Funded by the ANR, the Mapping Environmental DEbates on Adaptation (MEDEA) Project proposes a research programme based on the innovative methodology of controversy-mapping in order to understand and ultimately improve the way we publicly discuss climate change adaptation.
MEDEA is based on an original disciplinary articulation resulting from the collaboration of three partners:
- Sciences Po (médialab and IDDRI),
- the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l'Environnement
- and the ENSADlab of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.
http://projetmedea.hypotheses.org/a-propos-medea/presentation-en
MEDEA Project CC-BY Arts Déco & Sciences Po
Our database is populated with the names of each contributor to the 5 Assessment Reports (ARs) of the IPCC (the 5th AR is in the process of being finalized). We define contributors as someone who fulfilled one of four official roles in the writing of an AR, serving either as a:
- Contributing Lead Author (CLA),
- a Lead Author (LA),
- a Review Editor (RE),
- or a Contributing Author (CA).
In addition to the role, contributors are also associated with a number of other attributes: institute of affiliation, country of affiliation, Working Group participation and chapter contribution.
The combination and cross-referencing of these attributes--applied as means of "filtering" and "sorting" the overall population--reveals interesting trends, dynamics and sub-populations within the IPCC.
It is these relationships that we plan to make available to researchers and the public for exploration through the design of an "interactive visual and narrative platform".
The choices of design and functionalities for the platform are being made with two primary user groups in mind:
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a broader public for whom we are designing a structured narration and navigation of the data that will help orient journalists and interested citizens to pertinent information in the datascape (as well as give them the means to export visualizations for publication in print or on the web); and
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a "search interface" that lets more advanced users (i.e. researchers) to directly query the database and extract underlying .csv or JSON files of the data for their own research purposes.
One of the epistemological goals of the medialab is to represent data in a way that allows the "reader" of the data to navigate between macro-aggregations and individual units of the data. This means designing our platform so that users can zoom from the collective to the individual, which in our case means navigating between ARs and individual contributors.
Thus, it is important that our central unit of accounting--the contributor-- form the core of our visualizations. In other words, representing each separate individual unit as a point within the whole is a choice we would like to emphasize as much as possible in the more aggregated configurations of our data.