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Episode 14 with Jason Winn
Episode 14 with Jason Winn 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

Today we’re welcoming Jason Winn, Founder and Director at Narrative Infrastructure. He’s also an architect and urban planner with a focus on long-term design. The term narrative infrastructure refers to the basic structure that underlies the rest of the infrastructures that we all live around, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this episode.

Narrative infrastructure sees the world around us as a setting for our stories. All the environments that we live in are a mixing of each other’s stories. By being able to demonstrate that graphically and show how stories might be interfering with one another will tell us what the combined story is for that location.

When visual cues have been erased, narrative techniques can be used to build them back with the correct references to the past. Stories that have been passed on can always be used to rebuild, whereas images in a person’s memory cannot. Jason gives an example of when recreating infrastructure becomes meaningless if stories are not used.

For people who want to map the stories of their own community, it’s important to take the time to tell their own story. As long as it’s been recorded, it has the potential to be incorporated and mapped. Google Earth allows you to record voice and a flythrough on a map, which are fundamental building blocks of a narrative infrastructure.

There are technological challenges with recording narratives, mainly that the stories must not be tampered with. The stories need to be ethically of the individuals who has the experiences.

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Episode 13 with John Norman
Episode 13 with John Norman 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

Our guest in this episode is John Norman, Director of Strategic Research and Development at Teren, in Lakewood, Colorado. Today, we’ll be talking about wildfire reclamation and the role of geospatial technology in this work.

The 2022 Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico was the biggest in the state’s history, and 60% of its coverage was on private land. Private land owners in this area vary greatly, from those who live off the land by cutting firewood, to those who have a secondary home there. These socioeconomic conditions make this fire one of the most unusual that John has worked on.

Because of the history and private ownership of the affected areas in Hermits Peak, there were thousands of individuals that needed to be contacted so the federal government could start the reclamation process. This was especially difficult because many people in the area do not use technology or are very skeptical of the government.

While also using publicly available terrain and satellite imagery, John and his team were rapidly flying LiDAR and 4-band imagery over the burned area. This process impressively only took about a week, despite covering around 600,000 acres. They were even able to analyze individual trees with the data they acquired.

These fires are occurring more often, so John believes that task forces will be established to immediately come in with technology to quantify exactly what areas are the most at risk. He also hopes to see geospatial technology used to mitigate risks in areas that are prone to fires before they even happen.

Episode 12 with Emily Craven
Episode 12 with Emily Craven 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

Emily Craven, Founder and CEO of Story City, joins us for this episode. Today’s discussion revolves around locative content and the power of location to connect people to places via stories, as well as how Story City ties it all together.

Locative content is content in the form of stories, media, film, and audio which can only be experienced in a specific physical location. This kind of content is important because it’s the roots that make people feel as though they belong.

Story City was inspired by the idea of wanting to create stories, but also allowing others to be a part of those stories. People can interact with the characters in particular adventures by allowing them to be in the same exact setting.

Users are then prompted to choose how their story goes. They are given maps to allow them to dictate where they go and how their story continues, giving each user a different experience based on where exactly they are.

This also serves as an educational tool by giving information on things such as the history of the location. It allows for a unique social and recreational experience that brings people together.

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Episode 09 with James Floyer
Episode 09 with James Floyer 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

James Floyer, the Program Director and Senior Avalanche Forecaster of Avalanche Canada, joins us for this episode. Avalanche Canada is a non-government non-profit that focuses on avalanche safety for individuals in the backcountry.

Avalanches can happen anywhere there is steep terrain and significant snowfall. There are also a few different types, with loose snow and slab avalanches being the most dangerous. Because there is a lack of infrastructure, those most at risk to avalanches are people in the backcountry.

The MIN, or Mountain Information Network, is an observation system used by Avalanche Canada to assess risk. Individual users can submit information to this network, as it was created in response to recognition of an untapped resource for safety: the public.

Avalanche Canada puts out the call for public user support early in the season, and generally the response is quite strong. People feel called to step up to the plate and submit data, and looking at this data is where avalanche analysis and safety really begins.

