A collaborator, a story, something delicious

I met with Greg and Alecia this morning. Alecia, as you can see from her blog, is working to make web mapping accessible. That means providing all the information a sighted person can infer from a map to users regardless of their ability to see or use a mouse. Since there is an enormous amount of implicit information in a map (e.g. quick, what's the closest major centre to Winnipeg?), this problem is tough. I'm sure this isn't a complete description of the problem, but that's the idea.

There's overlap with my interests in that we're both looking at representing spatio-temporal data in interesting ways. Well, it'll sure be nice to have another person to bounce ideas off of.

But what, exactly, am I working on these days? This morning I bumbled my way through an explanation to Alecia. Greg pulled it together into a coherent and sexy story. I'm going to give you my own retelling of it:

Climate change -- the science is out there. There are plenty of datasets and models to show us how the climate behaves and how it's likely to behave in various future scenarios. And if you aren't truly scared shitless, then you're not reading the same books and websites I am. Or maybe it's because you don't have a compelling way to make sense of the science, to understand it and its implications on your life and future.

My hope is that I can do something about this. I'd like to make, or find and refine, something to that ("even") a high school student could, and would want to, interact with to help make sense of our predicament.

That's where the interest in spatio-temporal visualisation comes in. Maybe what's needed is a nifty environment for exploring existing data, or a simplified climate model, or .... well, I dunno yet.

For the next few days I'm going to continue my exploration of visualisations, but I'm going to widen my search beyond academic papers necessarily. I'll probably be turning up more than I can blog about, so I've created a del.icio.us account which you can follow, or check out some of the existing relevant del.icio.us bookmarks.