When I was working as a professional
drafter, periodically somebody would circulate this description of
engineers and architects. It seems engineers know a great deal about a
few things, and architects know a little bit about lots of things, and
over time the engineers get to know more and more about less and less,
while the architects get to know less and less about more and more. I
used to puzzle over this and try to figure out which one I was like. But
it never made much sense to me; I wanted to know more and more about more
and more. That's why I became neither an architect nor an engineer, but a
geographer.
My adviser told me for years that I needed to narrow my focus. Being something of a Renaissance woman, I found this pretty hard, and not even particularly desirable. But over time my main research and teaching interests have become somewhat more restricted: topically, 1) human settlement and 2) indigenous peoples in global context; and regionally, 1) North America (particularly the South, and especially North Carolina) and 2) Australia. Thematically, I consider myself a historical/urban/cultural geographer, with skills in GIS and cartography. I am especially interested in the practice, teaching, and scholarship of historical GIS.
I completed my dissertation in fall of 2006, defended in December, and officially graduated in May 2007. The dissertation was only the beginning of a probably lifelong project on the development of the Piedmont Urban Crescent, a polycentric urban region that dominates the urban structure of North Carolina. In this first stage, I began the huge task of analyzing the earliest settler land grant documents from the area to tease out the influence of the Indian Trading Path, a contact-era transport route of indigenous origin. Among other things, I developed a model at two scales to explain how the Path could affect town and settlement system development as part of the initial conditions on the landscape. This marks a major change from earlier town-formation models, which assumed Europeans were inscribing their settlement landscapes onto a "blank slate". I also developed a concrete methodology for elucidating the influence of indigenous landscape features on settler landscapes, involving the transformation of archival data at the microscale to geographic knowledge at the regional scale. This work, which was very much dependent on a database designed for me by UNC Information Science doctoral student Mary Ruvane, is to be featured in a forthcoming book by David Bodenhamer of the Polis Center as an example of how GIS can be used in history and the humanities. I'm currently applying for funding from various sources so that I can get on with the next phase of the work. Publications describing the work I did on this project for my dissertation include articles in Social Science Computer Review (special issue on historical work using GIS, August 2009) and Historical Geography (2009 issue, due out any minute, lol).
Several maps from my dissertation, and the dissertation itself, can be viewed at http://www.unc.edu/~grdobbs/dissmaps/. You can also download my NC Piedmont historical county boundaries at http://www.unc.edu/~grdobbs/histcounties/, as graphics, a poster, or shapefiles.
Currently I am an adjunct assistant professor in the Geography Department at UNC-Chapel Hill. I've been teaching "Natural Resources" and "Historical Geography of the US and Canada", and in Spring 2010 I'm doing something new--a First Year Seminar called "Local Places in a Globalizing World;" the local places I'll be focusing on include the UNC campus, Chapel Hill, and the Research Triangle--and as you might guess there will be a strong historical component. (In spring 2009, I finally passed my correspondence course on North America (UNC's Independent Studies) over to Matt Reilly to revise and teach.)
As of November 2009, I and colleage Mary Ruvane are soliciting manuscripts for a special issue of International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research on applied historical GIS, to be published late in 2011. See the call for papers here.
My other "hat" is my new and growing consulting business, Geographic Research and Data, LLC. Currently the company's main work-in-progress is an applied GIS study funded
by the US Bureau of Reclamation, using a gravity model to predict
recreation demand at a number of reservoirs surrounding the Central
Valley. The LLC will soon be adding four other geographers, each with a different specialization, to offer clients a wider range of expertise.
My current CV (pdf)
(updated
11/6/09)
My old (pre-academic) technical resume
My LinkedIn profile
My other web pages: