You're listening to a very spatial podcast, episode 765, July 20th, 2025, run since.

Hello and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast.

I'm Jesse, I'm Sue, I'm Barb.

And this is Frank.

And this week we are gonna jump straight into the topic because it's our 20th anniversary and we'll talk about that after the interview.

But first, we have a great interview with the folks from the Geo Zone Collective about zines and geography.

We're happy to be joined today by Eden Kincaid and Willow Ross, who are representing Geo Zone.

But as part of that, Eden is also postdoctoral researcher and affiliate assistant professor at the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware.

And Willow is zine maker and PhD candidate in history at the University of Bristol at Macquarie University.

Thank you both for joining us.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks for having us on.

We reached out to you just before the a a g because you had a geo zine, sorry, a zine, which of course, because of the A A G was geo fair at the conference.

We weren't able to talk to you then and luckily we've been able to get back in touch and now have a chance to talk a little bit about zines and let's just start with the general idea.

'cause not all of us, one grew up in the nineties and we're there for them the first time and to have gotten.

Experience with them in this resurgence in the last couple of years of what a zine is?

Well, the root answer for zines is that they are small, usually self-published artifacts from punk DIY culture publications that usually aren't, they're around 12 pages to 20 pages, can be a bit longer.

They can be tiny and fit in the palm of your hand, or they can be thick, a three A four.

It's kind of up to the punk ethos of the maker, what exactly they look like.

But I think a more helpful way of describing a zine is it's kind of like these little radical dossiers that end up in spaces that they're either very welcoming or sometimes not so welcome or unexpected to be found in.

And they're a way for people to share ideas that are kind of outside of the mainstream of academia or outside of kind of published.

Kind of worlds, whether that's books, magazines, journals.

Instead, it's like, you've got an idea, you make it, and you put those ideas on a page.

And usually you do that in a kind of DIY way where you're cutting up and you're collaging, you're printing, maybe you're using an old typewriter or stamp collection that you've got.

There's a lot of creativity involved.

And that's not just visually, but also with the ideas contained within.

So with that idea of the zine and the self-publishing and the, like you say, the punk ethos and aesthetic that comes along with it, what kind of brought you as a group, the Geo Zone collective, to begin to try to bring some of these together?

Because there are, you know, tons of them out there, there are things that people.

Are doing in small batches small batches or some of them are large print runs that are being shared across continents.

And so what brought you to the idea of being able to bring them together onto a digital service for people to download and print themselves?

Well this was some scheme that I had since I started grad school, which was now 10 years ago.

I actually have my little copy of the first one I tried to put together, which never totally came together.

But I was kind of like a angsty graduate student that had a lot of ideas and a lot of gripes.

So I got excited about creating some kind of, yeah, alternative way to engage ideas with my colleagues, but it never really took off.

I tried to launch this a couple different times.

The second time was because I was pissed about yeah.

Issues in academic spaces and trying to yeah, create some means to start conversations about, yeah, different kind of political issues in, in our workspaces.

And then I had the great delay of bumping into Willow in some transnational queer ecologies conference thing.

And Willow was leading a collage workshop collaging with trash or, or some such thing.

So I was like, okay, you're my person.

So yeah, I think I, and then it just kind of happened from there.

We all got on a Willow and myself and our other kind of co-founder Wiley Sharp, just got on a call and by the end of the call we had launched this like transnational scene archive.

But more broadly I think there's a couple of different motivations.

For me at least, one is causing trouble.

So it's a major motivation behind my projects.

Another is, you know, as we become trained in academic you know, disciplines, you get farther and farther away from like the real world in any kind of meaningful capacity.

And we learn all these ways of doing research that.

Make these distinctions between like community forms of knowledge and everyday forms of knowledge and activist forms of knowledge and these kind of rarefied academic genres.

So we're interested in messing with those kind of cross-pollinating between academic and activist spaces and also creative methods.

We all have different kinds of backgrounds with creative expression and creative practices.

So that's also a very exciting part of this is you can do things that you cannot do in a academic journal.

Okay.

So I have like a bazillion questions, so I'm trying to focus a little bit, make sure I go through this a little more mythologically instead of random.

So back to the idea of a zine.

I'm kind of curious, one, how is that different than say, like a manifesto you know, maybe an older concept.

And secondly, how critical do you think that that material.

Manifestation is to the idea of a zine.

In other words, the concept of a digital zine or a non-print manifestation of a zine.

How, how does that fit within the ethos?

Or is it, you know, just a different thing?

Okay.

I might take the fast question and.

Give a second to Eden, but in terms of, yeah, like is a 'zine a manifesto.

I think to be clear, like scenes were kind of born in the nineties, as Eden mentioned.

They came out of the riot girl scene and various like punk related, activist related scenes.

And I think a zine can be a manifesto, but often these original like early days scenes were fan scenes about like bands or like local music scenes and local punk scenes.

And it's kind of a way for like people who are like deeply embedded in like a cultural context to like share information with each other that is like inside a knowledge in a certain way.

So I think we're a manifesto is often looking outward, like zines definitely do that and they communicate ideas outward, but then they're also like serving a community and there's often like passionate zine make making zines and swapping them with one another.

And that's how I got into zines, like is in the activist zines of like Nam, the Place Center Melbourne in Australia.

