I attended a number of sessions sponsored by the GIScience Research Group and the Quantitative Methods Research Group.

The first one of these was focused on post-graduate researchers (PGRs), with 5 PGRs presenting their research. It was fascinating to hear about the range of topics they were working on, including machine learning based classification of social media data, exploring street crime using crowd sourced street view imagery, and the relationship between housing development and public transportation provision in the UK. The session wrapped up with discussions on the impacts of spatial structure of cities on potential spread of infectious diseases, and a great example from Germany looking at measuring urban growth.

The QMRG (Quantitative Methods Research Group) held their first annual lecture, in conjunction with The Geographical Journal. One of the main aims of this lecture series is to engage more with the theoretical aspects of the issues we face. Quantitative Methods, and GIS more generally, can often be quite data and stats heavy, but we need to remember how this fits into the wider setting of geography.

The first lecture was Mapping Uneven Ambience by Caitlin Robinson, who took us on a fascinating journey through her most recent project looking at the ambient environment.

This was the first stage of a larger project, and was focused on a range of factors around peoples lived experience, including air quality, noise and housing infrastructure. Currently she has explored this through a number of different data sets, including EPC (Energy Performance Certificates) providing information on heating in the home and ventilation, external air quality data from DEFRA and IMD data.

One key dataset that was missing was data on indoor air quality - which is vitally important for this type of work, as it is estimated that in the global north, people spend 80-90% of their time indoors. One of the questions at the end of the presentation provided a potentially useful data source for this, which is often the case at conferences!

The next stage will start looking at the interrelations between the different factors - for example indoor air quality and heating type - which will certainly be interesting to see as the vulnerabilities are often cumulative - exposure to indoor air pollution, combined with poor heating in the winter, will most likely lead to a much poorer outcome than either issue alone.

On the Thursday morning, I attended two sessions on Artificial Intelligence in GIScience and Quantitative Geography, where there were a fascinating range of presentations, looking at the space embedded in census data, embedding geography into vision language models and a wide range of other papers.

At Thursday lunchtime I chaired the ‘Best of GISRUK’ session, which showcased the three best papers from this year’s GISRUK conference in Bristol. It was a joint session from GISRUK, and the GIScience Research Group (where I am a committee member). The aim of this session was to show what GIS can do to a wider audience. The majority of people attending the RGS Conference do not use GIS on a regular basis, and may never have used it before. The idea of this session is to get these people to come along and get them excited about GIS, what it can do and hopefully spark some thoughts about how it might be useful in their research. We had a great turn out of 42 people in the session and I hope to see some of them using GIS in the future!

It was also a great opportunity to plug next year’s GISRUK conference, which is at the University of Birmingham. It will take place on 14th to 17th April 2026, and check out the GISRUK website for more details.

If you are new to GIS, or want to learn more about it, check out the first chapter of my book GIS: Research Methods, which is available for free. If you want to learn some practical skills, check out my GIS training material or my GIS training courses coming up over the next few months. If you have any questions, please contact me.

This is the story of bringing our son, Baby Bearman, into the world.

I’m calling him Baby Bearman here a) because we don’t have a name for him yet (you have 6 weeks after birth to decide, and we have been rather preoccupied recently!) and b) I don’t want this blog post to be the first thing that comes up when people search for his name!

Baby Bearman was due on Wed 25th June 2025, but ended up arriving early on Sun 8th June 2025, 2 and a half weeks early (at 37 weeks 4 days). All of us (Baby, Mum and Dad) are now doing well, although it has been quite a struggle at times.

This year it was hosted by University of Bristol, which gave me an opportunity to see a little of Bristol as well. I had a lovely walk up Cabot Tower, Brandon Hill, with some spectacular views of the city, it being the highest point in Bristol.

The keynote presentations are always very good at GISRUK, and this year we had three fascinating ones. Urska Demsar talked about her work linking animal movement and human mobility, which is a great example of two areas that use similar techniques but have completely different terminology, and her work to create a new framework to link these two areas will create gains in both fields by the sharing of techniques.

Michele Acuto gave a fascinating insight into Data after Dark: Shedding (Geospatial) Light onto the Night-time Economy. It is a world who we can easily forget, those who work at night. About 26% of UK employed people work at night, and often they are ignore from our analysis of cities. Transport networks can provide some insights, with many global cities transport networks non-existent from ~2am - ~5am. Transaction data can provide an interesting insight into this, but about 25% of night-time activity doesn’t involve a financial transaction, so there are large segments of this activity that are difficult to capture in data. Michele encouraged us go out at night and think about who we see - particularly those who are working.

Stef De Sabbata gave the final keynote titled What is geo/spatial about (geo)ai? Here she talked about going back to the basics of AI and thinking about what is the prior knowledge (“priors”) that AI has about geospatial data. There appear to be more than we might initially think, for example, the concept of ‘cities’ appears to be present, as well as some concept of latitude and longitude.

This year I was also presenting a paper, Location-allocation and public transit: An update on UCL student teacher placements, which was an update on the location allocation work I have been doing with spopt and UCL IOE. It was great to share some of the experiences and challenges of working in such a diverse team, as well as sharing the benefits the tool would bring to the Placements team in IOE. See Writing & Presentations for links to the paper and the slides.

Finally it was a great opportunity to network and link up with new and existing colleagues and catch up on the latest developments.

I also had two other roles during the conference. Firstly, I, along with Jonny Huck, was judging entries for the GISRUK & OSGeo:UK GoFundGeo Award, a grant to help the recipient to make spatial analysis code easily adoptable by others through the provision of an open source code repository, tool or plugin. We are very happy to confirm that the GoFundGeo winner is Melissa Barrientos Triñanes, with her work on Utilising open data to enhance park safety for women and girls in Bradford: A spatial analysis approach.. We liked this as a nice clear project with clearly identifiable outputs that could be useful to a wider audience.

Secondly, a new initiative this year is that the GIScRG (GISc Research Group) of the RGS-IBG is putting on a session ‘Best of GISRUK’ at the RGS Annual International Conference, which this year is at University of Birmingham from Tue 26 to Fri 29 Aug. We are inviting all of the prize winners to present their work in our session, in order to get more people outside GIS to hear about how GIS can be useful. Congratulations to all of the winners:

• Best Poster - Sam Denney - School-level factors influencing NEET outcomes in England
• Best Paper by ECR - Jessica Hepburn - Parks, Place and Equality: Mapping access to different park typology in Britian’s 20-minute neighbourhood
• Best Paper - Adam Dennett - GIS vs. The City Council: Data analytics, collective intelligence and policy dust-ups
• Best Paper in Spatial Analysis - Chris Larkin - Integrating Low Traffic Neighbourhoods into UK Cycle Network Planning

Congratulations to all the winners and we hope to see you at the RGS conference in Birmingham.

