As as absentee  member of the human ecology forum, I am denied the privilege of engaging directly with the folks there in debate or spending a lazy couple of hours presenting the half baked-kernel of a journal article idea to be ripped to be critiqued. It doesn’t mean that I’m not still thinking about the forum however; I hope that this small offering will be of some interest…

I’m currently working with for Digital Media Services at the Powerhouse museum on a project called About NSW, which is an attempt to do large-scale mapping and unifying of government data. As such, researching innovative ways of presenting and visualising data for the purposes of research and communicating with the public takes up a large part of my day, and a lot of what I’m finding would be of significant interest to the researchers in the human ecology vein, or anyone who find a visual mode useful for dealing with complex data. I’m happy to discuss the nature of that job with anyone who is grappling with data mapping and visualisation problems, by the way. But first, I hope you’ll indulge me if i present a virtual slide show of some handy approaches to data that I’ve ran across recently.

The thing that piqued my interest in this idea was this article at the indispensable WorldChanging blog showing the relative costs of various greenhouse gas emission abatement strategies. I first saw this style of diagram in the research by UTS’s institute for sustainable futures, but never for global-scale data sets. (as an aside, has anyone else seen this vase that visualises global climate change? Possibly not quite as pedagogically useful as it is cheeky, sadly.)

Treading the fine line between exquisite design and useful presentation of information, the gorgeous Virtual Water poster presents water footprints in a fascinating and easy understandable way. Over at foodwebs.org, they are rolling their own creative visualisations with weirdly pretty computer aided foodweb design. Those sample images are weirdly reminiscent of ANU’s own web mapping project, VOSON, who map social networks. I’m hopeful that it’s a mere surface similarity.

Less a clever visualisation than a clever placement for a normal visualisation, the Real Costs project annotates travel agents websites with the carbon footprint for the mode of transport you select, and comparative greenhouse costs of the alternatives. Hands up who’d like to negotiate pre-installing it on, say, all campus computers?

Treehugger has reblogged a pretty fascinating bit of geographic data visualisation about the rush for energy reserves in a time of peak oil: New Arctic Map Shows Just What Boundaries We’ll Be Fighting Over For Oil. From where I’m sitting, GIS has really exploded out of the geography labs and into the wider world in the last two years. Explore our planet recently posted the below image whish visualises shifting global temperatures in a pretty evocative way.

But with Google weighing in, arm-in-arm with the British government, we can expect some interesting large scale data-munging.

And finally, visualising a different kind of complexity, renowned architectural mag BLDGBLOG discusses architectural mock-ups and the media around them as potential impediment to architectural sustainability with some of the sophisticated ideas around net-positive impact buildings that i first ran into via Janis Birkeland – although thanks to the magic of the internet this discussion is kicking off without waiting for her new book to ship. The sooner the better, I say. Now can anyone recommend how I can pitch to the powerhouse museum management that their next major redevelopment should be taking those principles into account? Review copies of Birkeland books gratefully accepted.

[Image credit: Inhabitat]