Where like people are making these scenes about like how to do direct action or kind of like how to like make a squat or like, what's the music scene, what's the punk scene like in this city?

And in my research it became a way to talk with a bunch of like dumpster diving activists and punks and vegans to like share our information with other dumpster divers.

Like what makes dumpster diving so great?

What makes it so challenging?

What makes it interesting?

And like that's something that I definitely talk to people who've read that and thought, I love that dumpster diving scene that you all made.

It taught me these things about this thing that I've never heard of, which is jumping in a bin and getting food.

But then also people who dumpster dive for like decades are like, oh, I love that page about like running into like a weird bird in the bin, because that happens to me all the time.

Yeah.

So I think from these kind of origins.

As you alluded to, zines are kind of coming, making some kind of comeback or resurgence, and one of the, one of the spaces in which that's happening is these academic spaces.

So I think as they're like translated into that space and brought into that space lots of lots of possibilities are there.

Some are, yeah, like manifestos, some are you know, more conventional kind of research products.

Some are methodological experiments, some are just kind of different kind of commentaries.

So there's really no limitation in terms of, of the content.

And if you browse the zines we have on our archive, it's a wide variety of things that run from more traditional what you might expect to these kind of weird hybrid sort of research products.

So yeah, that's the fun thing, right?

Is like they're wide open.

It can kind of be anything.

As to your second question about the, the digital question.

Yeah.

What enables this project is this digital transnational space that we've created and are hosting because yeah, traditionally zines are circulated in a very kind of localized way.

Some are circulated beyond that, but this is kind of a curious idea.

You know, that it would be have, we would have this transnational archive.

So I don't know that that, I mean, I'm not a card carrying member of zine culture or like, I don't got the credentials to make these kind of statements, but I don't think that that really necessarily undermines the ethos of, of the whole thing.

I think actually scenes are meant to be shared, right?

They're kind of governed by this ethos of like, copy left.

Like they're not privatized and they're not intellectually owned, right?

It's like a ethos of sharing because right, you're trying to get a message across.

So of course there's questions there about consent and sharing and all of that, which we deal with as a, as an archive.

But yeah, I think it actually creates a really interesting space of for these scenes to travel in ways that and get audiences that they wouldn't have in just a local kind of hand to hand context.

I'm gonna jump in for just a second before Barb does and say the statement of, you don't have the credentials, but isn't that kind of counter to the punk ethos that anyone does have the credentials?

I wanted to jump in on this too.

I think if there is someone who's printing membership cards for the Zane community, I think that printing y soon.

Aiden, sir.

So I think you can, you can say that.

But also, yeah, that's the beauty of it, right?

Sorry Barb.

That's okay.

I, I wanted to bring in the geography of everything because everyone here is a, a geographer.

And everything that I saw when I was going through the archive were highly place-based geographic, that knowledge of, there's a bird here, like where you could really get down to anyone's observations and placing them in, in geography.

And then the, the one that I loved was about rats and the urban infrastructure, which was, you know between two different countries.

The, you know, combining them into design from a so close to the rat, you know, and as a trash person and a old folk punk person, it just is like, you're making it very tangible and touchable for everybody.

So what do you think the impact has been for broadening the reach of geography?

That's an interesting question.

I think I've been thinking about it more in terms of bringing z.

Exposing geographers to zines than exposing zine makers to geography.

What do you think, Willow?

Hmm.

I think it's a, it's an interesting question because yeah, I think a lot of zine makers are already kind of connected into these, like, wider communities, but I think a lot of geographers are not so aware that scene making or these creative outputs are a thing.

So I think the input of like, oh, you can, you can do this, you can present your research in a different way that has had like, such an impact on like people that we've met who come to the zine fair that we ran at the a a e to say, I didn't even realize I could do my research in this way.

So before Frank jumps in, I keep cutting everybody off.

That's okay.

One of the things that brought me to Geo Zone was the fact that last year.

I've been, you know, since the nineties, slowly trolling zine and have little collections here and there of different kinds that are everything from, you know, the music scenes to fan zines that are comic book related and those type of things.

But I started to see last year more of what, well, what's on geo zone, right?

The ones that are a little bit more both reflective and reflexive to see what's going on around us, looking at both the real world and the academic theoretical concepts.

So, and then bringing some of that together.

And I began to see more and more of the idea of geography being presented by people who are just making a zine.

Even though they weren't explicitly trying necessarily to do geography or any kind of academic discipline, they were having that voice and it was getting out there.

So it was kind of.

I dunno, kind of following on what you were saying.

Yeah.

And it's worth noting that we're like very undisciplined geographers.

You know, if you look on our, on our website where we kind of outline what the archive's about you know, geography, we define geography or geographic topics as having to do with space, place environment, climate, housing, cities, the state borders embodiment and bodies, gender, all these things.

So we're particularly interested in you know.

Trying to contain geography but have it kind of spill over and become a language that, you know, people who don't know that they're thinking about geography in space can find some, find some place in.

So I find this whole thing incredibly thrilling and fascinating to be honest with you.

'cause I actually have, I haven't done anything with it, but I actually have the YouTube channels that's punk rock videographer, so big old time punk rock guy.

And very much in, into the ethos of sometimes better just do and not worry about all the mechanics, you know making sure you get all the checks checked and all that stuff like that.

So I love this general concept at my core, but I'm kind of curious.

Maybe this is a later question actually, but I'm kind of curious.