The event works on an unconference format, with topic groups submitted a week or so before the event. We then had a chance to hear from the proposers about each of the topics, and talk with other people interested in the topic. This means there’s a bit of evolution of the topics, with the topics revised based on who is attending and what they want to do. Written down, this does sound sightly random, but it does work in practice. Within about 30 min of discussions, we had formed then 6 topic groups that would run throughout the remainder of the Retreat.

Alongside the topic groups, which ran for 3 mornings, there were a variety of short sessions (30min - 1hr) and workshops (2hr) as well as a focus on well being and recovery from what often is a busy academic schedule. In the spectacular setting of Batenburg, Switzerland, I made the most of the location and spent a reasonable amount of time outside. There was an organised walk around the Swiss mountains, and trips out to see local sights. We also had optional social events in the evening, with opportunities for silent disco, board games and networking.

I opted to take part in the ‘Even More Open’ group, which was a combination of topics focused about discover-ability and usability of Open Science tools including Quick and Easy Wins for Open Science and discussion around the use of AI. Our group was larger than typical for these groups (9 people) so after some initial discussions we split into one more theoretical group and one more practical group. I was working with more-practical group on a new tool to help discover existing Open Science tools, on the principle that while there are many many tools out there, it can be hard to find the right tool for the job. This tool is currently hosted on AdvancdSci Research Solutions and allows you to select tools for specific points in the research life cycle, subject area, level of complexity and a number of other options:

As a part of the OSR, the aim was to make outputs available at the end of the week, in an open form (of course!). We have shared our output on Research Equals, a new platform for me, but a way of sharing outputs with a DOI. For us, this included a summary report with links to our tool and other outputs and slide from the wrap up sessions: DOI: 10.53962/znvv-1p7c

There is so much potential with open science it is sometimes hard to pin down exactly what to do or how to do it. A number of groups addressed this is a number of different ways, including discussions about how to reward participation in Open Science, dealing with burnout and roles as an activist and a short session on calendar management. Check out all the available outputs on Research Equals.

This was not my typical GIS conference, and it was great to meet with a different group outside GIS! I did get a chance to help a group make a map. The Open Science activists were keen to create a map of activists which they could update and edit without relying on third parties (organisations or people). I adapted The Fellowship of the Traveling #GISChat Book which is a Leaflet map based in a website with a bit of R coding to geocode locations and convert the CSV data into GeoJSON. It is currently a work in progress but it was an exciting project to be involved in.

I am a bit fan of making GIS more accessible to anyone who wants to do mapping* and the map I developed for the activist group could easily be adapted for other users. I hope to finish off the automation elements (I need to work out GitHub actions) and potentially package it up as an easy to use tool for anyone else doing mapping.

*I was reminded about the variation in terminology that we have with different groups. The activist group wanted a geographic map of people, but this was not understood by everyone - often the term ‘map’ or ‘mapping’ is used in a non-spatial sense looking at relationships between different members or a group or elements - e.g. how people relate to each other. The group knew what they wanted and I understood them correctly, but not everyone who saw their message did!

Finally, I discovered how varied the weather in Switzerland at about 1200m elevation can be - while most of the trip was sunny, on the final morning I woke up to this:

It was a great event, and I would recommend it to anyone who in interested in discussing or doing Open Science. The next retreat is planned to be in the UK, so please do come along! Join the DRA mailing list to learn about upcoming DRA events!

The OSR started at 4pm on Sun 13th April, and finished 4pm on Thursday 17th April 2025.

Looking at the logistics, going by train from Weymouth (UK) to Interlaken (Switzerland) would mean I had to stay overnight somewhere. There aren’t (yet) any sleeper services that work for this journey unfortunately. The options seemed to be to stay overnight in Paris, or Basel.

I did look at flying. The nearest airport to Interlaken (with a reasonable number of connections) was Zurich, and from there to Interlaken is a approx 2.5 hour train journey. I would also have to travel to London adding another 4 hours (3 hours Weymouth to London Waterloo, 1 hour from London Waterloo to whichever airport I would fly from), plus of course getting to the airport 2-3 hours before the flight.

The flight times, with the last flight leaving Zurich at 5:10pm, also meant that I wouldn’t be able to leave Interlaken until the following day, as we finished at 4pm - I would an extra night in a hotel, which I would need on the train anyway.

The cost was also comparable - flying was a bit cheaper - but there wasn’t much in it. My rough notes were that flying would be ~£150 and the train might be ~£50 - ~£90 more.

Seat61.com is a really useful website for train travel anywhere in the world, and I found it really useful as a planning tool. It also has handy advice on booking tickets which was invaluable.

In the end my journey was:

• Sat 12th April

  • 0803 Weymouth 1120 Waterloo £39.70
  • 1431 London St Pancas 1758 Paris Garde du Nord £94
    • Stay overnight Paris

• Sun 13th April

  • 07:58 Paris Gare de L’Est 14:21 Interlaken West £144.02

• Sun 13th - Thu 17th April Open Science Retreat

• Thurs 17th April

  • 16:34 Interlaken West 22:15 Paris Gare de L’Est £86.65
  • Stay overnight Paris

• Fri 18th April

  • 0902 Paris 1030 London £179
    • 1235 Waterloo 1515 Weymouth £27.70

A total of £571.07 - unfortunately significantly more than my initial estimate, but I was a bit late in booking this, about a month before hand, so make sure you book early!

Once booked, the journey itself went very well. I had the joys of a (planned) rail replacement bus from Southampton to Eastleigh but this all went (more or less) to plan. For the journey, I would also recommend the SBB - Swiss Federal Railways app (below). It was very useful for real time departures and also lists which platform the train is on - very handy when you have a tight connection!

Different attendees at OSR had different priorities and a number did fly from the UK and other places in Europe. It is a difficult balance to consider the time / price / environmental issues of travel choices that this type of event requires. I am happy with the choices I made, but of course they are not for everyone. We did also have participants from Brazil and Nigeria, but I think it would be very tricky for them to get to Switzerland without flying!

