Mr. TIFF - An Oral History of a Format

Stephen Carlsen died in 2025. His family knew vaguely that he had worked on creating the file format TIFF, but it was his nephew, Nathan Carlsen, who kicked off a quest for the full story. This week, senior producer Hans Buetow talks with Nathan about his oral history project to document his uncle’s work, and we hear a fascinating conversation that Nathan had with Donovan Cameron, a First Nation GIS specialist who uses the TIFF in unexpected ways.

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Mr. Tiff

Find Nathan:

• Podcast: Inquisitive Pontification
• Original Reddit Post

Find Donovan:

• Website
• Documentary about Treaty 8 territories
• Living Proof by Terry Tobias

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

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It comes like this.

With tiny fingers screeching along the sidewalk screeching

screeching waiting

more than waiting.

It comes like this.

Writing a spasmotic gait of a

too quick operation speech

like the broke spoke of

wheels of things of

machine crossed human crossed with

machine metal grinding

grinding too

fast for its own function

It comes like this

Exceprt of FLOOD WATCHING by Elizabeth Fodaski 

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Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia.

Oh, does... I mean, can we share that? Is that okay to share that little anecdote? Yeah. I'd like

to introduce you to Nathan Carlson talking on his podcast, Inquisitive Pontification.

So we were we were all we were all... Oh gosh. It's hard to even start.

Nathan's talking with his cousins, Bethany, Kim, and Kristen and they're all talking about their dad, who is Nathan's uncle. His name is Steven Carlson. And they're talking about his last day in the early summer of twenty twenty five.

He was passing away, we were all there with him. And we were Kristen and Bee and I were telling stories. We were bantering back and forth and and dad couldn't really speak at that point or hadn't spoken for at least a day.

Not everyone gets to be surrounded by loved ones at the end And not everyone gets a chance to reflect on a life lived.

I can't look at any of your faces. Go away. And so we were just telling stories and kind of, like, teasing and joking. And when you're with someone who's passing away, you know, there's, like, laughter and tears

Mhmm.

At the same time. You know? So, anyways, we were we were all just telling these cute stories, funny stories, stories about him and what his conquests were with work, a lot of those stories, and a lot of details we were completely messing up. And so we were like, dad, I'm so sorry. I know it's probably just making you feel so crazy that we're just messing up all the data and the details and...

But, you know, we're just so proud of you. And so it's, like, a very tender, like, teasing session. And finally... And you could tell... All of a sudden, you could tell he was, like, working on from the depths of the ocean, like, pulling a word up.

And it was like, oh my gosh. He's gonna say something. We stopped for a second, and he pulled a word out, and it was wow. It was like, wow. And it felt like that in that one single word, I mean, it meant...

Well...

Also in the room that day was Peg, the girl's mother and Steven's ex wife.

The week that he was with all of us and and going through the last week of his life, prior to that for many many months and years, he really started to doubt how much he had accomplished in the world and he was really just... He would express, you know, I don't I don't know if I did anything worth it. And we'd always be like, what are you what are you talking about? And I'd always say, you're mister Tif. Don't... You know, and he'd he'd kind of discredit all that.

So So as the girls all sat there on his on his deathbed telling him all the things he had done, I interpreted his wow as, thank you. I think he

finally was was admitting and and living into his whole big life that had gotten really hard at the... For for many years. But he heard you guys, and he said, wow. Yeah.

Yeah.

And that was his last word.

This is actually a happy story. Steven was a dad and a husband and an uncle. And also, Steven was a software engineer who built one of the great digital file formats, the TIFF. What is a TIFF? You've probably seen a TIFF as a format option on a drop down when you go to save an image file, but maybe you weren't sure what it was.

Don't worry, we're gonna get to that. But for now, it's the summer of twenty twenty five and Steven has just died. We were all encouraged to share memories.

And a grieving family is doing the thing that grieving families do, they're sharing stories to honor and remember who has passed. What I had shared is as a boy, when computers were becoming more of a thing, my dad was very interested and so we got

a Packard Bell. Steve was the oldest. Nathan's dad is the second oldest. And folks, this is a computer family.