Have you seen this having a positive impact?

So, I mean, at the end of the day, right, what we do as researchers is we're trying to to talk about the world, make knowledge about the world in theory now functionally.

Does it work like that all the time?

No, obviously not.

But that's the aspirational goal, right?

So I'm just kind of curious where that intersection is of the make better knowledge about the world, specifically geographic knowledge in a geo zine context.

I mean, it's very obvious to me.

The nice thing about a zine is it gives a voice to many people who don't have a voice.

It gives an outlet for a voice for many people who don't have an outlet for voice, which is brilliant without a doubt.

But I'm kind of curious on the making knowledge piece, how, how do you think that this addresses that in a novel way?

That peer review and publishing a journal 17 months after you wrote it, you know.

Process that we're all used to.

How, how that com, how that supplements or supplants that type of profit process?

Hmm.

I think there's maybe a couple of different elements to this idea of making knowledge.

I think one that's close to my heart, because also as like a very anti-disciplinary geographer, I've recently, apparently become a historian and then like an archival historian, which I'm still getting used to.

But I think there's something about like ephemeral research media and ephemeral, like print media, like scenes, but also like things that come outta protests or blockades or like radical movements.

They often get like circulated for a few years and then just disappear.

And that is like a knowledge that has been created and then often the community is like unable to hold onto it because people move house and they can't keep track of their possessions or, you know, community centers and like anarchist infrastructures closed down.

And there's nowhere often for zines to actually live other than like random Google drives that you know, you've gotta know the right person to get access to.

So I think there's an element of just having a space to archive these various publications that is in itself like both like a new knowledge, but also like holding onto an old knowledge and making sure that it like actually, you know, has like a social life beyond just like a few months being passed around until the copy of the zine is too tatted.

And then I think the other side, and maybe Eden you wanna speak to this a bit more, is like the pedagogical side of, of zines and having all these zines available to access.

And I think there's something there in like the way that there are new knowledge is being created about teaching and like teaching new researchers and teaching students.

I dunno if you have any thoughts on that either.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, what this brings to mind for me is yeah, the politics of academic knowledge production, what, you know, what counts as research, what counts as knowledge.

And too soon to say the impact of all of this on on the spaces outside of the university.

But something that I found very interesting and heartening and you know, having great potential was just a space that we made at the, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers.

So this was the first time that there was this space.

So we were in the exhibit hall, which is where all the academic presses are and all the kind of sponsors of the conference.

And we had a space there where we were just.

Collecting and, and freely sharing all of these strange publications.

And something really interesting happened in that space, right at a conference where we, it's like the place to do all this really highly technical, highly formulaic sharing of, you know, official knowledge and, and all of that.

And we're passing out these kind of fringy experimental publications next to all the proper publishers.

So I think like, and we saw so much curiosity and so much excitement around that.

So I think you know, I can't really talk about impacts at this moment, but like just creating an opening, I think for these different kinds of knowledges in these official venues of our discipline.

The classroom is another such space where we've done a couple different panels on teaching with scenes and curate some resources around that.

And you know, occasionally I'll go into classrooms and introduce the archive to students and help teachers think about assignments and things like that where they can bring zines into their classroom.

And it's the same idea.

It's about kind of decentering academic texts, which tend to be inaccessible and uninteresting for undergraduates in particular.

And giving them some kind of strange little publication that addresses the same kind of content, but with a much different voices, much different kind of style.

And I've seen students respond really well to that.

So I think there's all these different ways we're trying to meddle with you know, what counts as knowledge and what kind of, yeah.

Processes and gatekeeping are involved in getting your perspective or your community's perspective recognized.

So Geo Zone was, you know, formalized fairly recently, but you've already gained a lot of accolades or people that are paying attention to what you're doing.

Did you wanna talk about some of those?

I can give the little rundown of what we've been up to.

Yeah, so we just started about a year ago last June.

So far we've been quite amazed by the response.

We have 83 zines in our collection on all kinds of topics.

From, I, I've lost the current count, but it's more than 20 different countries.

We've led a couple panels on teaching with zines.

We also had a workshop on environmental and climate justice storytelling through zines.

All of that's available on our website.

We recorded rerecorded some of those.

We had our zine fair.

We've been doing some other kind of organizational work to get into classrooms and things.

So it's really taken off, which I think speaks to the level of excitement and relief, I think a kind of relief that people feel to be able to engage these kind of spaces within our broader disciplinary formation.

When you meet with people and you talk about pedagogy or you're doing workshops, do you feel that movement from not being sure how to approach it because of how we're taught to approach these topics in academia to like basically getting relaxed with and exploring it as you've imagined it?

Hmm.

I think there's like a real appetite for it.

I think more often than not, sometimes you do see that unfamiliarity and a bit of like uncertainty when you're talking to an academic about it or someone who works in university.

But usually it's hunger and like an appetite for it.

We recently got an email from the librarian at my university just being like, can I use your website to like teach graduate students about creative research outputs?

And that was like crazy.

That was so great to just realize that there are people kind of organically seeing us on like.

An email list or, you know, seeing us online somewhere and thinking I can just organically bring this into the university that I work at.

Yeah.

And I think it's a matter of like, just encouraging people.

You know, there's no one right way to do things.

We can provide some resources and things, which we do, but I think more than anything people just need like a little push because I think there's a lot of dissatisfaction with how we teach and how we research and how we think and, you know, what we create.