I’ve written about train travel before and I think my experience was similar this time - well worth the little extra money to save quite a significant amount of CO2. The extra time is (for me) now slightly harder to justify - but in this case I don’t think it would have made much difference anyway, with the overnight stay.

tmap’s maintainer, Martijn Tennekes, has been working on v4 for a number of years, and has quite a few changes under the hood.

From our point of view (people who are new-ish to R, and/or tmap) the code to make maps has changed slightly. Martijn has put in a lot of ‘helper’ information for people transitioning from v3 to v4, so all your code will still work.

For basic maps, qtm() hasn’t changed at all; although you will notice that the defaults have changed:

Similarly, tm_shape and tm_polygons are the same for a basic map, but again the defaults have changed.

However, when you get to doing slightly more advanced things with tm_shape, for example specifying colours, the code has changed slightly:

tmap v3:

tm_shape(LSOA) +
    tm_polygons("Age00to04", title = "Aged 0 to 4", palette = "Greens", style = "jenks") +
    tm_layout(legend.title.size = 0.8)

tmap v4:

  tm_shape(LSOA) +
    tm_polygons(fill = "Age00to04",
                fill.scale = tm_scale_intervals(values = "brewer.greens", style = "jenks"),
                fill.legend = tm_legend(title.size = 0.8))

One specific thing of note is that there is a much wider selection of colour pallets available than the Brewer pallets. As such, we now need to specify brewer.greens rather than just Greens. However we do get a handy note if we forget:

[cols4all] color palettes: use palettes from the R package cols4all. Run
`cols4all::c4a_gui()` to explore them. The old palette name "Greens" is
named "brewer.greens"
Multiple palettes called "greens" found: "brewer.greens", "matplotlib.greens". 
The first one, "brewer.greens", is returned.

Martijn has designed the library to be backwards compatible, and if you do try using some v3 code with v4, it will still run and create your map, and give you some handy advice:

tm_shape(LSOA) +
   tm_polygons("Age00to04", title = "Aged 0 to 4", palette = "Greens", style = "jenks") +
   tm_layout(legend.title.size = 0.8)

── tmap v3 code detected ────────────────────────────────────────────────
[v3->v4] `tm_polygons()`: instead of `style = "jenks"`, use fill.scale =
`tm_scale_intervals()`.
ℹ Migrate the argument(s) 'style', 'palette' (rename to 'values') to
  'tm_scale_intervals(<HERE>)'
[v3->v4] `tm_polygons()`: migrate the argument(s) related to the legend
of the visual variable `fill` namely 'title' to 'fill.legend =
tm_legend(<HERE>)'

Additionally, when dealing with the layout, legend and so on, things are a bit different:

tmap v3:

  tm_shape(LSOA) +
    #Set colours and classification methods
    tm_polygons("Total", title = "Total Population", palette = "Greens",
                style = "equal") +
    #Add scale bar
    tm_scale_bar(width = 0.22, position = c(0.05, 0.18)) +
    #Add compass
    tm_compass(position = c(0.3, 0.07)) +
    #Set layout details
    tm_layout(frame = F, title = "Liverpool", title.size = 2,
              title.position = c(0.7, "top"))

tmap v4:

  tm_shape(LSOA) +
    #set column, colours and classification method
    tm_polygons(fill = "Age00to04",
                fill.scale = tm_scale_intervals(values = "brewer.greens", style = "jenks"),
                fill.legend = tm_legend(title = "Aged 0 to 4", size = 0.8)) +
    #add scale bar
    tm_scalebar(position = c(0.1, 0.1)) + 
    #north arrow
    tm_compass(size = 1.5, position = c(0.1, 0.3)) +
    #Set title details
    tm_title("Total Population of Liverpool, 2021")

All of this redesign is in aid of better flexibility. For example, in v3 we were limited to tm_polygons(), tm_lines(), tm_symbols(), and tm_raster() (and their derivatives such as tm_borders() and tm_dots()). But with v4, these are easily extendible - so we can have things like tm_cartogram(), tm_donuts() and so on. Many of these are still in development but it opens up a much wider range of options.

In terms of how we show maps, v3 had plot and view modes, but this new framework makes it possible to add other modes as well.

Equally, tmap is based on sf and stars, but the new framework will make it easier to work with other spatial classes, such as SpatRaster and SpatVector from terra.

A nice overview for those already familiar with tmap was at http://mtennekes.github.io/tmap4/ (originally posted in 2021, now removed 2025). A summary of the changes is on GitHub. The website also had a new range of tutorials under Basics and Advanced which are in the process of being developed.

The fact the tutorials (and the whole website) are built using pkgdown means that it is very easy to open the relevant page on GitHub and make changes. For example, I added a fixed breaks example to the Basic Scales page.

This also featured at the FOSS4G Code Sprint (Brazil) where Andrés Duhour and I updated the ggplot2 comparison article.

Tennekes M (2018). “tmap: Thematic Maps in R.” Journal of Statistical Software, 84(6), 1–39. doi:10.18637/jss.v084.i06.

If you want to learn how to use tmap, do have a look at my Introductory or Advanced GIS training in R, or if you have any questions, please do contact me.

The first two days were workshops, and I attended XYZ Cloud MAPPing 101 presented by Dennis Bauszus, and Community Drone Mapping by Ivan Buendía Gayton. In some ways I find the workshops the most useful element of the conference because it gives you time to dig in to a specific piece of software and learn some new skills, something I am quite poor at doing during my usual ‘day job’! I learnt some new useful skills in both workshops. Dennis has also shared the XYZ Mapping workshop materials if you have more discipline than me(!) and can work through it on your own:

• More details on the app itself
• Start with Getting started
• Then look at the workshop

The Drone workshop was also fascinating, and Ivan did a great job of both teaching us how to fly a drone (easier than I thought) and how to help local communities leverage the power of drones (& wider GIS skills) for their own benefit.

The main conference itself was in the Hanger Convention Centre and it was a great international conference. The laid back approach of FOSS4G always creates a lovely atmosphere and it was a great opportunity to get to know new people in the FOSS4G world, and catch up with people I have met at previous events. Community is one of the key things that I love about this group, with people very willing to help each other out. Uber is a key method of transportation in Brazil, and with a number of the evening social events in the city centre, we usually clubbed together at the hotel reception for an Uber to get us there, and back afterwards!

The variety of talks was incredible, with fascinating applications of FOSS4G tools, discussions on the interaction of academia and FOSS4G and personal reflections on people’s FOSS4G journeys. I particularly Kim Durante’s talk on FAIR Principles for Geospatial Data Curation which might have some very useful ideas for a project I am working on at the moment, and Veronica Andreo’s talk, From field biology to the GRASS GIS board - an open source journey about how she got involved in the GRASS GIS project.

