Moving the Geospatial Revolution Video Forward

You may have seen the trailer for the WPSU series of videos about the Geospatial Revolution. The public TV station, based at Penn State, has received enough funding to move forward and begin production. I’m honored to serve as an advisor for the project, along with Karen Shuckman and David Dibiase of Penn State, David Cowen of University of South Carolina and Daniel Sui of Ohio State and a columnist for GeoWorld.

We are meeting this week at Penn State to gather ideas for what should go into the four 12 minute videos. Today’s meeting involved each of the advisors sharing their vision for the key themes. While we all presented different ideas, similar themes came up again and again: neogeography, privacy, participatory GIS, GPS, tracking, imagery, geospatial intelligence, Google Earth, cell phones, health care… The big challenge for us is how to organize these ideas and make them accessible to those who may only be familiar with GPS and Google Earth. The producers and director asked what seemed like a million good questions to make sense of all that’s going on in our space. We regularly looked to one another to define terms and explain concepts. Thankfully, our interests and experiences are different enough to be able answer most of them.

It’s quite interesting to see the process documentary film makers go through to tease out the key stories to make these types of videos compelling. That said, I’d hate to be on the receiving end of this type of 8 hour “brain dump.”