My family was the first family to have a PC among my friend group. So I was playing Jazz the Jackrabbit and Doom, you know, when we got our Sound Blaster, you you know, speakers. Yeah. My parents got me Tie Fighter and I had a joystick and I I remember that. I would close my eyes after playing and I would see the stars like moving, you know Yes.

In my eyes because I was playing hours.

We would play... Kristen and I would play Lode Runner and Typing Tutor. Because once we had used up our allowed amount of time for Nintendo, we were allowed to have as much computer time as they wanted, so just typing tutor. Yes. So I would type for hours just it was a game.

Yeah. We typed early. Yeah. We learned how to type early and then and we got got fast.

I remember seeing Steve's study or lab, if you will, like, with all these Mac computers. They were... Their whole family was Mac, you know. And just like, I was like, cool.

We'd go down, yeah, into the basement and he'd be sitting on his his computer with his headphones on and it would take many many calls to get his attention because he was so focused on whatever he was doing on the computer. So we'd be like, dad, dad, dad. It would take like a while. And then this is the famous story we all still talk about. He turns around and he goes, just like like, it's disturbing me a little bit right now.

I'm gonna have to like get back into whatever I was into in my head.

There was a good chance in those moments that Steven was working on something for Aldis, which is where he was employed. A small software company that eventually merged with Adobe. Even as a teen, I knew Yeah.

That work... Someone working for Adobe, that's big time. That's really cool. And I

would brag about that with my friends. Yeah. I have an uncle that works for Adobe. What Steven actually did for Aldous and Adobe was a little murkier to the family though.

There was this family understanding of he either created the TIFF file or helped make it.

Okay.

But he's wasn't ever a breaker.

Whenever you would ask him like, what what project are you working on or what did you do today? He'll just say, oh, I was fixing bugs. Like, he's just the same answer, like, fixing

Yeah.

Some more bugs.

It turns out Steven was doing a lot more than that. Aldis's big product was called PageMaker, and PageMaker was one of the first pieces of desktop publishing software.

It was the first, like, foray into home publishing. But Aldis realized there was a big problem when it launched in 1985. Every scanner and printing company, the hardware, they all had their own proprietary file formats. And so all this was like, okay. We want our customers who are buying our software to be able to use all these hardware because they're all...

They all have different solutions, different price points, different strengths and weaknesses, whatever. But it's a nightmare to program and make it work for all of these different file formats. And so I I remember my dad was explaining it to me when I was a little bit older and understanding it. He's like, Steve was basically given the project to go talk to all of these different companies that made these scanners and printers of okay. What what file format are you you use...

You using and can I see like the innards of it? I want... I need to I need to see the programming language and pick the best one or make a

new one. We already know how this goes. Steven decides that he needs something more robust, more flexible than any of the existing proprietary forms that he sees out there in the market. What he needs has to be crisp at all sizes. So Steven needs to make it lossless.

This means perfect maintenance of quality even when you open and close the file a whole bunch of times which degrades other digital files. In order to play nice and work with all the different scanner and imaging devices, Steven also needed to make it adaptable. So, he built in a bunch of layering capabilities to the TIFF. So the image can have inside of it a whole bunch of context. It was mostly intended for color depth resolution, whatever was needed to be as simple or as complex to quote take advantage of the varying capabilities of the smallest or biggest machines.

And lastly, he needed to make it free and community owned. Otherwise, all the other businesses that they need to get on board were gonna be a really hard sell to adopt it.

I just like the idea of him being in the room with all these different big wigs at these different companies of like, so we're gonna make this TIFF file, we're gonna need them open source, it's not gonna be proprietary, we want you to support it, and here's how you support it, here's how you implement it in

your operating systems. Remember, Steven's a humble guy, and despite his family making him a t shirt literally that says, mister TIFF on it. The details of the TIFF are a little bit fuzzy for everyone.

We just kind of know this in our family. Yeah. But like, let let's put some teeth to that Mhmm. Belief, that story. Was he truly the architect or was there a team effort?

And if the... And if so, what what did that look like? What is the oral history of creating this file and how ubiquitous is this file?

