Totally dropped the ball on posting about this, but yesterday Margaret Schedel and I presented at the 2022 Interactive Sonification Workshop that is being held at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany.
In our presentation we briefly review different types of mapping and data display tools that were created to inform the public about the pandemic, as well as critical perspectives on each. We then proposed our own ArcGIS and sonification-based, socially conscious mapping tool: MARSYAS.
I’ll post the link to the conference poster here when the DOI is published alongside the proceedings! More to come on this project in the future. We are both grateful to our other collaborators and Co-Authors: George Aumoithe, Inderjeet Bilkhu, Haotong Zhu, and Litzy Escobar.
Abstract:
In this paper, we describe a hyperlocal ArcGIS- and sonification- based COVID-19 web-mapping tool that seeks to ameliorate some of socio-technical problems associated with epidemiological map- ping and the field’s frequent usage of visual and haptic data dis- play. This socio-technical problems can be seen in current, well- known and frequently cited epidemiological mapping tools, such as the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, which face functional and formal design challenges when compared to the hyper-phenomenal scope of the ongoing pandemic. As a re- view of our current project scope, we describe the stakes of the pandemic and pose questions related to the aforementioned design challenges that tools deploying data display may face. Taken as a whole, our project aims to offer a response to some of these design challenges by offering user choice and control, n-dimensional data display via sonification, and the integration so socio-political data into epidemiological layers to better represent Suffolk County’s lived experience with COVID-19
Lemmon, Eric, George Aumoithe, Margaret Schedel, Inderjeet Bilkhu, Haotong Zhu, and Litzy Escobar. “Mapping in the Emergency: Designing a Sonified Map of the Social Experience of Covid-19 in Suffolk County, New York.” In Proceedings of the 2022 Interactive Sonification Workshop. Universität Bremen: Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, 2022.
