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Collapsing mountains and embodied cognition

Posted: Sep 8 2010 by Kim Kastens

Earlier this year, I wrote in this very space:

I believed what I wrote, one hundred percent--in an intellectual sense, that is.

Then I went to Alaska, to the Kenai Penninsula and the Aleutians--and now I really believe it. More

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J. Harlen Bretz, Spatial Thinker

Posted: Aug 25 2010 by Kim Kastens When my daughter Holly was little, she wanted me to tell her stories. I found it difficult to make up stories from scratch. Eventually, inspired by a book called The Tale of Chip the Teacup, we found a work-around. I would tell familiar stories from the point of view of an unexpected character: Beauty and the Beast from the point of view of the Beast; Snow White from the point of view of Grumpy, and so on. I found this sufficiently doable, and Holly found the stories sufficiently original.

At the recent Spatial Cognition 2010 conference, I found myself in an similar position, telling the familiar story of the geological history of the Pacific Northwest from the point of view of spatial cognition. More

But so Much is Going on at the Same Time

Posted: Dec 23 2009 by Kim Kastens

Students come to us from other science classes with experience in thinking about one thing at a time. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the scientific method, they have often been taught, is to isolate out and control one parameter at a time, to set up experiments in which there is one manipulated variable or perhaps two.

Then they show up in Earth Science class, and we want them to think about interactions among many processes and phenomena, all varying over time and space. To get your mind around the water cycle, for example, requires understanding a dozen or so different kinds of reservoirs, and the fluxes among them, and the processes that speed up or slow down each flux. And all of those things are going on at the same time.

In general, humans find it difficult to consider many different processes or phenomena at the same time. We do, however, have one sensory modality that is exceptionally good at processing multiple simultaneous signals. More

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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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Universal versus Conditional Truths

Posted: Dec 4 2009 by Kim Kastens

In my previous post, I wrote about the distinction between data-driven visualizations and concept-driven visualizations. Today I'd like to dig deeper into how concept-driven visualizations play out in geosciences, recalling that concept-driven visualizations are "typically generated from a concept or theory and not directly tied to any empirical data" (Clark & Wiebe, 2000). To put the punchline first, I conclude that concept-driven visualizations can synthesize a stunning amount of geoscience information efficiently and compactly, but that they run the danger of overspecifying the features of a heterogeneous planet.

Below is an example of a powerful concept-driven visualization from an introductory textbook. This single figure pulls together the findings of geoscientist-centuries of earth exploration. To learn enough about seafloor bathymetry to be able to sketch in the mid-ocean rift valley and the abyssal hill fabric required ship-years worth of echo-sounder data and the cartographic genius of Marie Tharp. To learn enough about mid-ocean ridge magmatism to confidently write "spreading center basaltic vulcanism" required hundreds of rock dredges and thousands of analyses. In terms of insights per square centimeter, this figure is a masterpiece.

At the same time, this figure is also a potential source of deep confusion, More

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