And people, I think people have the creativity and have the Yeah, the appetite, but these ways of working aren't, aren't rewarded or aren't really recognized or might even be kind of looked down upon depending on your institutional context.

So I think just like what's powerful is getting people together a bunch of people with this interest and just kind of, yeah, giving them some tools but more just kind of, yeah, encouraging them to go experiment and then get back to us, right?

Like I'll go into classrooms and, talk to the students and say, here's like, their instructor will give them a, a zine assignment and they'll have me come in and just tell them about the zine and say, yeah, come and, you know, submit your zine if you want.

So I think it gives students like an actual, rather than just create this thing that's just gonna be turned in to just get a grade it gives them a little more interest and ownership in, in what they're creating.

Like it could actually go somewhere and like be shared somewhere.

So I think it gets everyone more engaged in the whole process.

And actually we're starting to bump into, yeah, special journals wanting to do special issues journal, reach out to me about that with scenes.

So, you know, it's always kind of unclear how they're going to bridge those worlds.

Exactly.

So there's always kind of questions there about format and whatnot, but they are expressing interest in these, in these new media and, I think also in one of our workshops, one of our colleagues was describing how they started a, or they were involved in, I don't know if they started it, a a zine based academic conference where you just send zines around and somehow they all connect around them.

And as part of that, they were talking about how the zines were getting DOIs.

For those who don't know, DOIs are like these numbers that get attached to pub, typically more conventional academic publications, but they're a way they become cataloged on the internet.

They're like persistent identifiers so that you can find piece of work.

So all journal articles have them, for example, so when you put a DOI on it or when it's associated with academic journal, even if kind of peripherally it gains a little bit of a credibility, right?

So I'm always interested in how to scheme all these ways to like right now I'm writing a couple papers, based on zines that are gonna be part, somehow connected to part of journal articles.

So there's all these schemes I think, to how we position ourselves and how we kind of play the game of you know, credentialing ourselves while also being kind of subversive.

'cause these, these publishers and all this also have an appetite for novelty and what's sexy, you know for better or for worse.

So I think there's ways to kind of strategically engage in a way where you can claim your work as a professional and also do things that are weird and fun and subversive.

And some of these publishers do it really well.

Like I am a huge fan of the cultural geographies in practice section.

I love, there's an article specifically about, I forget who wrote it, but it's about making like a Mr.

Men style kind of book about homelessness called Little Miss Homeless.

And it's like, it goes into how it was made, but it's such an interesting visual article and they do it really well.

Yeah.

There's also a, geo Humanities has a little short form section called Curations for yeah.

Art exhibits or some kind of, yeah.

Poetry or some kind of more creative media.

Okay.

So getting back to Geo Zone kind of as we are heading towards the end a couple of things I wanted to kind of highlight.

One of course is the fact that anybody can submit and can you just go through real quickly the, the few steps that it requires to get things in your hands to determine whether things will go up on the site?

Sure, yeah.

So if you go to our website, which is.

GEZ dot OE, we have the hips website thanks to Wiley.

So there's a tab on here called Submit.

So that just outlines all of our instructions.

Very simple.

Ensure that it's somehow in scope of the archive.

Send us the screen ready files and the print files if you have 'em.

That's a cool thing that we try to do is some of these are fully digital, but some of them also have print versions.

So people can go print 'em off in their house or in their office.

Yeah, you gotta send us like a little abstract.

There's a couple notes about how to be accessible in terms of alt text and OCR kind of, you know, text readability for screen readers and whatnot.

And yeah, then you send them in our inbox.

Sometimes we're a little slow getting to them 'cause there's, there's a lot that come in.

But we'll just read them through and if we think that they're you know, within scope and everything we put 'em up on the website.

Yeah.

And if you're not sure or you've got questions about the process, just like email us, DM us on Instagram.

We've got an Instagram, like, we're pretty friendly.

We're always down to chat.

And it is nice the, the accessibility aspect of making sure that it is OCR readable.

So even those physical zines that are out there that may be limiting.

This gives them another life for an entirely new audience.

Yeah.

We're still trying to figure out that piece.

Because, you know, OCR works for things that are produced on the internet.

You know, digitally I think it works less well for manually constructed things or things with different kinds of text.

So if anyone out there is really hip to best practices for accessibility for these kind of things, we would love some support on that.

I was gonna say the, the website does a really good job of capturing the feeling of a zine, but also of being accessible and not so image heavy.

So you could see that, you know, people from around the world could access it and not have so many issues in getting the information they need.

So I really exactly appreciate you taking the time to do that.

Yes.

And Wiley again is the credit there, like thinking about bandwidth and internet access and, and that was explicitly why they designed it in this manner.

So I have one final question.

That's not true.

I have many, but I'm just curious, what's your favorite zine in, in the catalog, each of yours that you didn't write?

Oh, that's a hard question.

Do you wanna go fast, Aiden?

Or should I go first?

Well, I can give my answer that may now be outdated.

'Cause we, we have a blog post where we had to answer this same question.

For me, one that I really like is by the Flat Collective at University of North North Carolina Chapel Hill.

That was a collective of students and professors who are trying to expose and contest the kind of white supremacist history of that institution and how it's embedded in the landscape and the infrastructure and the culture of that institution.

So my.

