Engineer Project

Aaron Straup Cope

******@***************.***

URL: http://www.aaronstraupcope.com

Professional Objective

The promise of the Internet is to be a bridge for cross-pollinating peoples, ideas and

communities. I am looking for opportunities to design and build the tools that will

continue to realize the Idea of the network.

Core Competencies

Programming: Perl (12 years), PHP (12 years), Python (8 years), JavaScript (8 years).

System administration: BSD/Linux, Apache, Solr, MySQL, Postgres, PostGIS.

Languages: English, French.Employment History

Senior Engineer, Digital and Emerging Media

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution [1] (New York City, New

York, U.S.A.)

July 2012-Present

Internet typing in the service of fun, magic and the future. Details to follow!

Internet Typist (and general layabout)

(

San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)

January 2012-July 2012

Combination self-employed and self-imposed sabbatical spent implementing and

investigating the practice of archiving and of running shadow copies of popular social

networking websites.

Projects:

Parallel Flickr [2] a tool for backing up your Flickr photos and generating a database

backed website that honours the viewing permissions you've chosen on Flickr. It was

presented at the Internet Archive's 2012 Personal Digital Archiving conference [3]

Privatesquare [4] a "looking-glass archive" web application to record and manage a

private database of foursquare check-ins with the option of recording them in a public

service after the fact.

Parallel-ogram [5] a simple web application to create a local backup of Instagram

photos and "likes" and to make that archive a living, breathing website of its own.

Design Technologist

Stamen Design [6] (

San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)

2009-2011Senior developer responsible for taming source data and designing and implementing

technical systems for a wide variety of clients and research projects. Also, maps.

Projects:

Surging Seas [7] (2012) a project with Climate Central [8] to visualize the effects of

sea-level rise and storm surges in the United States.

map=yes [9] (2011) a project with MapQuest [10] to demonstrate what their mapping APIs,

and commitment to the OpenStreetMap project, affords to developers and designers alike.

prettymaps [11] (2010) an experimental interactive map composed of multiple freely

available, community-generated data sources designed to explore and celebrate the edges of

what is possible in web-based mapping.

Cheerio Maps [12] (2010) an experimental map to visualize housing data in the San

Francisco Bay Area.

Lead Engineer

Flickr [13] (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)

2004-2009

Lead engineer for the Flickr [13] photo sharing/management web application; designed,

implemented and maintained the geotagging and machinetag infrastructure; primary contact

for security issues; primary contact for integration projects with its parent company

Yahoo!.

Projects:

Galleries [14] (2009) a way for users to curate up to 18 public photos or videos from

other Flickr users into one place around a theme, an idea or "just because"; galleries

were a way to encourage Flickr users to try and see their time and involvements on the

site as something other than self-promotion or collecting view counts.

Flickr Shapefiles [15] (2008) we asked the question: "If we plotted all the geotagged

photos associated with a particular location, would we have enough data to generate a

mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but

something more fine-grained than a bounding box." It turns out we did!

Machine tags [16] (2007) a lightweight and easy means for users to add extra semantics

to their tags and to use those tags as a kind of key in to third-party services; there are

currently over 2M tags with foursquare [17] venue IDs as well as many other smaller

bespoke projects.

Geotagging [18] (2006) the ability for users to geotag their photos; there were 1M

geotagged photos added in the first 24 hours and today there are over 300M geotagged

photos.

Just keeping the site up (2005) it was a very busy year.

Lead developer / system administratorVineyard.NET Inc. (Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, U.S.A)

2001-2004

Designed and built internal and customer-facing account management tools; Designed, built

and maintained custom web applications for real-estate property management; Oversaw all

web-related infrastructure.

Personal projects and activities

building=yes

2011-Present

building=yes [19] is a searchable and linkable index of every building in the

OpenStreetMap [20] project.

prettymaps, Talk To Me exhibition (MoMA)

2011

In 2011, the prettymaps project was included [21] in the Museum of Modern Art's Talk to

Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects [22] exhibition, in New York

City. This was very exciting.

Advisory Board, Built Works Registry

2011-Present

In 2011 I was invited to be a member of the advisory board for the Built Works Registry

[23], a joint endeavor of the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia

University, ARTstor and Getty Research Institute funded by a three-year National

Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

prettymaps, 20x200 prints

2010-Present

Starting in 2010, the prettymaps project was selected by the 20x200 [24] project for a

series of limited-edition prints. To date editions for ten cities [25] have been printed.

The Papernet

2007-Present

The Papernet [26] is the name for an on-going investigation of how and why and where to

bridge the digital and analog world. It was first introduced at the 2007 XTech conference,

in Paris.

Aaron's New York Times Widgets2002-2010

Tools, and visualizations, for data-mining the New York Times. [27] This project was

stopped with the introduction of the New York Time's "pay-wall".

The Mirror Project2001-2008

One of the earliest community-driven photo-sharing websites to promote built to encourage

and showcase "adventures in reflective surfaces". Sadly, this project is currently offline

but slices of it may still be seen [28] using the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine".

Education

Studies in Studio arts, 1993-1997

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design [29] (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada)

Publications

References

Available upon request.

External links

http://www.cooperhewitt.org/

http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2011/10/14/pixelspace/#parallel-flickr

http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2012/02/14/incentivize/#pda2012

http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/2012/01/22/privatesquare/

http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2012/04/02/haystack/#parallel-ogram

http://www.stamen.com/

http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/

http://www.climatecentral.org/

http://mapequalsyes.stamen.com/

http://mapquest.com/

http://prettymaps.stamen.com/

http://city.stamen.com/cheerios/

http://www.flickr.com/

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/09/14/galleries-unleash-your-inner-curator/

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/

http://foursquare.com/

http://www.flickr.com/map

http://buildingequalsyes.spum.org/

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/talktome/objects/146211/

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080

https://builtworksregistry.wordpress.com/

http://20x200.com/

http://www.20x200.com/artist/210-aaron-straup-cope

http://www.aaronland.info/papernet/

http://www.aaronland.info/nytimes/

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mirrorproject.com/

http://www.nscad.ca/

https://builtworksregistry.wordpress.com/imagining-the-built-works-registry-by-aaron-

straup-cope-christine-kuan/

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/cope/cope.html

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2009/abstracts/prg_335001944.html

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2008/papers/straup_cope/straup_cope.html

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/16/edfg.html

http://www.github.com/straup

http://cpan.org/~ascope

http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/

http://sxsw.com/interactive

http://www.whereconf.com/

http://www.stateofthemap.org/

http://www.aaronland.info/talks

http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/

http://www.aaronstraupcope.com/resume/en/aaronstraupcope-resume-en.txt

http://www.aaronstraupcope.com/resume/en/aaronstraupcope-resume-en.html

http://www.aaronstraupcope.com/resume/en/aaronstraupcope-resume-en.pdf

http://www.aaronstraupcope.com/resume/en/aaronstraupcope-resume-en.xml

Last modified 24 May 2012

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