I met one lady from Brazil and this was her first international, English speaking conference. She was really enjoying herself and it was a great introduction to the FOSS4G community for her.

One thing that came across to me was the variety of open source projects, and how some projects seem to be doing very similar things. Two examples that come to mind are QField and Mergin Maps, both of which allow users to collect data in a QGIS project in the field on their phone, and process that data back in the office. Another pair would be QGIS and GRASS GIS, both arguably great quality Desktop GIS tools, and there are many other examples too.

Initially I wondered why there were so many similar tools like this, when it might make more sense to combine effort and focus on one tool, rather than splitting our effort over two? However after a bit of reflection I discovered a) that often two similar tools have differences that make them more useful to different audiences. For example, QField is a more flexible field data collection tool, and Mergin Maps is easier to get up and running with. Also, b) having multiple tools reflects the market approach of encouraging development and innovation, with the best tool ‘winning’. In this context winning is not by having the highest revenues or the highest profits, but by having communities of users and developers. If a project doesn’t have a good group of users and/or a good group of developers interested in keeping the project up to date, then gradually it will fall out of use. I was not expecting to see an example of a capitalist based market in the open source community, but here it is!

I also had the opportunity to met Katja Haferkorn, who is the coordinator for FOSSGIS e.V. FOSSGIS e.V. is the OSGeo Local Chapter for German-speaking countries - D-A-CH, i.e. Germany, Austria and the german speaking part of Switzerland. FOSSGIS e.V. is also the German local chapter for OpenStreetMap. FOSSGIS e.V. is quite unique in that they are a local chapter who has a paid coordinator - Katja - and it was fascinating to hear her experiences. As OSGeo:UK Chair, one of the questions I asked her was about diversity within Local Chapters, and OSGeo as a whole. This is an issue for them as well and it is a aspect of membership that has been challenging the whole community for a while. Katja has written a great blog post about the conference. It is in German, but Google Translate does a reasonable job of translating it into English.

The last two days of the conference was the Code Sprint. This is a chance to meet people working on different open source GIS projects and learn how to contribute to different elements of the projects. I had a great chat with Silvina Meritano and Andrés Duhour about using R as a GIS. Silvina was keen to develop her mapping skills in R, and Andrés had already developed an R package (which he presented at the conference: osmlanduseR) and spent a bit of time learning about and contributing to the new tmap library examples. Tmap version 4 is coming out (blog post coming soon!) and I needed to updated my material for this new version. I also spent some time looking at the Las Calles De Las Mujeres project, which looks at the proportion of streets named after women (rather than men) in a range of Spanish speaking countries. Silvina and I had a go at creating a version in R that could automate some more of the process to apply this to different cities in English speaking countries.

The internet connection at the code sprint was a little variable, so we had some challenges and had to resort to using the “sneaker net” occasionally - using a USB stick to transfer data between us! Fortunately we never had to resort to playing truco - a card game played in Argentina when the internet doesn’t work and you have nothing else to do!

Thanks very much to everyone involved in organising the conference. Many more photos are on Flickr. The conference was a fantastic experience, and if you ever have the opportunity to go to a FOSS4G conference, anywhere, do take it!

If you want help or advice on any open source geospatial tool, or are interested in Introductory or Advanced GIS training in QGIS or R, please do contact me.

This was the first time in a while that I have been to a FOSS4G:UK as an attendee rather than as an organiser - and it made a nice difference! We had 14 great presentations, covering a whole range of topics including digitalization of railways, reproducible science, real time vessel monitoring, landscape heritage, open source funding, cloud native web apps and a whole variety of useful open source tools.

Unfortunately I missed the first presentation - thanks Great Western Railways! - but one common theme that cropped up a lot was how social media as a tool for open source projects has changed dramatically. James Milner said that social media used to be a great way to promote his program, Terra Draw, but know he gets no where near the same impact from using social media. It’s now a bit of a big unknown, and I particularly liked how he summarised this:

Interestingly, I sent out a number of social media posts to Twitter (X), Mastodon and LinkedIn, and LinkedIn got the most response, so make of that what you will! Although I think it’s fair to say LinkedIn is not universally loved, as it was memorably described as “Grindr for Business” by Andrew Bailey!

• Twitter (X) 1 retweet, 7 likes
• Mastodon 3 boosts, 3 favorites
• LinkedIn 6 comments, 4 reposts

The presenters have also mastered the use of memes, with Matt Travis hitting home with some of the perils of waiting for large data sets to load:

and of course also

It was also fantastic to get FAIR Open Science and FAIR workflows mentioned in the presentation by Richard Conway & Garin Smith from Telespazio, who are in the process of developing an exploration platform that allows researchers both to share their data, code and their methods in a reproducible form.

I also had the opportunity to speak about GoFundGeo and talk about how OSGeo:UK is funding a range of open source geospatial projects that will have an impact in the UK. Join the OSGeo:UK mailing list or check the website to find out more.

Finally, as ever, it was great to meet new people and network again with old friends at these events. I know of at least one contract opportunity, as well a number of potential ones and also I think some new volunteers for OSGeo:UK!

Thanks very much to all the organisers - Pascal Coulon, Alastair Graham, Sam Franklin, Dan Ormsby, Illya Sparkes-Santos, Ant Scott, as well as everyone who came along and took part.

If you want help or advice on any open source geospatial tool, or are interested in Introductory or Advanced GIS training in QGIS or R, please do contact me.

I also took the opportunity to ‘rebrand’ myself. Previously I’d used the name Geospatial Training Solutions to market my freelance work. I was never completely happy with the name - it was a bit long and a bit generic - and after some thought I decided I would be better trading under my own name - Nick Bearman - as that is a name already known in the GIS community and it is me that I am selling. I am freelance and have no current plans to expand or to hire other people - I am just me!

Anyway, once I’d made that decision, the question was how to make my new website. I’ve been using WordPress which worked reasonably well, but it has a relatively complex infrastructure under the hood (database, etc.) which:

1. opens it up to more vulnerabilities and

2. upgrading WordPress was always something that needed to be done every so often, and then I had to make sure everything worked as I wanted.

