Deborah Balk

Professor of Public Affairs in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College; a member of the CUNY Graduate Center faculty in the sociology, public health and economics programs; and interim director of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research.

Understanding many of the processes at the intersection of the social sciences (demography, vulnerability, urbanization) and climate change (exposures to seaward hazards, droughts, heatwaves) requires fine-scale spatial information and methods that are interdisciplinary and scale-dependent. Analysis of these data occur with spatial and statistical frames, and results are typically reported in summary tables and figures. Maps help to explain methods but have lagged in being a useful tool for communication of research results to academic and policy audiences alike. Some of this shortcoming is intrinsic to the nature of the data, but other limitations arise from our expectation of visualizations themselves. At this talk, sponsored by the Visualization for Understanding and Exploration project (a partnership between the Neubauer Collegium and the Research Computing Center in the Office of Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago), Deborah Balk will reflect on these challenges and consider ways to rethink what types of visualization are needed to improve our understanding of climate adaptation.

Anthony C. Robinson

Associate Professor of Geography and Director of Online Geospatial Education Programs, Penn State University

New forms of geographic data and spatial analysis are prompting us to engage with increasingly complex problem domains. While there remain plenty of use cases in which traditional approaches to spatial science can solve important problems, we are increasingly faced with situations in which our methods are not tractable without drastically reducing (or ignoring) contextual information, real-world variability, and the socio-cultural factors in which our information is produced, consumed, and acted upon. Quite a lot of recent work has focused on improving technology and empirical methods to handle massive streams of spatial data. These advances may help us establish basic facts, but on their own they are not capable of making the leap from making observations to telling the complex stories we need to tell with maps. In cartography, the creative elements of art and design (and their history) have always been present, but they receive relatively little attention compared to the technological and analytical aspects which sometimes lend themselves more readily to empirical research. As part of an effort to find intersections of opportunity, in this talk I present two examples that highlight the potential for cartographic design approaches to advance ongoing work in spatial data science. In the first example, I describe the challenges presented by missing data and the need to develop geovisualizations that help reveal the presence of absence. Next, I show how attempts to analyze maps and disinformation in viral social media is made possible by bringing together computational and cartographic approaches. I will conclude then with proposals for new research that grow from these experiments at the edges of contemporary cartographic science.

A recording of the event can be watched here.