And there's one more thing that Nathan wants.

The Wikipedia entry, at the time when I looked at it, his name was not mentioned. It should his name be on the Wikipedia entry.

So he's got the curiosity.

I have a teeny tiny little podcast. I could I could interview people, whatever. I'd record some of this. All he needs now is people to talk to. So that's when I decided to post.

So he goes to Reddit, the friendliest place he knows on the internet.

Hello. I'm posting this as a little bit of a research project. My uncle is quote mister tiff, the guy who created the tiff file. There's a lot of the backstory that I'm trying to gather.

This is where I enter this story. I was perusing as I am want to do the archive subreddit which despite starting on the photoshop subreddit, Nathan had been encouraged as responses rolled in to start to cross post. And responses were coming in. I remember seeing his initial post, which was so earnest and so lovely, and thinking, oh, that's really cool. And then I clicked in and I started to see how people were replying to him.

And folks, people use the TIFF. People use the TIFF.

So thanks for sharing about your uncle. He had a huge impact on the whole world. Okay. Thanks. Wow.

Wow. You know? Okay.

Let's kick it off right.

Right. So...

Nathan and I picked out some of our favorites to read and collected some from others.

It's a little hard to put into words exactly how we use TIFFs in my government archive. It's kind of like asking how you use your lungs to breathe. What else am I gonna use? My liver? If I need a good quality image format that will remain stable and lossless for years, of course, it's a TIFF.

I worked for fifteen years at a small town weekly newspaper, doing graphic design and layout using Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXPress. The TIFF file was the most reliable image format to pass back and forth between computers, edit multiple times, and still maintain its data integrity. I don't think I've ever encountered a corrupt TIFF file.

I used it last night for saving a printing Photoshops for an art show.

I work as a vulnerability assessment contractor.

Oh, man.

Someone that helps communities understand how the things they care about might be harmed by different hazards and phenomena and what they can do to protect them. Every time I start a project, I put together a series of spatial datasets that serve as a fundamental basis for every step of the analysis and cooperative learning effort.

TIFF is basically the archival quality format for long term digital preservation of still images.

For librarians, particularly research repository librarians like myself, TIFF's one of the primary file formats recommended by the US Library of Congress for preservation.

Every archive I have worked with, worked in or know people who work in use TIFF as their preferred archival format.

I'm not an archivist, but a picture framer. Yeah. We work in corporate framing and use TIFF for the images we print to hang. We print pretty large, and we need the files to still look nice. The images end up in hospitals all over the world.

Perhaps while your uncle was ill, he and his family were in a hospital with images like this.

That's cool.

TIFF's rich metadata tagging options let us tag the image with contextual description benefits users now and those that might find these images in the far future, which is a description something I think we should be appreciating TIFFs for.

So when there's a big lawsuit, information that goes through discovery is often entirely on hard drives that converted info TIFF and extracted texts.

I work in a government law library. My staff and I scan microfilm, microfiche to TIFF to scan old legislation to a server so that we can edit it in Adobe and digitize it for others to use more easily. Works way better than any other file type. They're used in many commercial microscopes from fluorescent microscopy to microbiology to scanning electron microscopes for nanotech circuit design and verification. There was one comment of like, we use it in in movie editing or something.

I'm like, what?

In the hundreds of comments that Nathan received, the variety of uses of TIFF was exceeded, in my opinion, only by the affection that was displayed by all the users. The things that people put the TIFF to use for was to me incredible. Nathan, for his part, started to gather all these comments and then started to coordinate with people to interview them on his podcast to learn more about the TIFF. One of the first interviews that Nathan did was a data scientist named Trevor, who was using the TIFF to find the projected level of fire, floods, and droughts in an area given the historical data. He shared

a screen and he showed me that he could click a button using the TIFF file, the GeoTIFF file. And he could say these colors, these dots right here, that's one specific species of tree. And then just the... This button shows me all the different trees in this area and how heavily populated the trees or whatever. This use of

a TIFF is called GeoTIFF and it's a subset of the TIFF experience that is used by folks who work in GIS.

