The GLaD Podcast

Today, we’re talking about embeddings. Unless you’ve been living… well, I don’t know where, you might have heard of the term generative AI. At the core of this technology is an obscure idea, word embeddings, that powers much of its magic. Embeddings work for text, but not only so. They also work for imagery and other types of geospatial data. This idea is taking force in certain circles, and we thought it’d be worth spending some chat time with this! Join us for a (hopefully) "lay enough" conversation about one of the most interesting ideas in geo-data that the last few years have produced.

You think balancing babies and a career is tough; try recording a podcast episode about the topic! Kidding. Sort of.

In this episode, Dani, Levi, and Rachel are joined by special guest, Elisabetta Pietrostefani, from the University of Liverpool, for a wide-ranging conversation about babies and (academic) work. The complicated decisions around whether and when to have kids. Things we wish we'd thought of. Tips for navigating different stages of kid and career. One of the most interesting things about this episode, we think, is just how tricky it was to navigate the conversation—an important takeaway lesson!

For this episode, join Dani, Rachel, and Levi for a discussion about Academic Love Languages. Does getting public recognition make you feel warm and fuzzy? Or would you rather the freedom to curl up in a quiet office, reading and writing? We're all different, and it helps to be aware of what makes us (and others) feel valued, cared for, or supported. So, how do you show your colleagues that you value them? And, what makes you feel valued as a colleague? Join us for a spirited discussion about whether such a thing exists and let us know your academic love language by emailing us at [email protected]

Happy new year!!! We know, we know, we’ve been in 2026 for a while already (already too long?). But this is the first episode we recorded this year, the first one with Levi as a dad (yay!), and one where the “year” itself will somewhat feature. So we find it apt to start with a cheerful approach.

 

The reason behind this episode is that I’m such a sucker for “best of…” and “what’ll happen in…” compilations. Like the best sci-fi, they tell you a lot more about the present, its hopes and anxieties, than about the year they either review or speculate on. And that’s always interesting to me. So Dani spent most of December listening to “hot takes” from all sorts of podcasts… And here at GLaD HQ, we’re all made of the “hot take” stuff. So, possibly several weeks “late” (in time is overrated!), here it is: our hot takes for 2026.

Come for the catchy episode title, stay for the wide-reaching discussion about spatial data, visualization, and cartography. We're joined this time by Anthony Robinson, from Pennsylvania State University, for a conversation about what cartographers do, what cartography looks like in the 21st century, what makes a map, and the challenges of "personal cartography." We've even got some requisite hot takes on spatial analysis and data (...and cartography!).