Data Visualization in my Project
Image from the USDA Forest Service
Due to the nature of the topics I am studying: nurse logs and artist who draws on scientific concepts rather than hard and fast numbers and graphs, data visualization will not play a large role in my project. On the other hand, visualization of concepts and key data points certainly will. The physicality of my creative display, a cardboard sculpture with a sentence fragment which will wrap around it, also ensures interaction with my project will be provoked in some way.
Inspired by Shel Marcuvitz’s thesis, nurse logs in a coastal oregon forest, my sculpture will display the edges of four trees that decay into nurse logs in the Pacific Northwest region. Their outlines will subtly emerging from cardboard sheets. Another piece of data represented through my sculpture is the presence of four used rolls of wrapping paper. The number, four, is also the number of the decay class in which some, Marcuvitz among them, theorize rotting snags are able to best support tree seedlings successfully taking root.
Though not through the medium of a sophisticated digital image, my project is still cognizant of the creative potentials that lie inherent in the mounds of data that are ceaselessly churned out by scientists and researchers.