It's a geographic information systems.

This is Donovan, another person that Nathan interviewed who also works in GeoTIFF.

I'm from So to First Nations. It's, one of the treaty eight nations, and, I've worked with GIS exclusively with First Nations doing a lot of, oral history interviews and stuff like that, building GIS systems, how to implement them.

The TIFF format allows GeoTIFs and GIS work to embed the context of georeferencing information directly into the file.

And it's kind of thought of conceptually as maybe five components where it involves working with data, whether you're collecting it, whether you're storing it, whether you're clearing it, asking questions about the data, getting subsets, whether you start to do analysis with it. And then finally, there's a fifth major component that is visualization. So if you think of GIS and those components, it's more than just map making. It's working with data that has some type of spatial phenomena.

Donovan had left a comment on one of the Reddit posts.

These were from scanned oral history maps, integral to cultural heritage and preservation, land use management, wildlife and environmental management, negotiations, research, economics, truth and reconciliation, treaty interpretation, litigation, mitigation, etcetera. It was so immeasurable. So after the break, we're gonna hear an edited excerpt of Nathan's interview with him about the way that a file format can change and ultimately reflect a worldview.

Glad to be here. So my name is, and my family's name is. And I'm also known as Donovan Cameron. And I'm calling today from the Treaty 8 territory in Northern BC, Canada. Treaty 8 covers Northern Alberta, parts of Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories.

It's a fairly large territory, about just over 840,000 or 870,000 square kilometers.

Cool. Thank you. And so how did you see my post on Reddit?

Yeah. That was Yeah. It was quite interesting. Definitely caught my attention. I frequent a lot of GIS subs.

What I noticed about your post was that it mentioned TIFF and also some type of legacy to your uncle as well, which was was also interesting. So I've had a very strong personal touch, which is something we we don't really get to see too much, you know, especially as we use these technologies. The faces behind them, the stories is something that I didn't really get to touch, and I I was really excited because it was inviting, you know, asking us to share our stories and our experiences. Nobody really asked those kind of questions. You know?

So, again, I was really happy to share that because a lot of our work happens in the background just like a lot of the work your uncle did. You know, it's in the fine print. Yeah. GIS, we make a lot of maps, but we we don't really put our names on them, so to speak. Right?

I started in in early two thousand six. At the time, there were all these new technologies coming out like Google Maps, Google Earth was there. But GIS, I guess, is the underlying technologies that really build those types of systems. Right? It's a geographic information systems.

My first real use of it was to help the treaty nations really look at how they wanted to be engaged with by... Through government. So maybe a negotiation piece and also a treaty implementation piece. It's interesting because a lot of these... I don't know if you're familiar with the number of treaties in Canada.

These are specific set of treaties, one to 11. And they were negotiated between the First Nations and the British Crown. And then eventually, as Canada became, like, a constitutional monarchy, I guess, so to speak, they had to adopt those treaties. So the honor of the crown was passed on to Canada as if they wanted to legislate and govern themselves. They also had to honor these treaties that was made with these other nations, and one of them was mine.

One of the... These First Nations. Right? So... But but, anyways, the mapping GIS piece was a new technology for us First Nations when I was really getting into it around that time.

We had been using it for a few years in the nineties, the eighties, but not really owning it in terms of get... Building our own capacity, our own people, our other expertise, or using it in house. It would have been done through research consultants. We probably saw our maps and books and different stories, but nothing that we really owned.

That someone else made. Yeah.

Yeah. And for the first time, I got to make a map from First Nations, a, and I brought it into this room. K. And I was just a young guy out of high school. Hit...

They're like, yeah. Take this map downstairs. It was just a boundary. There were all these chiefs and leaders sitting in this room, and there were maps for about these five or six nations. And each nation had drawn up boundaries where they wanted to be consulted on when it came to industrial activity, specifically oil and gas.

The reactions on the people's faces was something I'd never really seen before. I'd never seen how effective, how powerful this could be just simply making a map Yeah. And how strong the statement it could make. And the type of discussion it opened up was truly incredible. And it led to, you know, further negotiations, further consultations.

