Because the Anthropocene, and with it the climate crisis, pulls us, Rob Nixon writes, “into deep pasts and deep futures that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable terrain for historiography” (5), it makes sense that a digital humanities intervention into the discussion of climate change examines both climate data as well as popular discourses to account for the various interpretive practices that have come to inform discussions on this topic. As a 2013 study states, ninety corporations have been found to be responsible for nearly 70% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions since 1751 (Nixon 8), and the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) states that a 45% decrease of global CO2 levels is needed by 2030 in order to avoid a global systems collapse that would threaten earth livability by 2050 (IPCC 2018). Yet little is being done to curb industrial emissions and reduce global temperatures from rising as politicians continue with economic practices that jeopardize environmental sustainability. Meanwhile, however, many climate justice activists, such as Climate Justice Now!’s Greta Thunberg, are organizing, protesting, and striking to encourage global leaders to respond to the crisis with crisis-appropriate action, though these conversations are not often considered side-by-side even while they deal with the same issue.
As discussions surrounding climate change exist across and are shaped–or are fueled–by various media with varying degrees of consensus, a digital humanities intervention into this discussion must consider these conversations in tandem, and must likewise be transdisciplinary, interactive, multi- sensorial and vocal, as well as graphical in order to map these discourses against, or alongside, the data with the political and economic concerns that have thus far prevented real action from being taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. Assessing the scale of the climate crisis alongside popular and populist opinions about climate change as a social and geopolitical issue–and not solely an environmental one–my digital humanities project underscores how interpretation and informed discussions on this issue requires a multi-pronged approach that avoids the ontologization of data by engaging its often elided discursivity with other methods of knowing, such as history and human experience, thereby producing an infrastructure of interpretation. Graphically representing data as constructed and historically and culturally situated, this project seeks to demonstrate, challenge, and question how data is often presented as isolated from other means of interpretation, such as humanistic means of inquiry, and what this isolation means in and for environmental and digital humanities debates. By mapping data together with historical events and current discussions regarding climate change, my digital humanities project addresses the following questions: 1) How may data be discursively and graphically represented in the case of the climate crisis to express the various interpretive complexities that surround discussions of, and prevent immediate action from being taken in, mitigating the climate crisis? 2) Are digital tools capable of visualizing and graphically representing the gravity of the climate crisis, the impotence of global leadership in addressing this issue, and the need for new methods of interpreting lived and mediated realities?
In her essay “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Johanna Drucker argues that computational representations of data must contain a humanistic interpretation that informs and contextualizes that data. Such humanist inquiry involves “the challenge of rethinking digital tools for visualization or basic principles of the humanities” (Drucker 3) with a two-tiered approach that embraces “the concept of knowledge as interpretation” (3) on one hand, and which apprehends “the phenomena of the physical, social, cultural world … through constructed and constituted acts” (3) on the other. Thus constituting data involves acknowledging that it does not exist in isolation or as a substitute of material phenomena but as information that is “taken and constructed” (1) from and of the phenomenal world. As information that is selectively captured, data cannot be solely regarded as “descriptors of a priori conditions, as if it were the same as the conditions observed” (1), but requires a discursive and humanistic interpretation that represents the relationality of data to the social, cultural, or historical world, and that consequently informs its validity and utility alongside its ability to represent physical and measurable conditions.
As such, my intention with this project was to present data representative of climate change with the concomitant social and political conditions that gave rise to these temperatures, as well as conversations occurring about and in response to this crisis in the way that Drucker describes. I do this by including a Storyline graph (an annotated line graph tool created by Knight Labs) on my website that maps the increase in global temperatures since 1945 as measured by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), with the major global events occurring every five years.
Alongside this graph, I also provide the transcript to Thunberg’s speech, delivered to the UN Climate Change COP24 Conference in December 2018, in which Thunberg charged past and current global leaders in their complicity in the planet’s climate disturbance. Annotating portions of the text are links to sound bites hosted on SoundCloud that convey supporting, opposing, or troubling statements, further ‘capturing’ and contextualizing Thunberg’s speech within the infrastructure of interpretation that this project undertakes. Together, these visualizations and sound annotations demonstrate how data on global temperature is never isolated from social, cultural, political, or historical discourses, and that such data necessarily requires humanities contextualization to substantiate its relevance and its ability to inspire social and political change. The Storyline graph reifies the temperature data, while affixing that data with the correlative social events; it thus naturalizes the rise in global temperatures with the anthropogenic interferences in the planet’s geology and weather patterns, and reinforces the claims made by Thunberg in the speech’s transcript that is positioned alongside the graph on the website.
The function of the Storyline graph is clear: to demonstrate the rise in global temperatures from a specific date onward. Such a timeline is useful in that it allows for the inclusion of captured information in addition to the data, in this case, to draw patterns and connections between global events and the rise in international disputes, leading to the increase in global temperatures. I chose the year 1945 as the starting point as it also known both as the Golden Age of Capitalism and as the Great Acceleration, a period during which the impacts of industrialization have acutely increased with considerable alterations made to the planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, the acidification of the oceans, the erection of megacities and extensive deforestation, and the increased rate of extinction among floral and faunal life (Nixon 2). As such, beginning the Storyline graph at the year 1945 allowed for a usefully short parameter for this project to graphically represent the increase in temperatures, while also associating this data with modern and contemporary global politics and industrialization.
