Geoscience Metanarratives

 

At my job I am housed in a building occupied mostly by social science and humanities scholars, many of whom are postmodern, post-structuralist, “critical” social theory oriented. The “critical” is in quotes not to cast aspersions, but because these folks use the term somewhat differently than do scientists, for whom all well-conceived legitimate work is critical in the sense of skepticism, testability, and the potential for falsification.  Anyway, my office location ensures that I am exposed to a good deal of the concepts and jargon of that community.

One of those is metanarrative. According to the Sociology Index web site:

Soil Erosion and Climate Change

 

A lot of us in the geoscience business are concerned these days with interpreting ongoing and past, and predicting future, responses of landforms, soils, and ecosystems to climate change. As one of my interests is rivers, I have noted over the years that in a lot of the literature on paleohydrology the major changes, such as major influxes of sediment, seem to occur at climate transitions, rather than after climate changes or shifts have had a chance to settle in and exert their impacts for awhile.

A related issue is the relationship between precipitation, temperature, runoff, erosion, and vegetation. As climate changes both temperature and precipitation regimes change. And as every physical geography student knows, moisture availability is not just about precipitation, but the balance between precipitation and evapotranspiration (ET). So, if both temperature and precipitation are increasing (as is the case on average on much of the planet now), whether available moisture increases or decreases depends on the relative increases of precipitation and ET.  

Soil erosion on cropland.

Geography & The Priority of Injustice

 

Justice has been a reference point for radical and critical geographers for more than 40 years. Geographers’ engagements with issues of justice, however, have always been defined by wariness toward political philosophies of justice. These are variously considered too liberal, too distributive in their orientation, or too universalizing. The wariness, in short, indicates the parameters that define the prevalent spatial imaginary of radical and critical human geography: self-consciously oppositional, concerned with the production of structural relations, sensitive to context and difference. Barnett explore two overlapping strands of contemporary political philosophy and political theory that have recently developed arguments for ‘the priority of injustice’ in the elaboration of democratic theory.

Date:
Location:
Whitehall Classroom Bldg. - Room 214
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Clive Barnett (University of Exeter)

Clive Barnett is a professor of geography and social theory at the University of Exeter. He is an urban-political geographer whose main interests are in democracy, public life, and urbanization.

You can see his profile at http://geography.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=Clive_Barnett

His work investigates the intersections between democracy, public life, and urbanization. His current research includes work conceptualising the relationships between democracy and urbanization; work on the contemporary ‘urbanization of responsibility’; and research on the geographies of contentious public action. 

He is the Editor for the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics Series.Here is a link to details of how to submit a proposal to the Series.

He blogs about some of his research and teaching interests at Pop Theory. Downloads of some of his research and teaching publications can be found at Academic.edu.

Date:
Location:
Classroom Building Room 214

UK Geog Alumni Seminar: Biopolitics and Value in a Placenta Biobank

Dr. Maria Fannin graduated with her BA degree from UK Geography and is now Senior Lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/geography/people/maria-fannin/).



In preparation for the seminar, PLEASE READ the article at this DropBox link (https://www.dropbox.com/s/njwvpqhyhfzg3q4/Fannin_Kent_2015.pdf?dl=0)



In the early 1990s, over 14,000 pregnant women in southwest England were recruited to a longitudinal birth cohort study to study the relationship between child health and the environment. This study, known to the wider public as ‘Children of the 90s,’ involved the collection of health and lifestyle data as well as biological materials from mothers and their children, including whole placentas collected at birth. This seminar will explore how the placentas collected as part of this study were transformed into scientific objects, drawing on interviews with mothers, scientists, and other curators of the tissue collection. We suggest that the value attributed to the placenta as a ‘connective tissue’ and an archive of the child’s earliest ‘environment’ tells an important story about the social and cultural imaginaries of biobanking. We also argue for greater attentiveness to the geographies of tissue collections and to the profoundly biopolitical work of these collections in the making of a study population.

Date:
Location:
843 Patterson Office Tower

UI/UX Design and Maps: Theory, Technology, and Teaching

Rob Roth

University of Wisconsin-Madison



Maps have gone viral. They are in our cars, on our phones, and in our public spaces. Further, maps and mapping technology are used to address many of our planet’s most pressing problems. Arguably, maps have never been so important, and, importantly, the forms in which we encounter them are evolving. Maps increasingly are interactive, delivered online or through mobile applications. As a result, the cartographer increasingly must fill the dual roles of graphic designer as well as interaction designer; they must understand how to visually encode geographic information based on principles of perception, cognition, and semiotics as well as how to digitally code a useful and usable interface for manipulating the resulting maps.



In this talk, I will approach the emerging profession of UI/UX designer (User Interaction / User Experience) and its implications on cartography as both discipline and practice. Specifically, I will describe our experience creating a map-based UI/UX design course in the Department of Geography at UW-Madison. The story unfolds in three acts: (1) UI/UX theory, synthesized from the fields of human-computer interaction, information visualization, and usability engineering, and appended by my own empirical research on interactive map design; (2) UI/UX technology, focused on a critical comparison of client-side web mapping technologies to core interaction concepts, and (3) teaching UI/UX, drawn from lessons learned from the map-based UI/UX design course at UW-Madison. I will conclude with an outlook of UI/UX design in cartography, posing challenges and opportunities to stimulate discussion following the talk.

Date:
Location:
Niles Gallery in Fine Arts Library

Strat-and-Transition Models II

This is a continuation of my earlier post on applying state-and-transition models (STM) to stratigraphic information, to account for the missing bits.

Barrell’s (1917) explanation of how oscillatory variations in base level control the timing of deposition. Sedimentation can only occur when base level is actively rising. These short intervals are indicated by the black bars in the top diagram. The resulting stratigraphic column, shown at the left, is full of disconformities, but appears to be the result of continuous sedimentation. Noted sedimentologist Andrew Miall has used this example in several articles to illustrate the problems of gaps in sedimentary & stratigraphic records.

Strat-and-Transition Models

 

The reconstruction of past environmental change is more important than ever. First, we look for precedents, principles, and lessons from the past as we try to understand and predict ongoing and future environmental change based on the fundamental wisdom that “if it did happen, it can happen.” Second, all kinds of new ideas on the coevolution of life, landforms, climate, and Earth itself need testing, verification—and maybe most importantly—hypothesis generation from the historical record.

The most important historical records for all but the past couple of centuries are stratigraphic. Environmental change is recorded in the sedimentary rock record, in geologically modern sedimentary deposits, and in soil layers. However, geoscientists have long realized that the stratigraphic record is incomplete—“more gap than record,” Derek Ager famously pointed out, with the preserved events equally famously termed “frozen accidents.” The current state of affairs is well summarized in and recently published volume titled Strata and Time: Probing the Gaps in Our Understanding (Smith et al., 2015).

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