3rd week in - Status report

I'm now on my third week of 36[1], and whilst I am covering some ground, I'm worried that I don't have clear topic or plan yet.

Here's a summary of what I have covered over the past two weeks:

• Briefly surveyed visual querying languages and data exploration techniques.
• Looked into teaching tools for children which focus on the visual and the earth sciences. See for instance, The GEODE initiative, Visualising Earth Project, The Earth Exploration Toolbook.  Plus, a foray into the world of educational games, summarised best by the Wikipedia page on Global warming games.
• Recently, research out of the GIS and land planning communities (often from the journal of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems) that touches both on some fascinating climate change visualisations but also on the impact of visualisations for citizens and policy makers.  See in particular, this paper (Sheppard, 2005).
• Looking into how climate scientists work, and the software they produce.  (via informal interviews[2], various papers, and project websites.

Climate modelling-wise, I have a basic grasp of the issues and the players.  As for communicating the science of climate change, or building an educational tool, I'm feeling lost.  Here's why:

1. I haven't narrowed down my audience.  As Steve mentioned to me the other day, I'll need to narrow down the scope by picking an audience: is it grade 10 students, or climate scientists, or policy makers, etc...  You'd think I'd have decided this already by the way I've been writing and talking about educational tools, but I haven't.  I'm partly still holding out for:
2.  a way to ground the project.  I can (relatively) easily come up with a variety of problems which my research could seek to answer, but that work is not satisfying to me unless i can see that the problems have real-world relevance[3].  At the moment, the problem of 'an educational climate-change tool for highschool students' is nebulous: I'm not sure where the necessary work to be done is, how best to proceed in finding it, or how to judge the relevance of the plans that I do come up with.  Maybe since I've only been at this for a week I still haven't struck upon the right line of existing research, but maybe also this is exacerbated by the fact that:
3. this is unfamiliar territory for me.  .  The way I've been posing the problem so far, none of my CS education is of help to me here.  I can talk to you usefully about code metrics, software design, compilers, and usability but I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to communicating science.  Maybe I need to work harder to reframe the problem with more of an SE angle (though that depends a bit on #2), and maybe also recognise that:  
4. this is unfamiliar territory for my colleagues.  As far as I know right now, my advisors, students in the SE group, and other folks in the CS department have very little background in this area, so I'm flying through the literature solo.  Steve mentioned he thinks the SE of educational tools is a rather rare research area, but he did have a few leads on other researchers out there.

What now then? Here's what I'm thinking:

• Continue to explore the research on communicating science, and the impact of climate-change visualisations.
• Get in touch with other researchers looking into educational tools.
  
• Talk with folks who are "on the ground" and trying to educate on climate change impacts (e.g. realclimate.org, Bill McKibben).  
  
• Continue talking with my SE colleagues to discover more of an SE angle.
• Consider abandoning the educational idea, and switching to a topic that's more familiar to me and my colleagues.  Steve mentioned the defect density in climate models is lower than various comparably-sized projects.  Finding out why might expose something interesting about the climate scientists SE process.

---

[1] Or 32, if I finish by the end of August.  

[2] Recently removed from this blog.

[3] I've talked about this before.  Note, that I'm very open to the idea that my research leads nowhere, I'm just very uneasy with my research starting from nowhere!