Acknowledgements
This articles is a part of the series “Urban Information Architecture & Entrepreneurship: Spatial Patterns to Develop Thriving Entrepreneurial Ecosystems.”
I deal with anxiety. The kind of anxiety that has meant this thesis was the accumulation of not months, but years of thought, worry, writing, more worry, and rewriting. I have stressed about whether I have read enough articles to have any idea of the right direction to go in. I have stressed about whether I forgot an article in the back of my subconscious, and all of what I thought were my own ideas were really someone else’s.
When I wanted to analyze the data I got through an entirely new mode of analysis, through information patterns, that I myself had to make, I wondered several times if I was crazy. Crazy to not be content with the current way urban informatics professionals analyzed data, crazy to think I could produce not simply new data, but a whole new way of looking at urban spaces. Innovation was for professionals, for people with Ph.D.s, for people with twenty and thirty years of experience.
This acknowledgements is both a thank-you to the people who helped me along this path, but also an acknowledgement that these articles will likely have flaws, and that I give them to the world simultaneously with pride and vulnerability. Academic literature is so often presented as scientific truth. To write this, and publish it, I needed to recognize that while I could try my best to do great research, my work will still contain biases and flaws. I hope that while this series of papers is not perfect, it can be useful.
With that, I want to acknowledge the many people that helped me get to this point. I could not have created this project without the help of many people. I want to thank my primary adviser, Dr. Robert Goodspeed. I want to thank Dr. Dan Klyn and Dr. Cliff Lampe, whose thoughts greatly impacted my own. I want to thank my co-founder and friend Sal Saia, for being there to hear out and help me build my crazy ideas. Stewart Thornhill, Nancy Gilby, Joanna Millunchick, Drea Shipp-Caldwell, and the many others that have supported me along my own entrepreneurial journey. Thank you to my family and friends who kept me afloat with their love. Finally, I want to thank Richard Saul Wurman and Christopher Alexander, who I do not know but whose views of the world captivated and changed me.