But but as treaty nations, they were able to do something unique that they couldn't do before. A lot of First Nations mapping was done up in the North in the Arctic through the Arctic claims process. Canada was in the seventies. They were trying to do this Arctic sovereignty thing, but Canada didn't really have a lot of infrastructure. What could Canada do to give strong Arctic claim?

Well, they learned that in the seventies, they needed to assert that claim through the North Indigenous populations up there, like the Inuit and and and those nations. So they did this Arctic claim process where they invited those nations to assert themselves, try to draw out their territories, new oral history mapping, new hunting, fishing, all these activities they did on the land, their stories, and sacred sites. And by mapping those sites, they could prove where their title existed. And then Canada could use that to say, hey. Look.

Our First Nations are up there as well, and our indigenous population, that's out there. That's our area. Right? So... But in treaty territory, it's a little different.

When you have established treaties, you don't need to prove where your existence is. Right? The treaty already establishes where those rights exist. So it's more about implementing protection and conservation. So using the technology in that aspect changes things.

And and that's where, specifically for TIF, was interesting because a lot of our beginnings in GIS, especially in First Nations communities, begins with a lot of oral history and trying to transfer that oral history into some type of format that is, you know, secure, interchangeable, usable, and and and and freely available as well. Right? And TIF really fit the mark. It's versatility. Right?

So you'll see a lot of oral history happening with with elders, land users sitting in front of devices they're not familiar with, such as a computer Sure. Or even a tabletop map. Maps in themselves are a technology as well. You... You'll see the beginning stages of maybe a hard copy into a digital copy.

When you're scanning these in, a lot of times you're outputting a TIFF. Mhmm. And and then the journey just begins there. And that's where it get get... Starts to get really interesting.

Right? Because the TIFF was just a regular image. Right? Like, how is it a map? Where does it go from here?

And then where's more information? And what can you do with this? Right? And and then you start to attach geospatial information to a TIFF and it becomes a GeoTIFF. Or you don't even have to do that.

You can attach a GROW file, like a TIFF, a TFW, where your geospatial information is stored in a text file. So... And then they can reference each other. Like, it was such a beautiful format to work with and to be able... Some of those some some of those same files that I have used almost twenty years ago are still here today being used by people as well.

I can't say that for a lot of other formats, either proprietary ones that become expensive or unwieldy. So, yeah, it was... I find GIS and TIF really good starting points for a lot of nations and without really realizing it, without giving it the credit it really deserves for sure. TIF was a a very strong even training ground for me technically. For GIS, we work with a lot of data, and it takes a lot to work with data to look at it beyond the image, right, so to speak.

Mhmm. So how do we dig into the binary side of it? What does it look like, and what does the data really mean? What are these scales, one to two fifty five? Like, what's zero and one, and why is it like that?

And it really tested me and allowed me to even reach out to specialists within these fields and really learn about data because of all the things that TIP could do, all the things you could embed in it, all the things that you could do with it. It became like the the butter in between all of this Swiss army knife of data formats. Right? If you didn't have a stored in TIFF, you probably weren't doing much. Like, that's where you always started.

Like, you could store stuff there with lossless compression, which was so powerful. You can compress your data without losing any information. There aren't too many open formats that let you do that.

Can you share more about... You painted a very amazing picture of you, you know, bringing that map and seeing those people. I'm reminded... I took a class in in college about basically the power of maps. But you're kind of trying to prove this oral history to people that need to see it.

Am I getting that right? Mhmm.

For sure. There's... That... That's a good part of it, the oral history. But but what what also got to happen is you got to share your perspective, your worldview, your interpretation of it.

Right? The data when you own it, you get to interpret it, which is so powerful. And and like you said, all of a sudden, when you showed these maps, maybe there was apprehension because in the other people's worldview that weren't indigenous, they saw maps as ownership, exclusivity.

Right.

You know? But but for indigenous peoples or especially for myself, you know, and So to and Cree, we... The the land is kind of... It's a sacred responsibility. There's such a a big deeper understanding there in terms of ownership and responsibility to the land.

