image of Jeremy Aber

A short bio

I was born and raised in Emporia, Kansas. I graduated from Emporia State University in 2005 with a BFA in Art (glass casting) and a minor in geospatial analysis. I then moved to Manhattan, Kansas for graduate school in geography. In 2007, I received an MA from Kansas State University in Geography; a PhD in Geography followed in 2012. During the 2012-13 academic year, I taught full-time at Emporia State University in the Earth Science department. Following that, I moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where I am currently an Associate Professor of Geography in Middle Tennessee State University's Geosciences department.

In addition to Kansas and Tennessee, I have lived in Regina, Saskatchewan; Bergen, Norway; Warsaw, Poland; and Tartu, Estonia. As one might expect, my regional areas of geographic interest include Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. My research interests are in GIS and cartography, small-format aerial photography, virtual geographies and video games, cognitive geography, geographic visualization techniques, and sense of place and place attachment.

Maps

I am also interested in web mapping in all its forms. The two maps on this page were built with two very different techniques (see the cartography section for a third implementation of a web-based map). The US states map to the right was built using the Stately font. On this map, the states are different characters in the font, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face declaration. It marks states where I've lived in MTSU Blue Raider blue, and other states that I've visited in yellow. The interactive world map below was built using Leaflet. On this map, countries I've lived in are marked in blue and countries I've visited are marked in yellow. There are a lot of grey states and countries left to visit!