Toward a Digital Resilience
- Author: University of California Press
- Full Title: Toward a Digital Resilience
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #fellowship #geospatial
- URL: https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/journal.elementa.000082/112902/Toward-a-digital-resilienceDigital-resilience
Highlights
- The demand for maps has never been greater; whether for finding directions, for looking at city services, deliveries, movements of people and vehicles, weather events, social events, and social media. We are clearly in a new digital world order. And in this new world order these same digital mapping technologies used for science (for understanding how the Earth works) are also helping communities in a more practical way to gain resilience against one or more of the six intertwined problems discussed in Barnosky et al. (2015). These range from monitoring fire, drought or flooding to mapping the relevant insurance zones for such. (View Highlight)
- In making our data open to access, we need to be more open about we are doing with the data. In other words, we need to share more of the workflows done with the data (i.e., the actual steps taken in an analysis or preparation of a map from initiation to completion), and further amplify them in use cases (scenarios or vignettes showing behind the scenes how and why data were used for a particular analysis or map, with an emphasis on a practical, real-world outcome to achieve the user’s goal). This is especially true if wishing to maintain scientific rigor where repeatability of an experiment or approach or algorithm is a hallmark. Can someone reconstruct and verify the rigor of an approach, and hence the correctness of a conclusion? Can someone replicate the workflow? (View Highlight)
- In ArcGIS as an example, the workflow can be shared as a “toolbox” within the desktop version of the software or as a “geoprocessing web service” (aka “Ready-to-Use Services”), an online toolbox that is shared in a data portal for users to select along with the appropriate data and metadata. (View Highlight)
- Barnosky et al. (2015) point out an important two-pronged challenge in academia. The first is in training environmental and physical scientists to communicate issues in ways that truly resonate (especially in concert with, and learning from colleagues in the social sciences and humanities). As Caldas et al. (2015) point out, this is largely a matter of culture, “both a property of the individual, and a property of the social context in which individuals exist… but still an important variable mediating the relationship between humans and the natural environment.” The second challenge is in taking the knowledge developed within academia writ large and transmitting it into mainstream society in ways that elicit significant action. One way to accomplish both is through the medium of storytelling. (View Highlight)