.

While in classes for the UCLA Extension certificate, my prayers for a job were finally answered; the UCSB Library department of Special Research Collections was hiring student assistants for digitization support on the American Discography Project, and although I was not an enrolled UCSB student, I was (1) extremely interested in the project, and (2) desperate and willing to apply anyway. My enthusiasm paid off, and I have been working in Special Research Collections periodically for the last few years on temporary appointments. It has been a joy to learn about how audiovisual libraries and archives work, and it's very fulfilling to contribute to a project which makes historic, ephemeral media accessible to all.

I started to see a lot of cross-pollination between the ideas I was learning in GIS classes and at work when I was wrapping up my UCLA Extension certificate. In particular, my work in Special Research Collections granted me an opportunity to see relational databases in action. Together, my post-bacc coursework and library work experience gave me the confidence to apply for graduate school in GIS.

Since then, the Master of Applied Geospatial Information Systems and Technologies (MAGIST) program and the graduate certificate program in Digital Humanities (DH) at UCLA have helped me further expand my toolkit, while providing an opportunity to explore the intersections of geography, sociology, and musicology. If you'd like to read more about my thoughts on GIS and DH, then you should check out this page.

As I approach graduation, I'm excited for the coming free time; more time for mapping! As such, the map gallery on aggis.org will always be an expanding collection.