ISVIS2022: Visualizing Fear: How Do We Tell Our Children's Children We Sucked? / Eden Kupermintz скачать в хорошем качестве

ISVIS2022: Visualizing Fear: How Do We Tell Our Children's Children We Sucked? / Eden Kupermintz

The impact of humanity on the world up until its current form of existence, and especially over the last three centuries of its existence, is, by now, an undebatable fact. Species recovery, greenhouse emission dissipation and nuclear waste decay will all take generations. When visualizing these dangers, fears, and warnings to the future, what types of symbols are used? How is data communicated to people who might not have the underlying science to grasp them? What are the assumptions, politics, and limitations under which such work is undertaken and what do they expose about the present which is attempting to communicate? In short, how can, and have, we used data visualization to tell the future that we messed everything up? ========================================================== The impact of humanity on the world up until its current form of existence, and especially over the last three centuries of its existence, is, by now, an undebatable fact. “Climate change” doesn’t really begin to describe the scarification, pollution, and destruction that we have visited on the planet. What’s worse, these effects on our only home will last for generations; species take centuries to recover and greenhouse emissions even longer to disperse, not to mention the discarded (both literally and figuratively) nuclear waste that we have, and continue, to generate in our search for cleaner energy and bigger weapons. Therefore, the indelible impact of humanity raises questions beyond the practical, beyond the here and now; simply put, this impact raises the question: “how do we tell our children’s children’s children (and further) that we suck?” Many of our decisions will continue to haunt the planet, and our offspring, for potentially hundreds of thousands of years. If we cannot reverse these decisions, can we at least warn those who are to come after us? Sometimes, this warning will be nothing more than “well, sorry” but in other cases, such as the aforementioned nuclear one, this warning might save lives. Indeed, it might save all of humanity. Of course the question of whether we should issue these warnings is pretty simple; most people will answer in the positive, bar perhaps some especially pernicious types of nihilists. But the question of how to issue this warning is far more complex. Not only do physical objects erode with the passage of years but so does language. Meanings change, words are lost, entire lexicons fade into obscurity. What’s more, the concepts we are trying to communicate here are very subtle: fear, anxiety, concern, danger, death, illness, and more. The best approach we might have open to us is the symbol. While even the more “primal” languages of symbol, pictograph or chart lose their communicative potency, they do so much more slowly than the written word and contain a potential to communicate with humans on a more fundamental level, perhaps “rolling back” some of the chronological gaps between us and our distant offspring.Thus, the question of how to talk to the future and warn them about the dangers we have left behind us strays from the realms of the written and into the realms of visualization. When attempting to visualize these dangers, fears, and warnings to the future, what types of symbols are used? How is data like material half-life, construction methods, environmental damages and risks, potential illness, and other such metrics communicated to people who might not have the underlying science to grasp them? What are the assumptions, politics, and limitations under which such work is undertaken and what do they expose about what we see as the future now and, of course, about the present which is attempting to communicate? In short, how can, and have, we used data visualization to tell the future that we messed everything up? www.ISVIS.org