Again, how I got into this was I was interested in making zines that kind of critique academic institutions.

So that's one of our kind of areas of interest.

So that one stood out to me in particular.

I like the ones that are kind of trying to take on the academy and imagine other, other possible ways of you know, teaching and learning and creating universities.

So.

Mm-hmm.

And those ones felt the coolest to have, like, at the physical zine fair at the a a g because like we're all people who are investing in those ideas and we there and we're like, it feels like a real zine fest.

'cause like at a zine fest, everyone's always talking about what are we doing here at the Zine Fest.

Honestly, when one of you mentioned RA's Urban Infrastructure, I was like, Ugh, that is like my spiritual favorite scene ever.

Maybe.

But I think my actual favorite that I like really wanna shout out here is the Nostalgic Energy Scapes by Kat Neren.

It's about.

The Ohio River Valley and specifically Columbus, Ohio, and the kind of remnant infrastructures of fossil fuel industry that exist there and kind of this decommissioned hulking landscape of huge cement towers and factories and blocks.

And what I love about it is it is like both this kind of very like future oriented and past oriented look at like this energy transition and who gets left behind.

But it's also, it's like Kat is, they talk about being from that place and like what it means to like have an emotional connection to these infrastructures of like an era gone by and things that are often seen as like symbols of like a dirty form of like energy politics and energy production.

I met that zine actually before we started the archive.

There is a great conference called DIY methods.

They function by like mail, like snail mail, which I love.

And like they've been doing zine stuff for years and years and like huge shout out to DIY methods and like low carbon methods, which is the group they're associated with.

But I was part of that conference a couple years ago and in my little mail pack that they shift all the way to Southeastern Australia, which was incredible.

I got this scene and I was like, oh my god, I love this so much.

So yeah, shout out to Ka Finn for that.

Actually, I wanted to ask, did any of you have any favorite scenes either on the Jira Zone archive or elsewhere?

Are there any that come to mind?

Other than the rats obviously?

Oh, elsewhere.

I mean, I'm, I'm in music.

Nerd in every conceivable concept.

And actually it was interesting you talked about zines from the nineties, but actually zines have an older history than that to go back to the late seventies, but we didn't think of them as zines.

There's a lot of material that I would classify as zines.

So maybe my second or third favorite band of all time is The Clash.

And part of the reason that I love the Clash is it hit me at a time when I was becoming more consciously aware of the world around me, and they were talking about political social issues where most pop music wasn't talking about political social issues per se, particularly in an era where I grew up, where it was all about, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll was on the radio.

But they have a whole bunch of collections of stuff that happen around that culture in the UK that I would identify as zines that talk about.

The, the what, the materiality of what was actually happening in that area, in that era and area at the, the Clash was singing about.

And as a nerdy, you know, Southern West Virginia Backwood guy, I just got obsessive about getting those in any way, shape, or form.

So and then there was also stuff about comic books, which I was really into comic books, still love comic books, but particularly the sort of subversive not DC not Marvel, stuff that presents itself not dissimilar to a zine in a lot of ways.

So there are a lot of things that I would think precursor, the zine world that I would classify as zines.

That, that I think is fascinating and, and it really does talk about some of the things, but not on the academic side of things.

These are just normal people.

That wanna get their story out, that, that, that I love.

So that would be the exciting ones for me.

You should also check out I don't know if you've seen the sounds of our town ones on our website that's kind of looking at the intersection of music, heritage and declining in industrial cities.

There's one in Britain, in Detroit in the US and in Australia.

So there's a whole series that you can explore.

Cool.

So you said you were wearing the, the hat you didn't expect of historian, but I also wanna add one to it.

'cause my favorite come out of my experience is I have a, a background in waste, solid waste consumption.

And I will tell you all the trash people, we make these, we go through the trash.

You have people come and give talks and you touch things and you, you create something from nothing.

So you, you might look at that community that you might not have thought about because you'll have 50 people in a room that.

You know, are making things and collaging and making zines and just with, that's why the Rats of Urban in Infrastructure really struck me some of those because, you know, you're, you're touching the things we do in day-to-day life.

And so, you know, it would be a great way for you to guys to, to reach more people, you know, for, for your organization.

Sorry, I'm from New Jersey, so I say guys for everything.

So make sure to check out Willows at the very bottom of the list.

And we also just put, yeah, Willow has a couple on here.

And then we also posted more recently garbage gardening, which is by Summer Card Rally, who's my colleague at Delaware, who's, yeah, repurposing trash to make gardens, who's also really into this kind of discard studies pop culture kind of weird intersection.

So keep an eye out for their work.

Discard skull is love scenes and.

I just love that about them.

So I just wanna say as we're wrapping up that I absolutely love this and I'm, I'm walking away from this interview incredibly inspired, and I an idea for a zine popped in my head and I just texted Barbara so I wouldn't forget it.

What, what it was.

And so, and it's about Dungeons and Dragons.

'cause I'm, again, a general purpose nerd.

If it's nerdy, I probably am really into it at some level.

So I, I love this and I really hope our listeners go out and engage in this and start thinking of using this, even if you don't use the medium as it's sort of depicted as a inspiration for doing things differently in a new way, which I think is the most exciting piece of this, no matter what your age level or, or where you're at or where you're, what industry you're involved in.

Yeah.

We would love to see people kind of like grabbing zines, making them, sending them to us.

Like we are delighted with every submission.

