A quick update on the SIF projects I am working on currently:

  • Atlanta Mass Transit: The team has presented a draft story map and is working to address the suggested edits. We are presenting our final draft March 24th, and expect to make the story map public by April 1st.
  • 1934 Tax Maps: All of the team members have been trained on how to use ArcGIS to digitize and clip their assigned collection of tax maps. The project will be completed, meaning that all team members will have their assigned maps digitized and clipped, by the end of the semester. What is especially neat about this workflow is that seven of the ten team members had never used ArcGIS before working in CURVE/SIF. Three of the students who I worked with last semester on the AMT project learned a bit about Arc last semester, so they have been providing support to the five novices.
  • ArcGIS online: Through this project, I provide consultation services for GSU students, faculty, and staff at CURVE. So far this semester I’ve assisted 2 Masters students from Geoscience, 1 PhD student from History, and 1 professor from Education.
  • SIF showcase: I am now part of a team that is organizing an hour long event consisting of a series of short presentations highlighting a few of the SIF program projects. I’ll be meeting with each of the groups to complete a practice run through of each group’s presentation.

Now that I’ve got you all up to speed on what my SIF work has consisted of, I’d like to follow up my last post about the #MakeItHappy and discuss…bam bam baaaaa——#TheDress! 

“Amber! What about #TheDress makes it worth discussing in your blog post?! Everything about the freaking thing has been talked to death!”

Well let me take a moment to relate this to my past conversations, specifically around mapping.

In recent weeks, as I’ve been working on a number of different maps, I have been presenting map drafts to people: colleagues, friends, strangers, and even my mom. One of the questions I ask people when they’re viewing a map is, “are you colorblind?” because color perception is a big factor in map design. Because of the recent phenomenon with #TheDress-this question now, almost exclusively, sparks a conversation about the infamous photo of #TheDress.

“I’m not colorblind, but I’m not so sure I see all my colors right after seeing that picture!”

“No-but did you see that dress thing!? It messed with my brain! What did you see?”

“Well not usually, but when it comes to blue and black, I’m not so sure.”

If you’ve done your reading, you know that the discrepancies in the color perceptions of this picture have to do with white balance and overexposure of the image. But this post is not to dive into the details of why the image was perceived differently, I want to talk about why people talked about the dress.

Why?

Because conversations around #TheDress share many parallels to the challenges of mapping and the internet that I have addressed in past posts.  More specifically, the issues of visual interpretation, authorship/citing sources, and comments that take place discussing the post.

As I’ve gone into detail about interpretation and sources in past posts, I’d like to piggyback off of my #MakeItHappy post and discuss the ways in which dialogue is tending to take place through social media. In this post, I shared an experience where a comment I posted which critiqued (what I deemed) a poorly constructed map was responded to from another commenter as being harsh and I was told to #MakeItHappy. In the discussions, I saw taking place around this dress-there was plenty of opportunities for people to attempt make the dialogue take a more positive tone: yet I did not see this happen. Not even once.

What I did see was strongly worded insults on people’s vision and intelligence in heated debates about the colour. Why is it that the #MakeItHappy campaign did not make its way into the #TheDress comment stream? Better yet, why are people discussing this topic that makes them feel so angry in the first place?

This video by CGP Grey discusses this exact topic: how content that sparks angry emotions tend to be discussed in internet comments more often than topics that make one happy. I encourage you to take the 7 minutes to watch it. The basic concept of the video is that anger is one of the most powerful emotions and, because of this power, becomes one of the most significant drivers of online discussion.

So how is it that we can encourage positive, yet critical, conversations on the internet? I don’t have an answer. The #MakeItHappy doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. But the main question I have to ask is why are people allowed to attack others on their level of intelligence based on how their brain perceives a poorly exposed picture without being shut down, but I am unable to offer a critical reflection of a tool which is being used to produce knowledge about the world?  How is it that I can convince people that they can be angry, but maybe they should adjust the concepts or people that they are angry toward?

As the Atlanta Mass Transit story map is slated to be made available to the public in less than a month, I have become curious about how it will be received. Will it make people angry? It’s possible. It’s possible that people will see the potential that Atlanta’s rail system once had, and be upset that those plans from 1960 where not what became reality. This anger may result in a local viral circulation and the project will be celebrated. But what if it doesn’t make people mad? What if it is an interesting source of information, but nothing that elicits an elevated emotional response from users? Will it then simply live on the internet with the rest of the billions of resources that are underused? And if so, is it fair that information goes unnoticed simply because it doesn’t make one overly upset or overjoyed?

These are just some ideas that I’ve been mulling over as mapping continues to transition to web-based platforms. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on the topics I’ve discussed here. While the water I’m wading in seems pretty murky to me at the moment, with more thought and examination I am sure that, in time, the sediment will settle and the answer to these questions will become clear.

*Ignite, Inspire, Involve*-Amber