This is an advance meeting for the Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty: Exploring Humanistic Approaches to Graphical Representation workshop.

The topic for discussion will be visualizations as teaching tools. Kate Elswit, lecturer from the Drama Department and Mellon Fellow, will talk about how she has used William Forsythe’s Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced in teaching. The floor (and the big screen) will be open for others to share examples of visualizations used in teaching.

Synchronous Objects is a visualization project created at The Ohio State University based on choreographer William Forsythe’s work, One Flat Thing, reproduced. The project was a collaboration between Forsythe; Associate Professor from OSU’s Department of Dance, Norah Zuniga Shaw; and Maria Palazzi, Director of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. The project is widely recognized as an important example of how data visualization can be helpful in understanding human expression.

You can preview Synchronous Objects here.

WHEN: Thursday, February 10, 1-2 p.m.
WHERE: Stanford Humanities Center, Board Room

Session Description
Google Fusion Tables offers a unique and easy way to upload, store, share, visualize, and manage your geospatial data. This hands-on workshop will walk you through all the steps to use Fusion Tables in your own spatial data applications. You will learn how to upload data to Fusion Tables, share this data with others, and create an interactive geographical visualization of your data. No programming experience required!

Bio
Kathryn Brisbin-Hurley recently joined Google as a Developer Programs Engineer for Fusion Tables. In this role, she helps spread the word about Fusion Tables by presenting at conferences and developer events. She recently worked on Google’s 2010 U.S. Election Ratings gadget. She received an MS in Web Science from the University of San Francisco and a BS in Genetics from the University of California, Davis. Prior work experience includes research in mobile and peer-to-peer computing.

“(ECAI)Early California Cultural Atlas: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity
 in Digital History”

The Early California Cultural Atlas (ECCA) is a collaborative research project led by Professor Steven Hackel at UC Riverside in collaboration with Jeanette Zerneke of ECAI. ECCA is developing a digital atlas of historical data related to the colonization and settlement of early California. European settlement in North America and the establishment of missions to Indians initiated dramatic demographic, environmental, religious, and social change. In the first phase of the project we constructed a website of historical change in the region of Monterey, California. Embedded Google Earth visualizations show changes by year and allow the user to interact with the data layers and time bar. The project has chosen to intentionally address ambiguity, developed an ambiguity characterization methodology, and experimented with methods to visualize characteristic land use patterns. In the process, we encountered significant new historical questions.

ECCA integrates multiple types of data such as: California Mission records from the Early California Population Project based at the Huntington Library in Pasadena; Historical maps from the Library of Congress and David Rumsey Collection; and Hand drawn maps, images, and texts from the Online Archive of California. For further information see: ecai.org/nehecca.

Jeanette Zerneke is the Technical Director for the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). In that role Jeanette works with a diverse groups of technology experts to develop tools and methodologies that support ECAI’s mission. ECAI is a global collaboration among humanities scholars, librarians, cultural heritage managers, and information technology researchers. ECAI’s mission is to enhance scholarship by promoting greater attention to time and place. Jeanette’s work involves developing infrastructure, programs, methodologies, working groups, and training workshops to support ECAI affiliates in project development and integration. Jeanette works directly with project teams to develop web sites and ePublications highlighting the growing use of new technologies to present cultural information in innovative ways.

Previously the Director of Information Systems and Services of the International and Area Studies, UC Berkeley, Jeanette provided leadership in administrative systems, database, and WEB system development and management of computer support services. She has had more than thirty years experience as a programmer, information systems developer, and manager of computing services.

WHEN: Thursday, December 9, 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.
WHERE: Stanford Humanities Center, Baker Room

Since January 2002 the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp has held suspected terrorists captured in the Global War on Terror. The physical, mental and legal abuses of the prisoners held there have led to controversy and outrage. Despite intense public and media interest, GITMO remains a secretive place. The prisoners that remain at the camp are held in extralegal limbo, barred behind both tangible and intangible walls. Security clearance levels necessary to gain access to the prisoners mirror the tangible barbed-wire fences that ring the camp. Since government documents are mostly classified and physical sites are off limits, this project aims to contribute in a small way to the documentation of GITMO through analysis of publically available satellite imagery. The project assesses the state of the camp and compares current with historic imagery to quantify changes at the camp over time.