However, the Storyline graph could not be embedded directly within the webpage as the embed link generated by the tool was unstable, and the HTML could not be pasted into my WordPress editor. My correction for this was to include a screenshot (seen in Figure 1) on the webpage that would link to the Storyline in another tab or window. This means that to engage with the graph and click on the data points, the user must open another tab or window, which I had hoped to avoid. Another shortcoming of the Storyline tool was its inability to scroll through the text boxes affixed to each data point; limited textual information is able to be included in these boxes, yet no information was supplied on Storyline’s documentation page to indicate this issue. Having spent considerable time listing extensive historical information in the Google Spreadsheet (seen in Figure 2), I was disappointed that the text was largely inaccessible from the Storyline graph once I had generated the graph. For this reason, my project links to the Google Spreadsheet for users interested in the historical information selected for the graph.
The historical information included in the Storyline was carefully chosen to demonstrate the socioeconomic climate that affected or directly contributed to the rise in global temperatures. This required extensive parsing through online historical timelines to determine which events constituted notable historical moments that correspond to industrially-induced climate change, which I then entered into the Google Spreadsheet needed to build the Storyline graph.
While the data can be directly calculated, observed, measured, and recorded, the historical events contain a measure of arbitrariness as it is not discernible the degree to which these events actually contributed to global climate change. An extension of this project would need to engage in a historical assessment that carefully measures which events are most appropriate and relevant to be included in such an analysis. However, the events as presently included in my project serve to frame and contextualize climate data within a narrative of industrialization and resource exploitation for the benefit of nation building and global expansion. Together, the data and the historical information function as a qualitative graphical display that unifies quantitative approaches within a humanities schema.
The inclusion of Thunberg’s UN speech expands the discursive potential of the graph and engages dialogically with the present ideas, concerns, and cognitive dissonances that are governing conversations about this issue. Because climate change is a polarizing political subject, I decided to include sound clips from popular political voices of the day. Due to the systemic deregulation of environmental protections in America, I viewed political interviews with U.S. President Donald Trump to glean some of the American attitudes regarding climate change. In addition to these, I viewed interviews and press releases with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Member of Parliament Andrew Scheer. After having selected key moments in interviews, I used an online YouTube to MP3 tool to create and download sound clips to be used in the annotations; however, a great number of these chosen clips could not be converted into MP3s due to region restrictions, which yet again limited the scope of voices to be included within my project.
To add to the dialogic nature of the annotations, I also included clips from Thunberg herself, international news reports on the student climate strike of March 2019, as well as a message of hope from Ursula K. Le Guin from her 2014 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards. Each clip, converted into an MP3, I uploaded onto SoundCloud. Initially, I had chosen SoundCite, another tool created by Knight Labs, to aurally annotate the Thunberg’s transcript. This tool works by providing sound clips in-line with the text at precise locations within the corpus. It was appealing for several reasons: it offered an opportunity to easily listen to sound clips while continuing to read the text without having to open a new window or tab; it provided a multi- sensorial and vocal dimensionality to the text; and, it supported the idea of how data, knowledge, and information are constructed across media. However, after this tool failed on several counts, I resorted to linking the text I had initially meant to layer with the sound to the specific clips on my SoundCloud page. This is not ideal as it dramatically interrupts the reading process, but it maintains the intended idea, if not the end goal.
The combined failure of SoundCite and Storyline undermined the intended aim of this project, which was to create an interactive digital, transmedial, and dialogic intervention into the often data-intense discussions surrounding climate change. Yet, the project was successful in its experimentation into the ways in which humanistic inquiry can be paired with data in graphical visualizations that together may still maintain the validity of the data while encouraging a dialogic and discursive contextualization of those same measurements and observations. As “humanistic inquiry,” argues Drucker, “acknowledges the sitated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact” (Drucker 2), my project likewise assesses how data and social commentaries may be unified to demonstrate the interpretive complexities surrounding discussions of climate change. However, with the technical compromises being made, it is as yet unknown how effective such a union of digital tools with climate data and contemporary discourses on climate change would be in presenting this as a wider conversation. Drucker’s “challenge of rethinking digital tools for visualization on basic principles of the humanities” (3) continues. As my second question above asks, “Are digital tools capable of visualizing and graphically representing the gravity of the climate crisis, the impotence of global leadership in addressing this issue, and the need for new methods of interpreting lived and mediated realities?” the answer remains bound between the ‘yes/no.’ Until my own digital expertise in visually representing this conversation alongside the data is developed, or someone else takes charge of the task, the answer remains uncertain.
References
Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011, 1-23.
“Global Temperature.” NASA, 26 June 2019, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
“Greta Thunberg full speech at UN Climate Change COP24 Conference.” YouTube, uploaded by Connect4Climate, 15 December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=VFkQSGyeCWg
Nixon, Rob. “The Anthropocene: The Promises and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea.” http://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/mitman_chpone_9780226508658_text.pdf
“Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 8 October 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
Jessica Ruzek 