I looked around and found various examples that were similar to what I wanted to achieve:

• Kate Berg / Pokateo https://pokateomaps.com Wix
• James Cheshire https://jcheshire.com/ WordPress
• Mike Spencer https://mikerspencer.com/ Start Bootstrap - Agency (using Respond.js)
• Alessia Calafiore https://aelissa.github.io/ Hydejack theme on Jekyll
• Caitlin Robinson https://www.caitlin-h-robinson.com/ Wix
• Andy Kirk https://visualisingdata.com/ WordPress
• Robin Wilson https://rtwilson.com Jekyll

I mostly used these to think about content, but it was also helpful to consider the different technologies as well. More people were using WordPress that I thought, and often they were not ‘obviously’ WordPress sites. I wanted something simple, and certainly something I could update easily. Easy of updating was a common theme! To quote Pokateo / Kate:

At this point, Quarto had been released and they had some interesting possibilities for websites. I’d dabbled a bit with Quarto for PDF documents and websites (including A geographer’s introduction to QGIS & R) after using RMarkdown for several years. Quarto looked ideal, so I started experimenting with it. It is plain text, and can work with GitHub, which I am using fairly regularly.

Quarto also has a very good website, with lots of examples including creating a website https://quarto.org/docs/websites/ and you can also choose from a variety of different themes https://bootswatch.com/.

After various rounds of development, I came up with this site, https://nickbearman.github.io/. It is (I hope) a simple site which has what I need on it. It also supports blogs, which I do contribute to semi-regularly. It is also all static pages, so once it is updated it can just sit there and doesn’t need any database provision or anything else to run. The new site also incorporated a search, which is handy.

You can host it through GitHub Pages, and there are various options to automatically compile it using continuous integration, but I decided to keep things simple, to compile the site locally and the push to GitHub. Sometimes the potential to automate things isn’t worth the time to set it up!

Transferring my blog posts from WordPress (geospatialtrainingsolutions.co.uk and nickbearman.me.uk) was a bit of a faff but it is getting there. It is a work in progress. I have found a semi-automated way of doing this, but it will still take some time. I’m also trying to extract a static copy of the WordPress sites for archiving, with the Simpy Static WordPress plugin looking useful.

I also used to have a contact form, which I received some useful contacts through so I wanted to include this. Quarto as such doesn’t include such a form, as there is no interaction, but I had a brainwave and decided to use a Google Forms instead. We’ve used these a lot at OSGeo:UK and they work really well.

I hope you found this useful - do let me know what you think!

And if you want to learn more about GIS, checkout my new Training Courses page and if you want a bespoke course, make use of my new Contact Form!

I’ve attended some Code Sprints before, including FOSS4G 2022 in Florence but I had never attended a OGC Code Sprint before. They run 4 or 5 a year, each with a different theme, and run one every year in London, usually at Geovation. Gobe had recommended I attend, and as London is relatively accessible for me (compared to Évora, Portugal; St. Louis, MO, US or Geneva, Switzerland; there other venues) I thought I would go along.

ArcMap holds a special place in my heart because it is the software that I learnt GIS on. I first came across it in my undergraduate Geography degree at University of Leicester in 2003 - introduced to me by a certain Prof. Nick Tate if I remember correctly. This was the first time I had come across the combination of Geography and Computer Science and the subject suited me down to the ground.

Later on, I also spent a lot of time working with ArcMap 9.2 (above), which I used in my programming skills to use VBA (Visual Basic Applications) code to create a map that made sounds - an area called sonification, which formed part of my early research interests.

Things have certainly changed in the 20+ years since 2003. ArcMap itself progressed from version 8.3 all the way up to the now retiring version 10.8.2. Of course we have also seen the rise of open source: QGIS in particular as a competitor to ArcMap, and now potentially better than ArcMap or ArcGIS Pro, depending exactly who you are and what you are trying to-do.

We’ve also seen the rise (again) of scripting. With R leading the way and Python a performing a quick catch-up, the combination of easier to use software and ease of access to the benefits of scripting has seen GIS become much more accessible than it was 20 years ago. Some colleagues who have been using GIS longer than I have remember the days of AML, ArcInfo and Sun Microsystems - all of which used command line interfaces to work with data. Much of this was to handle larger data sets than was easy to do in a graphical interface with limited computer resources - much the same situation we see now with big data and bigger computers - but still with limited computer power to process that data.

I was saddened to hear that some students are still being taught ArcMap:

From https://twitter.com/pokateo_maps/status/1747717333211373896

For anyone teaching GIS now, ArcMap is not the tool to teach. It has been a long hard road of transition from ArcMap and I know moving software is not easy, but if anyone is still teaching ArcMap, I very much hope this is its final year. Of course anyone who would like help transitioning, ESRI provide a range of very good materials and I also have good consultancy rates - just get in touch!

One constant challenge in the geospatial environment is that the tools and technologies constantly change - and we see this across the board of geospatial. My advice to anyone coming into this area is to at least keep up with the changes and have an idea of what is happening, even if you don’t use the cutting edge in your own work. Much of GIS’s power is in its versatility and you can get 80% of this benefit with only learning 20% of the tools! Also that 20% of knowledge will easily transfer between QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, online web maps and many other GIS.

I’m really looking forward to the next 20 years, and who knows what it will hold?!

Best of luck with your GIS work!

The conference covers everything under the umbrella of Cartography and GIScience, with papers ranging from user assessments to theoretical discussions, covering topics as wide as cartographic methods, generalisation, COVID, navigation, education, spatial data infrastructures and many many other topics. There is plenty of overlap with the Cartography and Geographic Information Science journal (CaGIS Journal) and a number of us from the academic board were attending to present our work, connect with authors and discover new articles. I work as Cartographic Editor for CaGIS, and it was great to see some published work presented, and discover new authors who might write for the journal.

ESRI UK’s Annual Conference had a couple fewer streams than usual, but it was still as busy. I also managed to get into one of the over subscribed training sessions, to see what had changed in ArcGIS Online recently. Digital twins were mentioned quite a bit, developing from my blog post about last year’s conference, and the vocabulary is evolving and the focus has now shifted to how they are actually useful.

Jurassic Fibre gave a great presentation about how their as-built survey validation process made use of in field tools to collect and verify data. They were comparing what was planned to be built against what was actually built, and had some great processes for managing this. It really shows not just how important data is, but also how important how linking different teams together is important to deliver a service.

Discussions and catching-up at ESRI UK annual conference I also had some really useful discussions about sharing data between platforms – some people use ArcGIS, some use QGIS, some R, and so on. Everyone has good reasons for using the software they do, and it would be a hard struggle to get everyone (in a team, group or even organisation) to use the same software – and more often that not will be a waste of time. What can be done is to help everyone make use of the same data, and / or share data in exchangeable formats.

