Showing posts with label visual literacy. Show all posts

Monday, November 3, 2014

Visualising: at the heart of geographical representation

Image above: An animated map of global wind and weather.

Related links to Spatialworlds
GeogSplace (a teaching blog for Year 12 geography)
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

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manning@chariot.net.au

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Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'

Visualisations of interest

This posting is another opportunity to show some great visualisations to enhance student understanding and stimulate discussion on spatial technology. As mentioned on previous postings, an important skills of geography are visual and spatial literacy. Geographers love turning spatial data, statistics and information into visuals to make uncluttered sense of geographical happenings and phenomena. We are a very visual discipline - not only about the creation of visualisations such as graphs and maps but most importantly the interpretation and analysis of such representations. In the Australian Curriculum: Geography such skills are an important part of the Inquiry process i.e.

Inquiry Stage 2: Collecting, recording, evaluating and representing data

Inquiry Stage 3: Interpreting, analysing and concluding

Only by such interpretation and analysis of visualisations can geographers be problem solvers and decision makers based on geographical information and evidence.

Here are some sites to support this thinking:

* Mapping Ebola

Excellent case study on mapping Ebola to solve the developing problem. The website is the world’s leading source of reliable and authoritative news, views and analysis on information about science and technology for global development. Here is another interactive site mapping the distribution of Ebola.

* GIS practitioners are volunteering time to map.
This site also has a nice pdf/digital presentation to use in class.

* Spatial comparison site
A great site to show spatial comparisons between countries.

* Map fight: This simple WebApp allows the user to compare areas that are hard to compare on a map or globe because of distance or the map projection. This site helps strengthen student's mental maps and their ability to make regional comparisons.

* When Google Earth gets it wrong
Amazing distortions shown on Google Earth.

* A powerful visualisation of world population
A dot for every person on Earth - growing in front of your eyes.

* Animated map of global wind and weather
Seen in this visualisation are the dual menaces, Cyclone Hudhud and Typhoon Vongfong (as seen from ISS). This visualisation of global weather conditions is updated every three hours from supercomputer data projections. Click on the 'earth' text in the lower left-hand corner to customize the display. For examining the wind patterns and oceans currents, this is much more useful than Google Earth.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Change over time visualisations

Image above: The Pinnacles in Western Australia.

Geographical thinking Scoop.it

Spatial literacy Scoop.it

History and geography Scoop.it

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Email contact:

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'

A visualisation of change over time

The change concept of the Australian Curriculum: Geography can be brilliantly demonstrated by visualisation videos and Infographics showing change over time. Here are just a few.

* Visualisation of US expansion in North America from 1700 to 1900, seen through changes in the spatial distribution of post offices. The data from the USPS Postmaster Finder, with lat/long coordinates extracted from placenames through correlation with the USGS Geographic Names Information System.There is also an interactive version of this map. More can be found at blog.dwtkns.com/2011/posted/

* Twitter World Tour

Many twitter users reply to their friends' tweets. When both the original tweet and the reply include location data, we can show the connections. The result is a depiction of the replies spanning the globe during one day.

* Watch the world get older

The graph shows how, over the course of a century, Japan shifts from a nation where
children predominate to a nation of senior citizens.

*The power of visual representation

A very interesting infographic using words to show change of focus with Presidential speeches.

* Global Climate Change visualisation

A video data visualisation showing the change in temperature across the world over the last 200+ years. It is based on the data released by the UK's Met Office in Dec 2009.

* Air Pollution Visualisation: Nitrogen Dioxide, London

This movie does not show change over time but is an interesting visualisation of N02 in London. Produced by University College, London in association with the Environmental Research Group at Kings College London.