Avalanche Canada also has six field teams, five of which are located in Western Canada. They go out about four times a week into data-sparse areas to gather information about snowpacks and make observations of conditions to feed back into the forecast center. They also demonstrate best-practices to the public to help keep everyone in the backcountry safe.

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Episode 07 with Andrew Arreak and Lynn Moorman
Episode 07 with Andrew Arreak and Lynn Moorman 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

On this episode we’re joined by Dr. Lynn Moormon, Professor of Physical Geography at Mount Royal University, as well as Andrew Arreak, SmartICE Nunavut Operations Lead. The Inuit people across Northern Canada rely on sea ice for hunting and access, and it also plays a large role in their culture.

Knowing how to read the land and the ice has been passed down through Andrew’s family from one generation to the next. The people in his community have learned about it largely through first-hand experience. You really have to be there to understand how therapeutic it can be.

SmartICE is a co-development approach that aims to merge the traditional knowledge of sea ice with advanced data acquisition and remote monitoring technology. The goal is to create maps to help navigate ice conditions in real time using terminology that the community uses. This is becoming even more important as the climate warms.

They have been utilizing Facebook to transfer the knowledge throughout Northern communities and beyond. Digitizing the sea ice knowledge is another way of helping to pass the knowledge from one generation to the next. It also helps increase confidence around ice conditions.

In Andrew’s community, snow begins to fall in October, and the ice begins to form around mid-November. This is when they will begin creating sea ice maps again. Andrew loves it when he meets people out on the ice while he’s gathering data and enjoys taking the opportunity to educate them about the technology he’s using.

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Episode 04 with Danika Kelly
Episode 04 with Danika Kelly 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

Danika Kelly is with us in today’s episode. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of My Normative, a female-focused health tracking app that can help the user gather data so they can understand more about how their unique hormone cycles impact their sleep, activity, and overall wellness.

Danika is a high-performance athlete who always used apps to track her health and wellness. However, she found they simply weren’t usable because these apps didn’t take into account that she is a female. Female bodies are different, and their needs should be met accordingly, which is why she decided to start My Normative.

Female-body inclusion is important in health tracking. Researchers are working on this, but they are generally very specialized. My Normative is helping to break these barriers by acting as a salient tool for researchers.

Before tracking her own patterns of behavior, Danika would say she has a tendency to “hunker down” when she’s beginning her menstrual cycle. What she’s learned through tracking is that this isn’t true. She actually spends a lot of time doing low-intensity ambient movement, which is common for women to do to mitigate pain and inflammation as their cycle begins.

It can take a few cycles for the My Normative app to gather the right amount of data and hone in on one’s personal experience. Over time, the insights become even more specific to the individual. In addition to this, they’ve put in barriers to ensure privacy protection for every user.

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Episode 02 with Maggie Cawley
Episode 02 with Maggie Cawley 900 450 Nowhere Podcast

Maggie Cawley joins as a guest in this episode. Maggie is the Executive Director for OpenStreetMap, a nonprofit collaborative project to create an editable geographic database of the world. Anyone with an email address can edit this map. The goal is to try and build the best, most comprehensive map of the world.

OpenStreetMap has become a resource for people all over the world for analysis, to inform decision making, and allowing local participants to show the important features of where they live. Over 20,000 companies like Craigslist, Amazon, and Uber use OpenStreetMap.

About a year before recording this podcast episode, Maggie was contacted by park rangers concerned about the use and overuse of specific paths that were being perceived as trails based on information provided by OpenStreetMap. She used this opportunity to start a wider discussion on bringing awareness to this issue.

Maggie now has a working group with land managers, mappers, outdoor enthusiasts, and soil experts who are volunteering their time to work together and find a solution. This situation has highlighted the emphasis for adding the necessary metadata—for example, not just that there is a trail, but the features of the trail. As they work towards a solution, Maggie hopes educational resources will be available moving forward.

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