ABOUT
Hello, I'm Gareth! I'm a cartographer, visual storyteller, and educator—currently a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I use maps and other digital tools to broaden our understanding of place and power, and I hope to inspire my students to do the same. My mapmaking often manifests as classroom and community-based educational tools, including stories, tours, and atlases.
My current research focus is the long-term life of digital maps, and how maintenance and digital sustainability connect to larger infrastructures of power, labor, and technology, as well as how they inform cartographic and interaction design.
I am guided by minimal computing, a technical philosophy that foregrounds community and societal need.
As such, I am a strong supporter of free and open-source (FOSS), and develop FOSS workflows and classroom tools. FOSS is not perfect, and is increasingly saturated by tech corporations who seek to benefit from the unpaid labor of volunteers, as well as inequities within FOSS production informed by gender, race, and class. However, FOSS still holds tremendous potential for the reorganization and re-democratization of technology.
Check out my projects and CV if you think our interests might align. I'd love to hear from you at baldricafran@wisc.edu! You can also find source code for most of my digital projects on my Github page.
MAPS
TOOLS