Like, ours is more circular where we have a relationship instead of, like, this hierarchy and establishment. Like, a lot of our relationship to the land, we consider it like a gift. Right? There's old stories of creation and laws from creation that were given to us and language and our relationship to the animals and the land, the air, and the water. And it's our responsibility, a, to to manage that so we can benefit and survive.

Right? But but it's not something we can own or give away in the sense. We... I loved open source because open source was indigenous to me. I...

My first foray into GIS was very proprietary. You know, I love commercial software. I love it all. It works amazing. I...

I'll I'll use any tool. I'm not... I wouldn't argue against anything. But somewhere along the journey, when it came to technology, I learned about this thing called open source. The software was freely available so I could download it.

It was free for me to modify. I could just make changes to it. And it was free for me to distribute, whether I wanted to, like, distribute it commercially or just make... Contribute my changes back. This was amazing because that concept alone really resonates with First Nations people.

And if it doesn't, it really needs to. Because Mhmm. The way I explain it, it might make a lot more sense about how we, as a people, are open source. Our cultural knowledge, our our relationship with the land is is a collective right, you know, collective knowledge. And and how we evolve with that is is amazing.

So just to give you a traditional example, think of an arrowhead. Right? If I take a little rock, you know, a black rock of some kind, it's it's unrefined. It's just a chunk of rock. But let's say me and you are in in a tribe somewhere, and and I begin to sit there and I start to chip away at it.

Right? And I give it an edge. I'm like, well, this is all I can do. It's the best I can do. It's my technological capability.

It's my own understanding. But then you're like, hey, give me that. You know what? I give you that rock, and you you chip away at it somewhere and you make it better. And other people start to do this.

And by the time that Arrowhead gets back to me, it is such a refined piece of technology that we have all created, we all own. We can all collect it. We can modify it. We can distribute it. And we all own it.

There's no individual ownership to it. Right? That's TIFF. That's open source. So it was good to see that that our old cultural ways could see be reflected in modern modern technology through these collective uses of technology.

And I was like, that is such an indigenous thing that we've been doing since time immemorial through our language, through the laws, through our innovations, through through through our stewardship, our technology. Yeah. And we could adopt this seamlessly without conflict. That's really a good strong starting point of being able to own the data is to give that worldview and to share that and and to and to open up discussion. Because if discussions were only one-sided, they were very unbalanced.

You know, you have to have those multiple perspectives so people can learn to respect each other, right, and understand each other and then have true discussions and dialogue. So it was it was neat to see how much barriers it broke down and and also new challenges that are presented, right, as these stories got told. And then truth telling happened. Right? So it's really neat to see, yeah, the oral history capturing because it allows the nation to integrate a new tool.

Right? A tool that allows them to take control over cultural... Their cultural heritage and also their cultural continuity. You know? Because because these datasets actually store, you know, story map, putting...

Attaching language to places, pairing elders with youth and looking at different storytelling there, different land use activities, or or looking at how you can do predictive analysis. Like, just... It... It's amazing what what this really opens the doors for for different communities and nations.

And you mentioned... You said truth. Like, you you mentioned truth and reconciliation. I love that term. You know, it...

I I don't know if it was the first time ever it was used in in South Africa, you know, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. How are you using that term? What kind of problems are you solving?

Yeah. It's a very great question. It's been... You know, the the TRC process, you know, the truth and reconciliation commission process did happen in Canada. Right?

And they're very much mirrored, but what came out of South Africa and and those types of commissions as well. And the one in Canada was targeted to deal with the the historical wrongs against indigenous peoples, specifically residential schools and different cultural genocide practices, right, that were experienced by the peoples here. So through that, there was a lot of truth telling. Right? And and then came the the hard part, the healing, the reconciliation process, and and that's kinda where we're at today.

And so a lot of the mapping really, it it can help that process in terms of reintegrating people with their territories. Because when you look at the stories they were telling, the reason it happened, it was because it was to pull them from their lands, to alienate them from their languages, their stories, their connection, and take them away from from their lands, and to leave them on reserves. And we all know the story there or some don't, but it's it's it's another... Maybe another story to tell. Right?