And also maybe just a quick plug.

We are doing another zine Fair.

In London at the R-G-S-I-V-G this August, sorry, not in London, in Birmingham this year.

So if you're in the UK Constellations from a fellow UK resident, but you should also come to our zine fair.

And yeah, it's, we'll probably be running another one in future, so keep an eye out if you're on a different continent.

But I'll be behind the stool there, so come say hi if you wanna get some great scenes.

Yeah.

And in the meantime best way to keep in touch is our Instagram, which you, I'm sure you'll put it in the show notes, but it's at Geo Zone Collective.

We, we plug all our new zine releases and if there's anything going on with events or things like that, it'll be through there.

So give us a follow.

Okay.

Well thank you for joining us today and I hope everybody goes out and looks not just at Geo Zone, but at all the various places you can find zines in person and online.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks so much.

That was awesome.

It was, it's a good conversation.

Sorry Sue.

You couldn't I know.

Stupid work, dumb day job getting in the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's all like, as always with every day it's all like little stuff.

It's all little stuff, but, but that was a real, that, that was a very inspiring conversation, to be honest with you.

And I, I've been as, as case listeners aren't aware, we oftentimes record the interviews before we record the episode.

So I've been thinking that about that interview for four or five days now, how long it's been.

I really liked that one.

I, I had to get after, after we had stopped the interview, I had to get Barb to kick Frank under the table to get him to stop gushing.

I, yeah, I was she got a text and I was like, what?

I, I just really enjoyed talking to them.

They were talking about things that, you know, tickled my little fancy all the way through.

Yeah.

It was a good conversation.

I don't know, 20 years thoughts, I think.

Amazing.

I was thinking to myself earlier, I'm like, how many podcasts from that original sort of generation.

Are even left.

We gotta be one of the few, consistently and always a 20 years of Jesse's amazing editing and doing all of the technical work and stuff.

So, round of applause on that.

That's what I was thinking too.

But as part of that, I was thinking 765 episodes plus our dabbling in video, plus all our special episodes and stuff.

We're approaching a thousand, I think I, I, I didn't do a new count, but yeah, we're approaching a thousand.

How many with everything?

Over a thousand.

Oh, we're approaching a thousand.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can, I can see that.

So anyway, that's one of the things that kind of got me thinking like, you know, 20 years, but so many, well, not many, but several generations, waves almost.

Not quite generations, but waves of podcasts have come since then.

Right?

Because it was kind of like that first initial surge.

A lot fell by the wayside then.

It seemed a couple years went by and then there was another surge.

And now like the current generation is a little bit different.

Well now it's just mainstream, right?

It's matured.

Yeah.

It's, it's a mature industry.

Whereas before it was exploring the unknown, trying out new things.

It's been, I, I can't believe it's been 20 years.

It doesn't feel like it's been 20 years.

I'm, I mean, on the one hand it feels like I've always done this, but on the other hand, it feels like I just started doing this just a while, little while ago.

So you've told me five years, like, yeah, that seems legit, but 20 years, that's amazing.

20 years.

When a few years ago when I was compiling a list of like, where our name appears, one of them was on Wikipedia in the timeline of early podcasts.

And it was just exciting to see, you know, very spatial listed there.

I haven't gone back to check.

I need to but.

Around a long time, had some great conversations.

You're gonna try to do another one with one of the traditional folks.

And then we had a couple of of interviews pop up.

I'm like, you know what?

We'll just do something new.

So for those people that we have interviewed in the past for major anniversaries, don't be surprised if we email you to talk about it this year, but we decided to go with, with some new Yeah, which is cool, folks, which is cool.

Yeah, I mean, those are good memories, right?

So great conversations over the years with Elvin Slavic, who else?

All kinds of Mladen Stojic.

Richard Cook.

Yeah.

Bernie.

So yeah, there's, there's so many people.

Our first interview I think was Dr.

Tim Warner, who was of is, was yes, was the remote sensing professor at WVU.

And then of course Sue's favorite early episode or early interview.

Peter Morville, of course.

And you know, we've, we've had interviews with authors and comic book artists, and of course lots and lots of different types of geographers over the years.

So yeah.

Lots of people to talk to and lots of just random ramblings from us.

Yeah, a lot of that, that, but it, it's kind of nice, it actually goes along with the interview to some extent that we've had a, a outlet to, to say, okay, there's a formal way to do things in academia, but there's also other way to do things.

And it's been nice to, to say, I have a thought.

I wanna get the thought out there and I want to get it sort of kicked around a little bit without having, because all the formal stuff that academia normally allows or requires, or even, you know, even if you don't go into academia and you just do traditional publication of, you know, New York Times article or whatever, you know, it, it's been really nice to have that.

I have a thought, I want to express it.

This is a medium that allows me to do that.

So it, it, it's been a, it's been a wonderful way to get, to actually work through thoughts in a, a formalized setting and, and to come at it from a different perspective, from the journalism perspective.

At the time, it was such a way to speak to the people that are doing things on the ground rather than to the typical people you talk to in a trade journal where you're everyone's, you know, trying to impress you or to get a certain type of idea out there.

And it's a little, you know, stuffy and more based on honestly return on investment and finance.

In this case it's, you know, talking to real people, doing it about what they do, you know, daily or what they're trying to achieve.

So a lot of fun.

Yeah.

