RE: Information content- Visualization

[David James <james.david@epa.gov>]

Jennifer Cranford had responded to Prof. John Felleman's query about what policies had put in place to ensure that visual information be a part of communication to the public. Felleman wrote: "However, other than embracing GIS and the Internet, the EPA has little or no policy regarding the centrality of visualization in effective public participation. What policy does exist appears to be of the black and white Xerox hard copy vintage." 

I think in an area as fast-moving as visual technology, by the time the EPA had formulated a "policy," the public will have been exposed to so much more sophisticated means of exchanging spatial information that the policy will be more or less dated the day it  is promulgated.

In the absence of official policy, technology visualization advocates throughout the agency are working to use new techniques as they become available. From my view as a one-year on-site contractor, I've seen some very smart folks within the EPA make the extra effort to learn new technologies that help them to do their job better, cheaper and faster, in a very pragmatic way -- information practitioners don't get caught up in finding the very newest stuff for its own sake, but stop at "good enough" techniques.

Here in EPA R4 Waste Federal Facilities Branch, we've been using Microsoft Net Meeting and Adobe Acrobat 5, in a conference room with a standard speakerphone, to hold document and map review meetings over the internet -- computers at our sites and in our state regulators office display the exact image on our projected screen -- so document review can occur instantly, and GIS maps can be pulled up for everyone at once.

To see what's ALREADY doable on the web, I recommend anyone who is following this thread to check out the following three site:

1.   Boundaries of the United States and the Several States:

    http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/48states.html

This low-bandwidth animated map of our changing state boundaries displays a neat way to show time changes in two dimensions.

2.   Manhattan Time Formations

http://www.skyscraper.org/timeformations/intro.html

Substantially more ambitious, this high-bandwidth cutting edge website is a three-dimensional interactive multi-layered GIS history of Manhattan's buildings. You'll need the latest browser and Flash to view. 

Trust me, this one's amazing -- ArcInfo clarity on the web. Now imagine having such a site for each CERCLA and RCRA facility the EPA tracks, and let's figure out how to get some pilot projects funded. How about preparing a briefing on the possibilities to present to some of the new Regional Administrators after they get settled in?

3.    Prof. Sam Savage's Blitzograms -- animated histograms

http://ite.informs.org/vol1no2/Savage/Savage.html

a great way to get across statistical truths through moving graphs. All of us who aren't already statisticians can benefit from looking at Savage's web and Excel work. 

David James
Atlanta
james.david@epa.gov