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Seismologists Gather for "Discourse Over Materials"

Posted: Jan 24 2010 by Kim Kastens

Every Friday afternoon, for as long as anyone can remember, the seismologists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have gathered for a lively session of discourse over materials.

"Discourse over materials" is a phrase coined by scholars who use ethnographic techniques to study the behavior of scientists and science students as though they (we) were a recently-contacted tribe with mysterious customs and folkways. "Discourse," in this context, lies somewhere in the triangle bounded by "conversation," "discussion," and "argument." "Over materials" refers to the situation where a knot of people gathers around some physical object or representation, which serves as focal point, statement of the problem, source of evidence, and visual aid in the discussion. This form of discourse includes lots of gestures and pointing, and some bouts of "muddle talk." Meaning-making emerges in some complicated way through the interplay among the materials, the spoken words, and gestures (Roth & Welzel, 2001; Ochs et al, 1996.)

The seismologists don't call what they are doing "discourse over materials"; they call it "record reading." More

Milk Comes from the Store; Data Comes From the Internet

Posted: Dec 11 2009 by Kim Kastens

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been working with a doctoral student, Sandra Swenson, who has asked 8^th, 9^th and 12^th graders a series of open-ended questions about a widely-used geoscience data map. One of her questions is "How do you think this was made?" A substantial fraction of these kids provided answers along the lines of "it came from a computer," giving no inkling that data had been gathered from the actual Earth in order to create the data representation. I was reminded of the stereotype of the city kid who thinks that milk comes from the grocery store.

Imagine my outrage when I came across a website made by adults who should know better. More

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Where do Data-Driven Visualizations Come From?

Posted: Dec 8 2009 by Kim Kastens

Two posts back, I introduced the distinction between data-driven and concept-driven visualizations, and in the last post I explored some of the affordances and pitfalls of concept-driven visualizations. Today I'd like to dig into how data-driven visualizations get made in geosciences--and how much of that process students need to know about. Recall that "a data-driven visualization uses empirically or mathematically derived data values to formulate the visualization" (Clark & Wiebe, 2000, p. 28.)

With doctoral student Sandra Swenson, I have been researching how middle school and high school students understand one particular data-driven visualization: a global map of topography and bathymetry.

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Turning Nature into Numbers

Posted: Oct 26 2009 by Kim Kastens

On October 24, 2009, environmental activists around the world gathered in support of a geophysical data point. With their bodies, banners, and balloons, they formed the numeral 350, advocating that governments should adopt 350 ppm as a target for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. How remarkable that a number should have such rallying power. How remarkable that humans are able to conceptualize the invisible stuff we live within and breathe into our bodies as a substance made of numbers. Our ability to do so is an end product of a long series of insights and inventions by our scientific predecessors.

For hundreds of year, a major activity and accomplishment of Earth Scientists and our predecessor natural historians, has been to turn experienced reality into numbers. Earth Science is sometimes dismissed as merely a "descriptive" or "observational" science, but such an attitude understates both the vastness and the power (and the pitfalls) of the enterprise of mathematicizing that which had previously only been known through non-quantitative human senses.

I can jump into a pond or the ocean and sense its temperature with sensors in my skin and describe my sensation in words: "Warm," "Not so cold, come on in," "Cold," "Icey." With the invention of the thermometer, approximately 400 years ago, it became possible to turn these feelings into numbers. Over the same 400 year stretch of time, many attributes and processes of the Earth were turned into numbers: the power of an earthquake, the height of a mountain, the swiftness of the wind, the saltiness of the ocean, the density of minerals, etc., etc.

Why was this considered a good thing to do? More

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The Meaning of "Meaning": Causes & Consequences

Posted: Aug 5 2009 by Kim Kastens

In an earlier post, I asked "how is it that skilled spatial thinkers can construct meaningful inferences from observations of shape, size, position, orientation, configuration or trajectory of objects or phenomena of the Earth and environment?"

It seems to me that "meaningful inferences " fall into two broad categories: causes and consequences. What processes caused the observed spatial phenomena to be the way they are? And, what are the consequences or implications of the observed spatial phenomena? More