Where's that whistling coming from that we keep hearing around Branner Library?  It's our new Geospatial Manager, Stacey Maples. Stace is a self-described "geospatial Swiss Army knife." He considers his love of all things geospatial "pathological" and states that with great glee. Stace comes to us from Yale University where he was the Geographic Information Systems Specialist & Instruction Coordinator. He spent 9 years in the Map Department of Sterling Memorial Library working on GIS data collection development, directly helping students and faculty with their projects, provided technical support for geotechnologies in research and teaching, and created their GIS technology instruction program. 

Stace got his B.Sc. from Southern Methodist University in Anthropology/Archaeology. He studied Geographic Information Systems at the University of North Texas and completed his Masters of Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has attended the Google Geo for Higher Education Summit as well as attended the QGIS Academy.

Stace was an integral part of the Photogrammar project while at Yale. This digital humanities project was "designed to offer an interactive web-based open source visualization platform for the one-hundred sixty thousand photographs created by the federal government from 1935 to 1943 under the Farm Securities Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI)." Stace was responsible for the creation and management of the geospatial data for the project. This included geocoding 90,000 images for display in the viewer. PetaPixel calls the site, "One of the most beautiful and comprehensive conglomerations of visuals and information you're ever likely to stumble across...The interactive map is the shining star of the project." 

He notes, "My work mapping the research interests of scholars has taken me from the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, to Kurdish Northeastern Syria, to the most remote areas of the Mongolian/Chinese border. An archaeologist by training and a technologist by temperament, I am interested in all aspects of mapping, from the aerial imaging of archaeological sites using kites and balloons, to the development of platforms for the gathering of volunteer geographic information."

Please join me in welcoming Stace Maples to Stanford!