Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Agora Journalism Center & the 2015 APA Conference

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a build-a-thon at the Agora Journalism Center. During this 3-day event, I worked with web designers, map makers, journalists, and subject area experts to create a web app that will help Oregon residents prepare for the Cascadia Earthquake. The app allows the user to enter any address in Oregon in order to receive a personalized story about what you should expect to experience if the Cascadia Earthquake occurred while you at that specific location. Your personalized story tells you what you should expect when the earthquake occurs (shaking intensity, soil liquefaction, landslides, etc.); how long your community will have to go without resources such as electricity, fuel, and running water; and how you should prepare yourself for the earthquake. In the end, our app produces over 300 individualized stories that help inform Oregon residents how to prepare for the Cascadia Earthquake based on location.  Last week, I returned to the Agora Journalism Center to talk about this app as part of my presentation at the “What is Journalism?” Conference.  Currently, OPB is working to finalize the app, and it should be available to the public very soon.

Here is a promotional video about the app: https://vimeo.com/125524401. Please forward it to anyone who might be interested.

Then, this past Monday, I got to head up to Seattle to present about the Seismic Rehabilitation Grant Program (SRGP) at the American Planning Association’s 2015 National Convention.  Not only did I get to learn about community planning and emergency management efforts taking place around the country, I also got to promote the SRGP to a ton of APA attendees.

So, stayed tuned for the new Cascadia Earthquake web app and more updates about the SRGP.

Where’s Waldo

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Sorting plankton is a bit like a game of Where’s Waldo, except that Waldo is moving and translucent, and the entire background scenery is moving along with him.

In my case, the Waldos I am looking for are appendicularians. I separate them from the commotion of the background plankton by their distinctive shape and motion. They are easily confused with the transparent rod-shaped body of chaetognaths (“arrow worms”)—but have a more pronounced, football-shaped head—and the sinusoidal wriggling of a nematode—yet less fitful. Their motion can be hard to detect amidst the darts and jolts of the ever-abundant calanoid copepods.

Some days my sample (collected from the net in the figure below) is filled with so many Waldos I cannot possibly pipette them all. Some days I can sort for hours and never find a single one. Usually it is one extreme or the other: no goldilocks plankton here.

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Conducting plankton tows in the Charleston Marina with my salty dog, Zephyr.

 

My task for this term is establishing cultures of appendicularians at our lab on the main campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene—60 miles from the ocean and 120 miles from the collection site. It is rather daunting, particularly since my appendicularians are smaller than copepods—barely visible even when backlit and examined by the squinting, trained eye. Their life cycle is about six days, depending on temperature. Scientifically speaking, they progresses from external fertilization of the egg to embryogenesis to organogenesis to metamorphosis to somatic growth to maturation and reproduction. Less scientifically, they grow from an egg to a little tadpole to a bigger tadpole to a tadpole with a disproportionally large head (yellow for females, blue for males) and then, once her and his heads fills with eggs and sperm, their gamete-brains explode and a new generation begins.

I have yet to raise appendicularians through their full life cycle. For the time being, my efforts are focused on keeping adults alive inland for a few days at a time, which necessitates to a lot of driving back and forth between Eugene and the coast. On the days when hours of scanning yields only Waldo-less samples, I wonder: is it too late to study copepods?

Can I get a witness?

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Talk to 25 people about the same event and you will get 25 different observations of the experience. This is intuitive especially if you watch any of the multiple crime dramas on TV. Many eyewitnesses can witness something different despite watching the same scene. Add the element of time and the possible observations grows. Add that the witnesses are a diverse grouping of people with different values and worldviews and the possible number of observations becomes overwhelming.

Over the last three months, I have sat down to chat with 25 people who have been involved in a large-scale research project to anticipate water scarcity in the Willamette Valley over the next 85 years. This subset of participants in Willamette Water 2100 (as the research project is called) is meant to be representative of the multiple viewpoints engaged in this project and includes university principle investigators of natural and social sciences, county commissioners, farmers, and representatives from state and federal agencies like the Oregon Water Resource Department (OWRD), the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA), the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the Forest Service (USFS), among others. The idea is that by talking to multiple witnesses of this project, I can fully characterize the participants and their resulting outcomes after participating. Did each person have a unique experience or did all participants experience the same things? My interviews and analyses will speak to this question and more.

These “chats” followed a semi-structured interview format. This means that I had a list of questions or themes that I wanted to talk about but that I allowed the conversation to go any direction so I could follow up on any interesting points that might deviate from my list of questions. The interviews lasted anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour and a half but most were around an hour long. I asked my interviewees how they had gotten involved in Willamette Water 2100 and why. I asked what they had expected coming in to the project and if their expectations had been met. The interviewees also named challenges and successes that the project had faced and identified ways that the project is useful while suggesting methods to present the results to a wider audience.

After talking to each person, I took the audio-recording and transcribed our conversation to a text file. These text files are my data. Now, how do I analyze files of words? I have been trained to handle data of numbers and categories entered into Excel to generate graphs and summary statistics. That is not the way to handle qualitative data like my conversation documents.

I am just beginning to analyze my words in a process called “coding” which organizes repeating ideas into themes and concepts. For instance, one concept that practically every interviewee mentioned was that participating in this research benefitted them through learning. What was learned may differ among individuals or between groups of individuals, but they are all unified under that concept of learning. Reading and re-reading, and grouping and re-grouping are the next steps for me with this data so that I can accurately characterize the long-term participant experience in this research project.

But! That is not the only data with which I will be working. I am also about to launch an online survey to all participants of the process. Where my interviews were targeted based on expertise and experience with the project, my survey will be sent to every person on this project’s list serve. I will ask similar but more specific questions seeking to identify the degree of participation of each individual, their motivations for participating, and their perceptions of the project’s outcomes. The survey will provide me with some numbers to strengthen the conclusions I am making with the words of the interviews. Using multiple measures is a good way to confirm my conclusions.

I am feeling pretty accomplished having completed the interview data collection and transcription by the end of winter term. However, as we are beginning the spring term, I realize that there is still so much more work to do. And, while I would rather continue reflecting on my research process with you, I had better return to organizing the reflections of my subjects on the research process they went through. Unlike the police, however, I am not trying to recreate a crime to identify what happened, so I am going to change metaphors now at the end of this post (and let you see a picture of me when I was four years old). Consider the following picture of a party.

20150413_203158(Photo credit: Pam Ferguson)

Everyone is at the same party, but you might imagine, that different attendees will have different comments to make about the success of the party or how they felt leaving it. I want to know what the common and uncommon perceptions of the party were so that I can throw a better party in the future. While it may be weird to interview and survey your guests after a party, coordinators of scientific engagement processes definitely can do this. And then we hope to develop and invite people to better scientific engagement processes in the future.