TY - JOUR
T1 - One Sinister Hurricane
T2 - Simondon and Collaborative Visualization
AU - Woodward, Keith
AU - Jones, JP
AU - Vigdor, Linda
AU - Marston, Sallie
AU - Hawkins, Harriet
AU - Deborah, Dixon
PY - 2015/4/28
Y1 - 2015/4/28
N2 - This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The project, which brought together AVL's programmers, visualization experts, and artists with NCAR's scientists, required the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives. In the language of such collaborations, the term renaissance team was coined to capture the collective expertise necessary to produce modern, high-end visualizations of large data sets. In this article, we deploy Simondon's concepts of technical objects and collective individuation to analyze the development of AVL's Katrina simulation. One extended sequence of team member collaboration suggests that technical objects also be treated as “collaborators,” for they have the capacity to transform such collectives through the unique problems they present.
AB - This article offers a theory and methodology for understanding and interpreting collaborations that involve visualization technologies. The collaboration discussed here is technically a geovisualization—an immersive, digital “fulldome” film of Hurricane Katrina developed by the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, produced in collaboration with atmospheric scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The project, which brought together AVL's programmers, visualization experts, and artists with NCAR's scientists, required the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives. In the language of such collaborations, the term renaissance team was coined to capture the collective expertise necessary to produce modern, high-end visualizations of large data sets. In this article, we deploy Simondon's concepts of technical objects and collective individuation to analyze the development of AVL's Katrina simulation. One extended sequence of team member collaboration suggests that technical objects also be treated as “collaborators,” for they have the capacity to transform such collectives through the unique problems they present.
U2 - 10.1080/00045608.2015.1018788
DO - 10.1080/00045608.2015.1018788
M3 - Article
SN - 0004-5608
VL - 105
SP - 496
EP - 511
JO - Annals of the Association of American Geographers
JF - Annals of the Association of American Geographers
IS - 3
ER -