But with reconciliation and maps, by telling them... Let their... Tell their stories on their territories, they could really reestablish their connection there, reestablish connections, and and open up other opportunities. Right? Generational trauma can start to begin healed.

So when we... I'll give you an example there. Like Yeah. A lot of times we we will map a berry site. And I think, that's that's okay.

That's just a berry site. Right? You know, it's just a... It's somewhere on the slope, maybe huckleberries. But when you start to learn the context of some of these sites, they didn't just go there to pick berries.

These were places and times used to share less certain lessons, certain stories, and to help people progress through their lives through different stages, others through young, through teenager, up to adult today. So it was very important that these were more or less anchor points that indicated strong cultural connections. They would sing songs. They'd conduct ceremonies through all these sites. So there's more to it than just a bury site or just a Right.

Stick tent or however you... They could be described. The context in these was really empowering. And that's one of the reconciliation pieces that I was really proud of to to see see nations put into place through... Especially through GIS and mapping.

Well, so with those stories, are you able to, like, encode those stories in these GIS and TIFF files?

Absolutely. So there's there's kind of been a standard that's been adopted for oral history mapping. There's a book out there by a gentleman named Terry Tobias called Living Proof. And it's kind of like the documented style or method that people have started to follow when it comes to oral history mapping. And to keep it short, it it kinda teaches you about something called a data diamond.

That's who, what, where, when. And those are the four data points, right, that you would capture in an oral history interview. So who was it? When was the activity? What did they do?

And and some why now... Or how. This context piece is where all the interesting stuff gets captured. And... But with with KISS, they have this crazy ability to tag.

And these tags and this metadata that you can record in the tips lets you put a lot of that data right in there and make it machine readable. So from the oral history, from the mouth to the document to the scan to the TIFF, and you can start to record what was said into the TIFF even if you had to. Because you can record different lines of metadata that could be coded for these interviews as you standardize them as they came out of this living proof methodology. Right? Because if you had a methodology that lets you follow this data triangle, those four coding elements, that's very simple to follow, and you can implement that in a TIFF, for example.

As you start to handle those TIFFs, the machine can read it and see that it's standardized. And you could have all these processes in place for data quality, data assurance, and and different tools. Also, the the TIFF itself can reference in its metadata different documents, or it can reference even different standards of the file format itself. So if it has geospatial data attached to it, and it's not just x and y, so Latin long, but what if it's zed data, like height, and and different terrain data? Right?

It can do that as well. And you'll have different metadata to handle that for different quality standards and different uses as well. So you can continue to say this data is intended for this use just by encoding metadata and by having standards. So so it was very... It's very, again, very flexible and powerful in that regard as well.

That's all kinds of awesome.

TIF is wild. You can store basically any type of data. It can be nominal, ordinal, interval, relational, and all these different types. Right? And it could be discrete, continuous, and different fields of study can use it.

Right? Like, I... It's not just the points, lines, and polygons and the and the scan documents. It's actually the... Maybe some type of analysis that you've done.

It could be derived products or or other things. That... That's where the work really got interesting is how we we could interpret oral history. Right? So so the TIFF was always the launch pad.

Mhmm. And if you didn't really have a good TIFF setup, then it was kinda hard to do work. And I I realized early on that if I could really integrate a lot of early work, heavy lifting, or do data consistency somehow by tagging it in a TIFF so that it could be consistently read in the future, then it was... It's it's really awesome. And like I said, even today, fifteen, twenty, twenty years later, some of those TIFFs that I've made are still in the wild.

Right? It's still being used, and I've seen some of those maps on the screen. So it's it's awesome to see.

Oh, wow. And you're like, hey. I made that.

Yeah. Yeah. Right there. And that's new. Like I said, we we don't get to put our names on things, but we just get to see where it goes.

We've talked on this show about the pillars of the internet. That's systems, it's formats, it's programs that were created by humans to solve a problem and that have become something that a bunch of the modern internet rests on top of. So as everything gets, you know, duct taped together around them, these pillars keep doing what they do. They provide stability, functionality, and I think ultimately creativity to people that goes well beyond their original intent. I mentioned this idea of pillars to Nathan.

