Aaron Straup Cope

Email: resume@aaronstraupcope.com
URL: http://www.aaronstraupcope.com/

Professional Objective

I have worked at Flickr [1] helping to build and nuture the beautiful monster that it became, made pretty maps at Stamen Design [2] , re-opened the Smithsonian Design Museum [3] re-imagining what it means for a museum to hold hands with the Internet and built a high-quality, openly-licensed gazetteer of all the places [4] in the world at Mapzen [5] . In my current role at the San Francisco International Airport Museum [6] I am working to develop a robust and sustainable technological practice to meet the needs and the constraints of both the cultural heritage and public sectors.

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 as a public good.

Core Competencies

Programming: Go, Python, PHP, Swift, JavaScript, Perl, Java.

Languages: English, French.

Employment History

Head of Internet Typing
San Francisco International Airport (SFO) Museum [7] (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)
2018-Present

Lead developer and architect for a project to consider what it means for a museum in an airport, an airport with over 58 million visitors in 2019, to operate in a world where (almost) everyone is connected to the internet and to learn what are the opportunities and responsibilities, as a cultural heritage organization, to everyone who passes through SFO equipped with curiosity and a computer connected to the internet.

Although the museum has a long history of self-sufficiency in traditional museum-related operations it has lacked equivalent digital skills relying instead on third-parties and outside vendors to maintain its online presence. My role has been to develop the infracsture and practices necessary for the museum to take ownership of its digital needs and desires (past, present and future) while still operating within the constraints of a cultural heritage organization and local government.

These efforts have been documented in detail on the Mills Field weblog [8] . These include:

Projects:

Editor at Large – Creator, Architect and Head of Engineering for Who's On First (WOF)
Mapzen [5] (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)
2015-2017

Creator, Architect and Head of Engineering for Who's On First (WOF), an openly licensed gazetteer of all the places and all their metadata in the world, ranging from continents to neighbourhoods and venues. WOF was published as a public resource and a series of API-based services and used internally by a variety of Mapzen services including Search (geocoding) and Tiles.

The goal of WOF is to provide high-quality and openly licensed location data with global coverage specifically designed for use with a broad range of applications, datastores and programming languages, while ensuring long-term durability and portability of both the data and the services.

In January 2018, Mapzen announced that it would cease operations. WOF continues to operate [17] as a community-driven open-data and open-source project at whosonfirst.org [4] . All of the data and source code continues to be developed and distributed through the whosonfirst-data [18] and whosonfirst [19] GitHub organizations, respectively.

To date approximately 60, 000 words of theory and practice [20] have been written about the project on the Who's On First weblog. A good introduction is the 2016 talk titled Mapping With Bias [21] and a detailed discussion of the project's goals and motivations is the 2015 blog post Who's On First [22] .

Projects:

Head of Engineering, Digital and Emerging Media
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum [29] (New York City, New York, U.S.A.)
2012-2015

Head of engineering and technical architect for all public facing and internal digital initiatives related to the re-opening of the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in 2015. This work was documented in The Atlantic magazine's 2015 The Museum of the Future Is Here [30] profile and culminated with The Pen [31] an NFC-enabled stylus, custom designed and manufactured by the museum, given to every museum visitor.

The Pen allows visitors to collect objects on display and retrieve them post-visit as well as produce new works on multi-user interactive tables located through the museum. It works in concert with purpose-built API designed and maintained by the museum and enables both internal and third-party in-gallery experiences. Launched in March of 2015, The Pen has been in continuous use since then. As of January 2018 [32] it has been given out to 350, 000 visitors; used to collect objects 14 million times; and used to create over 300, 000 designs.

The technical, manufacturing and institutional challenges (and successes) that were prompted The Pen are discussed at length in Strategies against architecture: interactive media and transformative technology at Cooper Hewitt [33] , a formal paper presented at the 2015 Museums and the Web conference and The Pendulum of Bespokiness [34] , a presentation delivered at the 2016 Bosch Connected Experience conference.

Projects:

Internet Typist (and general layabout)
(San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)
2012-2012

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:

Design Technologist
Stamen Design [2] (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)
2009-2011

Senior developer responsible for taming source data and designing and implementing technical systems for a wide variety of clients and research projects. Also, maps.

Projects:

Lead Engineer
Flickr [50] (San Francisco, California, U.S.A.)
2004-2009

Lead engineer for the Flickr [50] 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:

Personal projects and activities

Public speaking
2007-Present

I have been speaking publicly since 2007 [56] on a variety of personal and work-related subjects including Flickr, maps and cultural heritage. I have been a frequent speaker at the Museums and the Web [57] , Museum Computer Network [58] , Openstreetmap State of the Map [59] and North American Cartographic Information Socirty (NACIS) [60] conferences.

A complete list of talks is available at https://www.aaronland.info/talks [61]

go-iiif

go-iiif [62] is a fork of the iiif [63] package that moves all of the processing logic for the IIIF Image API [64] in to discrete Go packages and defines source, derivative and graphics details in a JSON config file. There is an additional caching layer for both source images and derivatives.

Brooklyn Integers

Artisanal Integers as a service [65] . A very elaborate joke, but a useful one. The canonical text on artisanal integers is the time pixels [66] keynote from the 2012 New Zealand National Digital Forum [67] but a more approachable introduction is neverendingbook.org's artisanal integers [68] .

The Mirror Project
2001-Present

The Mirror Project [69] was one of the earliest community-driven photo-sharing websites to promote built to encourage and showcase "adventures in reflective surfaces". In a world before selfies...

Education

Publications

Miscellany

Code samples and current projects are available for review on the @aaronland [83] and @whosonfirst [19] and @sfomuseum [84] GitHub organizations. Older code is available for review on the @straup [85] and @thisisaaronland [86] GitHub accounts.

I have been maintaining a personal weblog since 1999. [87]

This document is available in the following formats : Plain-text [88] , HTML [89] , PDF [90] and XML [91] . The code used to generate these documents is available as open source software [92] .

References

Available upon request.

External links

Last modified August 2023.