Mapping Tragedy

Google Earth has teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create an interactive learning tool about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.  Google Earth is a downloadable program that combines maps, satellite pictures, and three-dimensional imagery to allow users to surf the globe and zoom in on places of interest, such as neighborhoods, natural wonders, or national monuments.  The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has created a new set of layers for Google Earth that provides information about the destruction in Darfur.  The layers include images of damaged and destroyed villages, statistics about displaced persons, and interview transcripts from victims.  It’s a visually compelling tool that highlights the creative ways in which we can use technology to learn about new things, but also to address social problems.

Visualizing Scientific Output

I recently learned of the data visualization work of W. Bradford Paley through Eszter Hargittai’s blog.  Some of Paley’s ideas overlap with those of Edward Tufte, but his networking graphics are quite unique and compelling.  He is probably most popularly known for his map of the relationships among scientific paradigms, which was recently published in Nature and Seed magazines.  As I was exploring Paley’s Web site, I came across a similar type of map called The Strength of Nations, which uses a network analysis to show the relative strength of various academic disciplines across ten countries. 

I love this graphic because it’s a great example of the intersection of my two main research areas, cross-national criminology and informatics.  One of the challenges of cross-national crime research is the differential amount of academic resources in this field across countries.  This concept has been difficult for me to adequately convey to undergraduate students who do not have a sense of academic disciplines in different countries.  Paley uses sophisticated information presentation techniques to nicely illustrate how the social sciences in general are stronger in some countries, such as the U.S., than in others.  I plan to use this picture in my Cross-National Crime class to illustrate why the field of criminology is more developed in the U.S. than in most other countries and why it is difficult to get cross-national crime information from other countries.

The Lucifer Effect

Today’s online New York Times has an interesting video interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the recently retired social psychologist from Stanford University.  Zimbardo is probably best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which explored how people adapt to social roles, why people conform, and the conditions under which people can treat others badly.  It is also used today as a good example of why we need to take ethics seriously in social science research and why Institutional Review Boards are important.  Zimbardo’s intereview was promoting his new book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, in which he takes the lessons learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment and applies them to the recent prisoner abuse case of Abu Graib.  I often show this film in my classes, to illustrate why it’s important for researchers to collect data responsibly, and I have had several class discussion relating this film to Abu Graib.  I’m now very curious to read Zimbardo’s take on this issue and I’m looking forward to getting this book.