And over the years, right especially at the beginning, one of the goals of doing it was to not just get those thoughts out there, but to kind of follow our own processes as we tried to keep up with some amazingly rapid changes going on.

And I think for us, starting off in the academic side, getting exposure to the practical part of the geospatial industry, geography a lot of people who are, you know, are out in the world and going to conferences like Wear 2.0 and getting that perspective as well just was an amazing thing to add to maybe some of the more traditional things that we were doing.

So in terms of our own education and then later in our day jobs, right?

In teaching others, and hopefully there's someone out there on Insta reels or TikTok or whatever platform of choice that is doing what we did because we wanted to make sure that we were keeping.

With things that were new coming out because our faculty weren't, and now we are not.

So hopefully someone else is doing it for the generations coming up now.

'cause as you may have noticed, a lot of our ideas are not too dissimilar, I'd say to a decade ago.

I don't think we were, we're stuck 20 years ago, but we haven't really dug into a lot of the newer technologies.

I don't know.

I mean, some, certainly not whether we've done a decade ago.

That's, I'll agree with you on that one, but I mean, you know, there's still things, you know, virtuality is newer technology, believe it or not.

Yeah.

But we've been working on it for the full 20 years, so Yeah.

Which we are looking at that in a diff in different ways.

Yeah.

But the, the stuff like AI and, and generative AI and LLMs and how now what we've been doing as part of remote sensing and, you know, the expert systems, neural networks, AKA AI that we started with.

It's not that different, but we're not keeping up with the terminology of machine learning, deep learning as it's, as it's transitioning.

So I guess in some ways we're keeping up with it other ways we're not, but it's just hopefully there are people who are keeping up with those things that we are not.

So I don't think we should necessarily be the ones on the cutting edge because we're not using those things daily.

I would say that based on just, you know, being able to review things for like the signal awards, I'm hearing more and more just spatial and geospatial just coming up out of just different podcasts that you wouldn't even expect.

So I think that there's just a broader in ingrained ness of it and what's going on right now that, you know, people aren't.

Realizing 'cause you don't notice how much it's changed.

So it is exciting to see that it is out there and people are talking about it and exploring it, not just on geography podcasts, but also in the areas it's embedded in, which you didn't used to hear people talking about, but certainly we, we could have a whole conversation about, you know, being up to date and whatnot.

But I, I think you're absolutely, hopefully people are out there doing what we did 20 years ago on these new platforms.

'cause everyone needs to be doing this more often, I think.

And importantly, there are a lot more podcasts now as well.

And that started, I think about three or four years ago that we saw a swell of them.

And part of it was COVID, part of it was just the new acceptance of podcasting more broadly as well.

Yeah, I, I think that, you know, I always tell people when I meet them to go ahead and, and do something like a podcast if they have something they're passionate about in geography and to explore it deeper.

When I started with very spatial, everyone, you know, you remember I was the least spatial.

I didn't really know anything about geography and geospatial.

So I would have to start that when I talked to people.

But it wasn't necessarily bad because everyone enjoyed talking about and explaining it to me.

So even if you don't, you don't have to be an expert to explore an area you're interested in, but if I had one desire for potential podcasters out there, it would be for good equipment.

You know, I would love to see a way for, because the, the one impediment I'm seeing is just that poor sound quality.

So my wishlist or gift for everyone starting a geography podcast would be for.

Someone to hand them the appropriate equipment they need to do what they wanna do.

A nice, cheap $50-100 microphone.

Okay?

And that's not necessarily cheap, but a couple of those and handheld microphones.

Make sure you're doing those.

'cause that way you can use it whenever you're somewhere or whenever you're sitting at home.

Works just as well.

Either way.

Doesn't look as cool on video, but who cares?

It sounds good.

That's always gonna be my preference over great looking equipment.

And then something to plug those into.

And you can get that from anywhere from a hundred dollars to, you know, the sky's the limit, but it doesn't have to be the greatest thing because now a lot.

Of software exists that did not exist whenever we started.

That can clean up audio in amazing ways.

But if you can keep each person's audio on a separate track, it just makes it easier to clean up in those pieces of software, like podcast adobe.com or a sheer, you know, there's, with AI coming up, there's so many different audio cleaning tools out there that it's just open source or proprietary.

Just play around with all of them to see which one works for your voice Yes.

And listening to it.

And so over the past 20 years, we've had Jesse, who's been awesome with editing.

And, and Frank has stepped in a few times as well to edit, but that was one of the things that, that I would tell you.

And he would say, you gotta stop doing this and or that, and it does make a difference.

And so I was the bad one on that, that had some, and still have some, some bad habits.

And you don't realize it until you hear it that yeah.

There is something to be said for checking that.

And so the man on the street sound is great for a while, but after that you really need to help out your listeners.

Maybe if you're gonna really do it with some better quality.

Well, I'll say this, which is don't expect to get it out correct outta the gate.

I mean, don't worry about the first dozen or even two dozen episodes.

Learn it's okay to do what?

Learn what by doing.

That's perfect.

Okay.

Nobody expects a professional studio grade production on episode three.

I mean, come on, learn, figure out what you're doing.

Get rid of some of those, those things that you do that sue's mentioning that are weird.

And then invest the money.

You know, when you go, yeah, this is something I wanna do.

Take out your phone, hit record video or just audio.

Put it in the middle of the table.

Start talking.

