Week 5

Oh dear. Oh dear. So much work to do. Today is Google API night.

Just finished a very rough version of the Green Papaya Site. It's built using Google Sites. (I did say it was very rough.) Basically, it's the quickest way I know how to introduce Donna and Peewee to managing their own content.

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Just had a talk with Lori Almirez. She...

• ... has been working for the Jesuit Communication Foundation at the Ateneo University, an organization that provides multimedia training to Catholic organizations. They recently held a four-Saturday workshop on "e-advocacy" for non-profits, not all of whom (I gather) were faith-based. (An old friend of mine, filmmaker Ditsi Carolino, was one of the participants.) Lori asked some of the individuals to fill out a "Data Visualization for Advocacy" training needs assessment form. (I can't she believe she just took the initiative and did this. It's fantastic.)
  
• .... has been in touch with a Waray anti-mining group, one of whom made a film about it.
• ... has connections with a group somehow interested or working with issues of water privatization.
  
• ... has connections with the Ibon Foundation, a research organization that produces all sorts of quantitative and qualitative data related to the Philippines, and produces reports and other publications.

We talked about many things. She's interested in popularizing through education certain kinds of issues which rarely make it in mainstream curricula. I proposed that one way to go about it is to present them partly as science education issues. For instance, issues around mining and struggles of communities in mining towns could be integrated in a syllabus about geography, geology, etc. Data visualization could play a part in helping explain science-related ideas, as well as link it to relevant data about human activity.

Something... a niggling thought. Thinking about the classifications of data visualizations I made. Some visualizations unpack complexity, some reveal underlying patternsin large amounts of data. When I talk about "Data Visualization for Advocacy" a lot of the kind of work that I want to do is more about unpacking complexity. One thing I'm really interested in is instead of advocating for a certain issue per se and presenting data that only favors one side of the debate... (Update 31 Oct: Yes, I want to boost this idea. Visualizations can complicate notions, as it were. )

I remember a quote I read many years ago on a poster at the LGBTQ center in Vancouver, something about how the greatest evil is sitting on the fence in the time of greatest need. I don't know how much I would subscribe in that.

At any rate,

design+science+education = lots of work being done
art+design+science+advocacy = not so much?

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My goal for the end of today is to finish all the google map api tutorials. Then I take a nap. Then I mark papers.

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