The following EAGER supports an innovative project to create greater public access to data and data visualization tools in order to more fully engage scientific information about the Arctic in public discourse. The PI convincingly argues that with global environmental change, increasing sea ice and ice sheet melting, increased interest in natural resource development, tourism, arctic shipping, human migration, etc. the Arctic region is increasing in importance within critical public discourse. The researcher contends that this discourse needs easily accessible, highly accurate data in a form that the public will find useful. This project is a pilot application of the Jefferson Institutes long standing Patchwork Nation data visualization tools to a critical region of the Arctic, the Barent region of Northern Europe and Russia.
In order to construct Patchwork Barents, the researchers will assemble a Barents data portal pooling public data and building on the existing data visualization engines built for Patchwork Nation. In this way, the research team will generate an embeddable Barents data map, equipped with tools for uploading new datasets and creating visual data displays. In addition, these will be matched with weekly reporting from representative Barents communities and two pan-Arctic analytical posts on the Patchwork Nation main page <www.patchworknation.org/>. The research team will utilize the Arctic Social Indicators report and leverage existing efforts to compile Arctic data at the county-equivalent (NUTS3 ? regions used by the EU?s Eurostat agency) level, including the Community Climate Change Survey, SEARCH, AON-SI, and H3l (Humans, Hydrology, and High Latitude NCAR data set) projects. Added to this will be physical and social science data from other publically available sources.
The project is a unique effort to match emerging tools for popular data visualization and community-centered data with public county-equivalent scientific data on the Arctic. Ultimately, the aim is to empower citizens with the tools to learn and share more about their own community and to place their community into the context of intuitively similar and dissimilar places nationally and across borders. This project fulfills a part of the NSF's mission to make science data more accessible and useful to broader public audiences.
Public discourse on the Arctic is often passionate, but rarely well informed. Stereotypes and anecdotes dominate, rather than hard data. While deep local knowledge exists on the state of the Arctic, its peoples, and its frontier regions, it is not easily available to the public, nor is it presented in a visual format to aid identification of positive trends or emerging challenges. Professional social scientists lack mechanisms for empowering citizen scientists with intuitive direct access to their Arctic research, for popular self-learning and for social sharing of those lessons. Local and international stakeholders alike would better know the true condition of Arctic frontier regions, and better place these regions’ changing context over time if publicly available quantitative and qualitative comparative data were collected, compiled, and presented on-line via accessible and interactive visualizations. This Barents data portal, www.patchworknation.org, pools over 60 public data series from 13 regions in 4 countries with more data added every week. It builds on data engines to generate embeddable visualizations, and is equipped with tools for registered users to upload new datasets and create visual data displays. It is matched with regular journalistic reporting from representative Barents communities, using the scientific data and visualizations from the site. We have drawn lessons from the Arctic Social Indicators report and leverage existing efforts to compile Arctic data at the county-equivalent level, including the Community Climate Change Survey, SEARCH, AON-SI, and H3l projects, while layering in additional series of publicly available physical and social scientific data. The project is a unique effort to match emerging tools for popular data visualization and community centered data journalism with public county-equivalent scientific data on the Arctic. Ultimately, the aim is to empower citizens with the tools to learn and share more about their own community and to place their community into the context of intuitively similar and dissimilar places nationally and across borders. We center on the Barents region: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Northwest Russia at the county level, but our aim is for this pilot project to generate lessons that might then inform subsequent larger pan-Arctic efforts in data journalism and intuitive sharable visualization of public data from both the social and natural sciences.
