About

David O’Sullivan

This website is a shop window for Geospatial Stuff through which I offer contract expertise in data analytics and visualisation, simulation modelling, and training, especially in relation to all things geospatial. For more information contact me.

Research

I am an established geography and geospatial researcher and scholar with almost 30 years experience at UCL (1997-2000), Penn State (2000-04), University of Auckland (2004-13), Berkeley (2013-18), and Victoria University of Wellington (2018-24). I am an Honorary Professor in the School of Environment at University of Auckland. You can find out more about my academic exploits from the ‘Academic’ drop-down menu above, or for a quick overview, see my Google Scholar profile.

Commmunicating ideas

I have written 3 books and numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters.

I have taught for over 20 years and can put together a mean slide show. I use web-formats, primarily revealjs and quarto. See my presentations, or the slides from this course.

Communicating data

I work all the time in R and Python developing workflows to tidy, reformat, analyse, and visualize data, especially spatial data. I am a trained cartographer, and while I haven’t done a lot of publication cartography per se I have regularly worked on visual analytics or maps of complex data in research projects and publications.

Wrangling data

I have been programming since forever. The languages I use all the time are Python and R, but I have experience in several others (notably Java and JavaScript). I am not a software developer, but can write well organised and documented code. I am not a web developer, but will roll up my sleeves and figure stuff out if called on! Most of my web stuff is linked from these pages, so just have a look around, especially under Other stuff. The most complicated web-thing I’ve built is this New Zealand 2018 commute visualization.

Simulating stuff

I love NetLogo, but freely admit that it is somewhat niche (albeit surprisingly powerful, see this geographical COVID model I built in lockdown). I’ve also written a book about this.

Project management

Before academia I was a project engineer leading build, test, commissioning and maintenance of production line laser-scanning inspection equipment, working with major multinationals such as IBM, Kodak, Dow Chemical, and Sony. In that role I learned a great deal about project and people management.