Accessibility also had a focus in the end keynote presentation, combined with ChatGPT. Large language models create great potential for interacting with maps and spatial data in a different way – a prototype demo showed how a user could verbally ask for information about a map, and the computer could give a verbal summary. No where near production yet, but it shows what could happen. There is a huge amount of potential here – with developing better interfaces for those suffering from visual impairment – or for better natural language interaction with maps. This linked a bit in with my PhD work, from 2008-2011, focusing on sonification, where I used sound to represent data in combination with vision. There are some videos and code demonstrating this (I’m sure the VBA code in ArcMap will no longer work, not the Google Maps API code, but the videos how how it worked!), as well as my PhD thesis itself.

https://vimeo.com/22290435

Sonification – from a few years ago 😉

Will ChatGPT replace GIS Analysts? I don’t think so, so we will all still have jobs! It will certainly change what we can do, and some jobs will change. With any LLM, you need to know how to ask the right question as well as being able to understand the answer that comes back. Ultimately the skills will be in interpreting the results, and making a judgement call about whether it is useful or not. Google revolutionised the internet when it was launched – and LLMs will be no different. As ever, we always need to be critical of maps and spatial analysis output – and ChatGPT or Bard or any other LLM will not change that. If anything, it will make it more important!

• “So don’t just use GIS, but use it critically.”

I also popped into the Spatial Data Science Conference party in Wednesday night, and it sounds like the conference was fantastic – next time perhaps!

GeoBusiness followed ESRI AC UK, with a huge range of geo related businesses hosting stands and presenting talks. The stands were very equipment focused, with many new drones and surveying tool available to have a look at and discuss. However I was more interested in the talks and networking opportunities. The skills shortage was again raised as an issue, with not enough people available with geospatial skills. However speaking with those at the coal faces, new graduate with geospatial skills are being tempted away with starting salaries of £5k – £10k more for similar roles outside geospatial (e.g. programming) and even more for data science roles. It’s a hard ask for someone to give up £5k – £10k a year to stay in geospatial!

Developing skills of people coming into geospatial is something that is of particular interest to me, with a range of initiatives around training and skills development. While many users are big ESRI clients, there is certainly an increase in people wanting to use ESRI along side open source solutions – particularly QGIS. I see lots of potential for North Road’s SLYR tool, what they term: the ESRI to QGIS Compatibility Suite.

There are so many novel applications of GI data and one in particular caught my eye – ClearSky, a product from Aspia Space, have created a AI algorithm which converts uses cloud-penetrating Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to create cloudless multispectral imaging, right across the visible and short-wave infrared spectrum. This allows a ‘cloud-free’ view of satellite imagery – an interesting and valuable resource.

A different, but potentially equally useful application of GIS data was presented by Christopher Jackson from Advanced Infrastructure talking about geospatial tools for energy. They have created an application to help local councils estimate where it may be viable to install electric car charging points. The GIS analysis itself is not that ground breaking, as they are looking at a combination of IMD data, street width and electricity supply provision data to estimate feasibility and cost of electric car charging point installation – but the fact they think this is worth building into a product that can be sold is. It shows how vital geospatial data is and reminds me of the fact that there are still many people out there who don’t know what geospatial is. Communicating this is one thing we could all do better at.

It was great to see so many people, and chat about upcoming projects and opportunities, including FOSS4G:UK 2023 – watch this space(s) for more details soon: OSGeo:UK!

I decided to travel from the UK by train to Florence, and this post is about that journey – in both senses of booking it, and travelling it. I wanted to do this a) to see if it was possible and how easy it was, and b) to reduce my carbon footprint by getting the train rather than flying. I’ve also got some photos of my trip on Twitter.

The first place to spend a bit of time is seat61.com – this is a great website run by Mark Smith who does all sorts of train travel across the world. My trip to Florence is bit a tame compared to some of the trips on there, but it was a great resource. Seat61 directed me to Rail Europe, where I booked all of my trains beyond Paris. Working out the timings was a little complex, but with the help of suggested routes, I got something worked out.

My planned outbound itinerary was:

• Weymouth – London – Paris – Geneva

• night in Geneva

• Geneva – Milan – Florence

Return:

• Florence – Turin

• night in Turin

• Turin – Paris – London – Weymouth

I booked these about ~2 months beforehand (in June), and the cost breakdown was:

• Weymouth to London (SWR, return): £70

• London to Paris (Eurostar, return): £219

Rail Europe (out):

• Paris to Geneva (SNCF, single): €129 ~£112.91

• (night in Geneva CHF90, ~£80.90)

• Geneva – Milan (Trenitalia): €60 ~£52.52

• Milan – Florence (Trenitalia): €39.90 ~£34.92

Return:

• Florence – Turin: €50 ~£44.50

• Turin – Paris (TGV): €99 ~£86.65

• Paris – London (included in return above)

• London – Weymouth (included in return above)

Because of the currency changes, I paid £341.95 to Rail Europe, so a total of £630.95 for my train travel.

One alternative I didn’t manage to find was sleeper trains. Night jet has recently gained in popularity since I booked this, so there might be some alternative routes there.

There is now an overnight option to Venice, but this wasn’t an option when I started looking, and Venice is a bit out of the way to get to Florence.

My planned itinerary got slightly mangled because of the rail strikes in the UK, so I ended up having to travel from Exeter to London (rather than Weymouth) and have a extra night stay in London – but I managed to catch the ‘Back to the Future’ musical, so the extra night had some compensations.

Beyond that, everything went as planned and I arrived in Florence on time, at 1400 on Monday.

The SCNF Connect app – the equivalent of the National Rail app for France & Italy. One thing to remember – when travelling on Eurostar, the queue at St Pancras was very very long, but they were very efficient so even though there were many people there, I had plenty of time for my train – I arrived and got through the queue, check-in, security and both sets of border control (leaving UK and entering France) in 45 min.

I’d also recommend the SCNF Connect app – a great app which will give you train details with updates and platforms.

Check out the Twitter thread for some photos of the various different trains I was on.

It was a great trip, and I really enjoyed it. It certainly took longer and cost more, but for me, it was worthwhile. Let me know about your train adventures!

Overall the day went really well, and we had some great feedback from participants and presenters. One great aspect was once the presentations were completed, they were available on YouTube more or less instantly.

