Sean Rowe Informational Interview
This week I had the privilege to talk to Sean Rowe about this project, specifically about data visualization. Sean is the head of the Hatfield Marine Visitor Center, in Newport. Some big takeaways that I took away is that data should be easily read, which should be done by relating the data to something that a person already knows. We also talked about curriculum, what it would look like to implement it in different programs, as well as people who may have further knowledge on aspects of this project.
The first part that we talked about was data visualization. Sean has a background in this field as he is one of the first people to do active research on how people interact with learning in everyday activities. He does this by monitoring hands-on exhibits that he procures for the visitor center. He says that generally people are poor at understanding data that is presented to them. There are certain things that people presenting data can do to help make the data more readable. An example is that when he creates a map of the ocean with data on it, he will add major cities in the area onto the map, so that people will have a starting point to engage. A map of the Oregon coast would include Eugene, because many people will be able to orient themselves spatially when they see this. Another example is that he will use a blue to red color scale to represent temperature, and a green scale to represent plant growth. People relate those colors to the objects that the data is representing, which makes the data much more readable.
One final exhibit that I want to specifically point out is the topographic sandbox map. This exhibit is a sandbox with a camera above it. The camera looks at the sandbox, uses some free government software to determine the contour of the sand mounds, and then projects the topographic map onto the sand. As a person moves the sand, the topographic map changes. The map is also displayed from the bird’s eye view on a tv screen. This screen shows a 2-D map. This is a cool way of data visualization because it allows for interaction, and the 3-D map will help to connect people to what the 2-D map actually represents.
Sean’s work is primarily with data visualization, which is less challenging than data sonification. People do not know the rules for what data means when you are listening to it. He did give a good example of data sonification. This example is at the Science Museum of Minnesota, called the Seismofon. This exhibit has tubes that will play a noise whenever an earthquake occurs on earth. The noise will be a larger or smaller intensity depending on the magnitude of the earthquake.
We talked about how my project first should start out small, with one piece of data connecting to an output. We also agreed that visuals could also be a good addition to this project.