Yeah, hopefully you'll be here in 20 years too.

We probably won't.

You don't know.

Well, I don't know, but I'm also not sure.

I wanna be 72 and recording a podcast.

So what else are you gonna do?

You're retired.

Nothing else want.

That's fair.

Actually.

You might do hopefully daily at that point.

Yeah.

So as we kind of sign off to head into our 21st year, like are there any particular memories?

I mean we do this like almost every year if we do like a yearly reminiscence, but now it's been 20 years.

Are there any sort of standout moments for you guys?

I mean, there's been tons of them, but if you had to pick one.

Any thoughts?

So I'm gonna go ahead and get it out there that no, 'cause it's 20 years and so I can't think of one thing out 20.

So, well, that's what I said one thing at this moment, which, which I'm, I'm letting other people do.

Okay.

Because I'm just saying I will not.

I, I would say this, that something I miss that I, it's just on me to do but I, I miss is when we, at some point in the middle, maybe early on, certainly in the middle, we did kind of a multimodal approach to this.

We were recording a podcast and we were doing video to mention that, and we were doing blog posts.

And I liked that, that allowed me to think through some ideas a little more fully and get them down and kind of edit them a little bit as opposed to freeform talking.

They both have their place.

So I really like that and I like to get back to it.

And that, again, that's on me to just do it.

But still, that's, that's was something that sticks out at me.

That was a really special thing that we did during the podcast that I always really liked.

Well, I would say that something that sticks out with me going along with it's hard to believe it's been 20 years, is how much I still look forward to meeting with my friends and co-hosts every time we do this.

This isn't something that is a chore to do.

It's a highlight of, you know, it was a highlight of my week and now it's highlight every other week of something to look forward to.

And I think that's what you need when you do something like this, is you need to look forward to the, the people that you're talking to, the people you're interviewing, the topics that you're covering.

And so after 20 years, it's still something that brings me joy to do.

And when I hear other people's podcasts, that also, you know, is something that I enjoy listening to.

So I feel like I found the right place and the right topic, and I appreciate that Jesse and Sue invited me along.

Well, I feel like that should be the ending one, but I was gonna say that, for me, and, and I think it's wrapping up today, actually.

One of the, the highlights was that first time, well, not just the first time we had a meetup with our listeners two days ago is when it wrapped up.

Doesn't it not end on Sundays?

No, it ends on Friday.

All right.

Okay.

So it already wrapped up, but that's the Ezra, you see and our meetup with fans, which was amazing.

And also our live episode there a couple times that we did that.

So among many, many highlights and getting, you know, to have the conversations, those are a couple that stood out, which was like, wow.

So this, this is one that sticks out really hard, which is we got the opportunity to interview Jack Dangermond and his people.

I mean, he's an incredibly busy man who has very scheduled days and it was at the uc and it was after the SAG awards and his people were very clear.

We had, I think, 10 minutes.

I.

That's it, that's all you have.

And he got into it and we ended up talking for like 15 or 20 minutes.

It was a, it was a significantly longer period of time than what we had allocated.

And when we hit like the 12th minute or something like that, I remember looking over to his people and the look on the one person's face was, I want to blame you for all of this, but I really can't because I know the guy I work for.

But I do kind of blame you for all of this.

And I was just like, I feel really bad.

It was just a really funny visual half second moment on something.

And it was a very enjoyable conversation.

I don't episode 100 something, 200 something.

You wanna go back and listen to it?

It's, it is a good, it's a good interview, but it was just funny 'cause he got into it and he really just wanted to talk about GIS and, and, and showed his passion.

That was one of my favorite moments.

I still don't have, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pick for my children.

I'm not going to, he's not gonna play favorites.

All right, well then, so 20 years we're gonna, I guess keep going for a little bit longer.

We'll see how that goes.

And yeah, podcasting.

So if you would like us to cover anything particular, let us know.

It becomes a little bit more difficult once the school year starts, but we can always ask people to talk to us on the weekends.

But yeah, let us know what you think.

And I don't know what else is there to say.

Think how could they reach us if they let us know?

Well, we can tell 'em thanks for listening for 20 years.

If you have, there's a, a few of you have been around for 20 years, some of you have been around for a lot less, but that's understandable.

But I want, isn't it amazing to think that somebody who wasn't born yet is now in college, that's, anyway, sorry, 20 years, but a shout out to all of our listeners.

20 years, all the way back, however long it's been, and for those that that you know, have gone on to other things.

So it's been cool.

Yeah.

And, and for those of you who had gone on to podcasts and other things, would be nice to hear from you.

That's Barb at very spatial time for 20 years.

Some people have.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Of course, events, go to events, all kinds of events.

Talking to people is the, the name of the game to help you, whether you're talking to them in person, on social media, over Zoom, whatever format you talk to people, it gives you a chance to bounce ideas on off of them and, and grow your own ideas.

Of course.

If you'd like us to add your event to our next podcast, send us an email to podcast@veryspatial.com.

If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at sue@veryspatial.com.

I can be reached at barb@veryspatial.com.

You can reach me atFrank@veryspatial.com.

I'm available.

At kind of spatial and you can find all of our contact information over at very spatial.com/contact.

As always, we're the folks in very spatial.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in a couple weeks, finally, hell of a month.

So.

It's inside live.

I don't feel.

Try not spin out clouds.

I'm so.