Science of Earth: Visualized

Wired posted an article by David Mosher entitled, "The 16 Best Science Visualizations of 2011," exhibiting the top designs from the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. One of the competition judges, Thomas Wagner, a cryosphere scientist at NASA, commented on the development of science visualization. He said, "I think because information technology tools and visualization tools have advanced, people have found ever-increasingly clever ways to display difficult scientific concepts."

A similar Wired article, also posted by Dave Mosher, illustrated another example of complex scientific data made visual through, "Video: 10 Years of Fires on Earth Seen from Space." Over the past decade, NASA has recorded tens of millions of fires that burned all over the planet using a pair of earth monitoring satellites. NASA engineers took the ten years of data and created animated visualizations demonstrating the Earth's cycle of vegitation, weather, ocean systems etc. It is through these animated visualizations that this data becomes relevant to the general public. In a sense, accessible visualization tools have given complex scientific topics relevance again in the public sphere.

There is more and more discussion about ways to collaborate these visualizations. So much buzz is generating new projects for collective thinking and creating. The goal of many of these platforms is to archive not only the final presentation but to accurately archive the thought process humans are exhibiting whilst interacting with nonhuman machines. It is through the complexity of visualizations that researchers and theorists can begin to explore the methods of thinking and brainstorming that internalized within each research topic.

The Dynamic Media Network posted an intriguing article: "Assembling Collective Thought," by Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie. Munster and Murphie define the assemblage for collective thought (ACT) as, "an ongoing conceptual and aesthetic collaboration" and further as, "an assemblage of technologies and techniques for collaboration." They assert that ACT enables participants to 'think' collectively and conceptually; ACT considers the type of thought that is produced "in the middle of the very act of collaboration, when DJing, VJing, dancing in front of a camera." Munster and Murphie said that because so much new media composition and production concern itself with technological conduits and infrastructure, ACT fashions a kind of assemblage that explores new media to produce new concepts.

For more information about ACT and its development processes: Check this out!

Sources:
http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/publications/assembling-collective-thought-anna-munster-and-andrew-%20murphie

http://vogmae.net.au/vlog/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/science-visualization/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/wildfires-space-nasa/