Clearly, clearly by the resonance that this had Yeah. With the number of people, the number of different people using it for different things, this is one of those fundaments. And it has existed unchanged for thirty years at this point.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it still works Yeah. Better than anything else.

Yep. In in a lot of cases, better than anything else. Yep.

Well... And so

if I if I was gonna give your uncle accolades, I would say that he helped build one of the pillars of the Internet. And he helped make it stable enough that it could just hold its part of the Internet up.

Yeah. And there was a question to his family at one of the episodes... One of the early episodes was with his daughters and ex wife. And I was like, did... Do you think he understood how impactful just this one project he had?

He worked on many other things. But this one project that he worked on, how wide it has affected people's lives and careers and cyst computer systems, all these different things. And I think I think the answer was partially. I think at some point, he did know that it was used commonly, but I don't know that he knew to this extent. Yeah.

I don't know that he ever knew that.

As of publishing this Mhmm. Your uncle is mentioned in the Wikipedia page for the TIFF.

Okay. Great.

But he's only briefly mentioned.

Yeah. That's okay. Yeah.

Do you feel like you have achieved what you wanted, which is to get enough information and verifiable information and enough context to be able to adjust to the Wikipedia page. Like, could you create a Steven Carlson Wikipedia page?

Oh, yeah. That's a bad idea.

To me, it's glaring that it has no hyperlink. You cannot

click Steven through Carlson? Sure.

To Steven Carlson and learn a little bit about the man himself because because I feel like the contribution that you have helped me understand that he has made to so many things just by inventing this format, it deserves that some people know about it.

I would love that. Yep. That'd be great.

You heard the man. Our duty is clear. If you are someone who can help Nathan give his uncle Steven Carlson, mister TIFF, Wikipedia recognition that we think he deserves. Reach out to us. We are gonna put you in touch with Nathan.

And please, if you're inclined to just go out there and take care of it, please don't just go build the page. Let's all work with Nathan and his family to let them do the honors with mister Tif. Because I find it very special that Nathan has turned this project into an oral history series on his podcast, Inquisitive Pontification. I think there's something poetic about Nathan archiving the efforts of someone who made a part of digital archiving possible. I think Stephen will be really proud of what Nathan has been doing, to bring all of us a little bit closer to the TIFF.

Nathan, thank you so much for sharing your uncle with us. Yeah. And and helping us understand so much more. This is like the such geeky stuff to just feel like the world is an okay place.

Yeah. That's something that I really liked and like you saying, the internet is a big monster And, you know, you asking why did I pick Reddit? Well, you know, their little motto was like the heart of the Internet. Yeah. And I kind of agree with that.

Because it's like, that's where I go if I want help. Done different projects, solving some, you know, nerdy thing or whatever. But but, you know, some of the some of the conversations, not all, but some are positive, encouraging, helpful, compassionate, and that was Steve. He was compassionate, empathetic, and that, you know, that encourages me not just for my career as a counselor of just like, I'm gonna make... Give you the time and space to tell me what's going on and maybe I can help you out a little bit.

But also just in my personal life Yeah. Of like, how can I be be a better son, a better brother, a better friend, and have patience for people, encourage people, have compassion for people? And so Steve, the TIFF file, Reddit, all these different technologies and communities, that's... It helps me to try to be a better person. Yeah.

I guess.

Thank you Nathan Carlson. Thank you for being generous with your tape, your story, and your uncle. If you're listening you can go find and listen to the whole mister Tiff series of interviews that Nathan did on his podcast, Inquisitive Pontification. We are gonna put a link to it in the show notes, I highly recommend. There are so many more details about Steven, stories about his life.

Nathan interviews coworkers, and you can hear the family talking. It's a real pleasure to dive into the world of Nathan's show. And if you're someone who uses a TIFF or celebrates the TIFF, send us your thoughts on that too. We would love to be able to share with the Carlson family more of the affection for this pillar of the Internet.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, 10/29/2026. Do you love content? Of course, you do. You can't get enough content.

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