Adrian Myers is a historical archaeologist primarily studying the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on military conflict, internment, and surveillance. His interests include the First and Second World Wars, the Global War on Terror, Prisoners of War, criminal incarceration, archaeological ethics, and satellite remote sensing. His central PhD research project is on the Whitewater PoW Camp, a Second World War internment camp that held German soldiers in Manitoba, Canada. More at http://stanford.academia.edu/AdrianMyers/About.

WHEN: Tuesday Nov 2, 2010 at 12noon
WHERE: Anthropology Department, Building 50, Room 51A (Main Quad)

Drupal is a usually known as a content management system in which to store your information, but did you know it can also help you visualize that data on a geocoded map? By using such technologies as MapBox, OpenLayers, GeoTaxonomy, and KML it is possible to use Drupal to make powerful and interactive representations of your data without writing any code. Learn from Matt Cheney of Chapter Three how he uses Drupal to do mapping with examples from the United Nations and People’s Vegan Donuts in Berkeley.

Matt Cheney is Managing Partner and Drupal Strategist at Chapter 3,  a San Francisco based Web development company specializing in Drupal and open source software. Matt served as a political consultant for campaigns and causes, developed online information systems to help connect attorneys in the California Death Penalty defense community, and worked as a researcher at the National Center for SuperComputing Applications, developing communities for online learning. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy, History, Religious Studies, and Political Science and a M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

WHEN: Tuesday Oct 12, 2010 at 12noon
WHERE: Anthropology Department, Building 50, Room 51A (Main Quad)

Databases used to track historical political geography require a more nuanced representation of place than that found in traditional geodatabases. Not only do they need to record ambiguous geo-locations and change over time, but also the possibly complete reformulation of a historical place such that it might have a different name, jurisdiction, area or even location (or even a lack of existence in the case of temporary abolition) while maintaining some kind of continuous conceptual identity.  The creation of a new digital gazetteer for use by the Mapping the Republic of Letters project builds on lessons learned in the creation of the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty (the release notes of which are attached).  This new gazetteer allows for the representation of change over time as well as tracking not only the physical location of an entity but also its existence within any of a set of containers, allowing for the implementation of what is known as a tripartite model of space, which creates a suitable dataset not only for traditional historical GIS but also for other spatial but not necessarily physical questions to be addressed.

WHEN: Thursday, March 18 at noon  (Bring your lunch. We will provide coffee, tea, and chocolate.)
WHERE: Humanities Center, Board Room

“Measuring spatial segregation: residential patterns in the U.S.”

The talk will briefly describe a set of methods of measuring spatial segregation, including an ArcGIS tool, developed by Prof. Reardon and his colleagues, to implement these methods. The methods will be illustrated using data on residential racial and income segregation patterns in the U.S.

Sean Reardon is Faculty at the School of Education at Stanford. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of social and educational inequality. In particular, he studies the causes and consequences of residential and school segregation and the sources of racial/ethnic achievement gaps. In addition, he is interested in methods of measurement and causal inference in educational and social science research.

When: Friday 2/19/2010 12 noon
Where: Anthropology Department, Building 50, Room 51A

When: Friday, January 8 at 3:00 p.m
Where: Baker Room at the Stanford Humanities Center

In social theory and ethnography, the “return of space” has foregrounded the environmental dimensions of urban power through a new critical geography. In the past ten years, a distinct “urban turn” the study of South Asian history has sought to rethink the role of cities such as Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta as more than just a physical container for colonial power, or discursive stage for nationalist politics. Between the narrative framework of nationalist history and the spatial history of cities in South Asia operate at different scales and periods.

My presentation will address this hiatus between narrative and spatial history in the context of my research on the urban environment in colonial Bombay and contemporary Mumbai in the twentieth century. I will discuss the challenges of tracing and archiving the historical geography of Bombay/Mumbai from 1914-2001, using layers of map imagery and geodata collected in my research on historical maps and contemporary plans, open source GIS and web mapping services.

SHEKHAR KRISHNAN is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Science Technology and Society (STS) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where he is researching the history of technology and the urban environment in Bombay and Western India from 1860-1950. For the past ten years he has been involved in urban research and community organizing in Mumbai as a founding coordinator then associate director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) and currently as a founder member of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust). He is currently managing partner of Entropy Free LLC, a software consultancy which builds tools for digital humanities and the geospatial web. See his research blog at http://heptanesia.net and the MIT Urban South Asia workshop at http://bombayology.net