We had 246 people attending in person, and I think reached about another 50 online. Anyone could watch the streams online so it’s tricky to know exactly, but the first keynote had about 100 views as it finished, so assuming some double counting (people in the rooms who were on the YouTube stream) I think we can say we reached about 300 people. This is much greater than our usual in person conferences so I’m pleased to say we managed to increase our reach and get more people involved in FOSS4G:UK.

Our multi venue streaming didn’t quite work out as planned initially – our first session had some technical problems so a number of the talks didn’t stream. But everyone was very forgiving, so thanks to all the good will in the community.

For the keynotes, we had a Jitsi meeting which each of the venues and presentors joined. We could then share cameras as usual in a video conferencing meeting, and it was great to see all of the venues share their cameras in the welcome section:

The Jitsi call was then streamed to YouTube. We then collated questions via the YouTube chat and the Matrix room we had running. Theoretically we people could have asked questions in the room (relayed via the Admin WhatsApp group we were running) but it was easier for people to type directly in the Matrix room or YouTube chat, even if they were physically in the room. See this post (coming soon, I will circulate to the OSGeo:UK mailing list when published) for some more technical details, and lessons learned.

We’re very much looking forward to the next one, and I hope you can be involved – join the OSGeo:UK mailing list to stay up to date.

ESRI UK Annual Conference at QEII Centre, Westminster, London Sustainability was the key theme of the conference, “GIS – Creating a Sustainable Future”, with the Met Office delivering the keynote focusing on climate change. I actually missed their presentation (a long train journey!) but hearing from other participants it sounded a good presentation, although there was the question of how we turn talk about climate change at the conference into action that makes a real difference in the world.

ESRI were very keen to push the ArcGIS Suite as a set of capabilities and focusing on what you can do with their tools, rather than the tools themselves. Highlights include new graph data structures now available in ArcGIS Pro, the versatility of LiDAR data and ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online, ESRI’s response to Google Earth Engine allowing processing of large satellite data in the cloud. On that note, ArcGIS Online was first launched ten years ago – which was a slight shock to many attendees! It has gone from strength to strength – and I do like how the ArcGIS products have made GIS more accessible to new users.

ArcGIS Hub also featured prominaty as a way of collating information and making it avaialbe to non-GIS users. We also heard about deep learning models being features in the Living Atlas, real time vechicle tracking (although interestingly no mention of ethics), and greater links with AutoDesk billed as ArcGIS GeoBIM. ESRI are also very keen on pushing greater use of the cloud – either provided through ESRI’s owns services, or, longer term, hosting the various ArcGIS products on the cloud yourself. We saw a great semo of ArcGIS Geoanalytics running a Python Notebook on databricks.

Finally, we had various mentions of ‘digital twins’. I remember the last GEO Business conference I went to in 2019 there was a lot of talk about digital twins, but nobody had actually created and used one. Now, a number of people have. One example was a model of buildings in London including information on how much water might be needed by the fire brigade to extinguish a blaze in a specific building and whether the water supply network could supply the needed amount of water. A few people weren’t convinced these were digital twins – as the key definition of a digital twin is that it includes real time updates. However, ‘real-time’ depends a bit on what temporal scale you are working to – and the amount of water needed to extinguish a blaze in a specific building probably wouldn’t change that much – so I think this is very case dependent.

GEO Business 2022 at ExCeL, London I also attended the GEO Business conference out at ExCeL on the following day. Again, this was a great networking opportunity, although with a slightly different subset of the geospatial community. I went to a couple of very interesting applications talks – including one from the Met Office by Anthony Veal, who was working on a pilot project to increase the rated capacity of overhead electricity lines depending on the weather. Currently, overhead lines are rated for their maximum capacity based on a worse case weather scenario, which is rarely reached. Heat is the main limiting factor on the lines, with wind being the primary mitigating factor. This project is working on moving from a static worst case scenario limit to dynamic limits based on the current wind conditions. It is still in relatively early stages, with one case study, but shows a potentially significant increase in capacity at certain times. This, arguably, could be considered a digital twin with its’ real time data but the Met Office didn’t use this term.

Doug Specht also gave an excellent talk on Teaching Geospatial Ethics, and how he approaches this with his audience of students who are not geographers, but are often asked to create maps. He summarised the issues as a very nice three principles:

1. No visualisation is neutral

2. Platforms have politics

3. All perspectives are partial

This works very well for this students – journalists, writers and communication – and works as a great first step before looking at geospatial ethics frameworks like the Locus Charter.

Cloud processing also cropped up a lot at GEO Business, with many of the companies, large and small, offering new cloud based services for working with LiDAR point clouds, aerial photos and drones. There was also a nice expansion of engaging others with GIS and highlight how useful it can be across all professions – something I strongly believe in and see every day.

Overall it was a great couple of days, with lots to think about. Please do add your comments in below, and if you are interested in finding out how GIS could benefit your work, please check out my book GIS: Research Methods, the GIS courses I offer or reach out if you would like a chat.

Students at work, learning how to use R as a GIS A quick recap before we get into the details – there are two main libraries that allow us to handle spatial data in R – sp and sf. sp has been around for nearly 20 years now (it first came out in 2005) and is now entering retirement. sf is much newer – it initially came out in 2016, and ever since has been gaining new functions and new users.

sp and sf work in fundamentally different ways, specifically revolving around how they store spatial data within R. sp uses something called S4 classes, where the different elements of spatial data (coordinates/geometry, attribute table, coordinate system, etc.) are split up into different ‘slots’ and accessed using the @ symbol. sf uses S3 classes and stores spatial data all within a standard data frame, with some extra header information and a geometry column.

The practical upshot of all of this is that I have to choose which one to teach in my courses. Pre 2019, I taught everything in sp because that was the most well used library. In March 2019 (three years ago) I moved the first part of my course from sp to sf and introduced the tmap library. This actually made R much easier to teach – because it was quicker and easier to create a map, primarily as a result of the great tmap library and the simplicity that using sf brought.

At this point sf was still developing, and I struggled to be able to do a point-in-polygon analysis in sf – see my previous blog post for more details! Additionally, there were still many many examples of sp code on the web, and relatively few sf examples. Therefore I decided to keep my more advanced practical 3: point in polygon analysis in sp.

By the time we got to Dec 2021 (last year) sf had come along way since 2019, and point in polygon analysis was now possible – so I updated my practical to reflect this. I’ve still kept the sp example, and in the introductory course I still mention sp in passing as I think it is important for any R spatial users to be aware of sp, even if they don’t actually use it. This is because I think for at least the next couple of years, there will be lots of sp examples still on Stack Exchange and elsewhere on the web, and when people find these examples, they need to be able to understand what they are any why they are different.

Moving forward from now (2022) most of the packages that support sp (rgdal, rgeos, maptools) are being retired from the end of 2023, and everyone is being advised to move to sf. sp itself is still getting some maintenance updates, but this will only be for a limited period of time, and now everyone should be moving from sp to sf for new work. In addition, if you work with raster data, the raster library (which has many of the same dependents as sp) is transitioning to terra.

The We Are R Ladies group on Twitter did a very good Twitter thread about these changes – do check it out at https://twitter.com/WeAreRLadies/status/1469286521874300939.

My introductory course is now fully transitioned to sf, and the practical is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license at https://github.com/nickbearman/intro-r-spatial-analysis. I will next be running this course as part of the GeoIgnite conference in Canada, on 9th March. I will also be running this course again the future, please sign up to my mailing list to find out when I have confirmed more dates.

Next on the list is updating the Advanced course, Confident Spatial Analysis and Statistics in R & GeoDa and moving this from sp to sf, which is going to be quite a job. A summer project, perhaps….!

This is really helpful, to avoid situations like this:

Matrix is something that might be able to replace all of these, and bring them into one interface, so you can have all of your IM communication in one piece of software. Matrix is an open source, distributed protocol for instant message communication. It’s a bit like email, but for IM. The email analogy works really well – because Matrix is the protocol (like email) and you can get many different clients, like you can for email (Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, …). You also have a Matrix address, much like an email address.

Within Matrix you also can have specific chat rooms (think like Slack Channels, IRC rooms, Teams teams, etc.) as well as 1 to 1 messaging. The big advantages for me are that it is open source (the only open source option for this, I believe) as well as being end-to-end encrypted. It also has bridges which allow you to join in other platforms from your Matrix account, and this is the big thing for me. Now when people send me messages in WhatsApp, Signal, Teams, Slack or anywhere else, I can a) actually find their message easily when I hear a sound and b) reply to it all in one place!

The other key bit of the puzzle is the client. I use a program called Element, which is one of the main clients for Matrix. There are others available as well, and you can use whichever one you like. You can also switch between platforms and all your messages and rooms you have joined will still be there.

This is my Matrix address: @nick:nickbearman.ems.host and if you go to https://matrix.to/#/#nick:nickbearman.ems.host in your web browser, this will open up the (Matrix) client of your choice (Element by default), give you the option of signing up for an account on Matrix and then allow you to send me an instant message.

You can also join rooms in a similar manner, e.g. the recently created OSGeoUK chat room on Matrix, to discuss Open Source Geo things: https://matrix.to/#/#OSGeoUK:matrix.org. If you are in to open source Geo, please join us there!

There are also lots of other resources including Matrix’s FAQ page, this post explaining what Matrix is, and this much longer post discussing how Matrix could be really useful in open source software development, and some background info on IRC too.

Matrix also updated the XKCD comic above with their current bridges, so you can talk to all of these through Matrix!

Give it a go and let me know how you get on!

*For bridging to other environments, you need admin access in Teams / Slack to set this up, which requires the organisation who admins the system to allow you to use the bridges on their system!

(Apologies to anyone who has studied English Literature, at any level!)

With nearly everyone participating in more and move video calls, “to share video or not to share video” is, indeed, the question. When participating in an online conference, should the audience members share their video?

We have all attended loads of video conferencing calls over the last 15 months, and I’ve been no expectation to this. I attended two conferences recently, and one thing that struck me was whether the audience members have their cameras on.

When I’m running a training course or presenting, I really love to be able to see people’s faces – so I can see who I am talking to. Of course, I realise this isn’t always possible or something the participants want to do (either because of bandwidth limitations, not having a suitable home environment [although this is less of an issue with virtual backgrounds now] or many other reasons). Therefore when I am running a course I explicitly say at the beginning:

“If you can have your video on and would like to, please do. I really like to be able to see people. However if you have limited bandwidth, or another reason why you don’t want to share your video, that is fine as well.”

With this approach 9 out of 10 people usually put their video on and it makes it a much better experience for me (and, I think for them).

I recently attended two conferences (AGILE 2021 and Coding in the Open), where only the people presenting shared their video, and the attendees did not. There have been many conferences like this, and at some conferences attendees do not have a choice (e.g. if you are using Zoom Webinar, the audience can not share their video).

However for these conferences, there was a choice (AGILE used a standard Zoom room, and Coding in the Open used Bluejeans). For AGILE, the organisers asked participants to turn on their cameras for a group photo! About two-thirds or so of people did turn their cameras on the for photo. However as soon as the photo was done, people turned their cameras off again.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that the audience have their cameras off, and I have seen this is many other conferences as well.

Personally, I don’t really like this, as all you get to see of the other people on the call are black boxes. Yes, you can turn off the blank boxes, but if I am presenting, I like to be able to see who I am presenting to, and if I am in the audience, I also like to see who the audience are.

The other conference I attended was Coding in the Open, and this was run on Bluejeans. Here the attendees were asked to turn of their video because of bandwidth. This is often a worrying concern, and here around 150 had signed up for the free conference, and the organisers were very worried that 150 people joining the call with video might stretch the limits of the platform. In the end, typically we had 40-50 people in each session, so wouldn’t have been an issue.

This is a very common concern for organisers, and compounded by the fact that for free events, often only one third or one half of the people who sign up actually appear. The question then is how much capacity do you need for this event, with additional capacity often costing more money. This is a discussion for another time though.

I did a rough show of hands in the session, and it seems most people would prefer to see the audience, whether they are in the audience or the presenter. Additionally, most programs have the option of hiding the video of other participants, if that is what you prefer.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that you can turn your own video off in most platforms, and apparently this has been shown to reduce tiredness. I’m not sure it makes a lot of different for me, but for some people it clearly does:

Now that you can remove the icon video of yourself in Google Meet I am finding online meetings far less stressful. Seeing myself (however small on the screen) for the last 15 months has been horrible. I am happy to have my video on + be seen, but not as a mirror back onto myself
— prof jenny pickerill (@JennyPickerill) June 9, 2021

So if you think it might help you, give it a try!

I guess as we work out what the ‘new normal’ is, we will be creating new social rules and expectations for how we work, including in video calls. I would say please do share your video if you can – whether you are in a call of 2, class of 25 or lecture hall of 200. I think it makes all the difference to the person presenting!

Do share your experiences in the comments below and let me know what you think.