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VFF: Mapping Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia and Visualizing Physically Giant Spatial Data

Visualization Friday Forum: Fridays at noon, LSRC D106
Friday, March 01, 2019
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Andrew Pericak · Science & Society
Visualization Friday Forum

In mid-2018, I and my colleagues at Duke, SkyTruth, and Appalachian Voices published a novel dataset: the yearly spatial extent of surface coal mining in the Central Appalachian region of the United States from 1985 through 2015. In this presentation, I will briefly review our methods and results of this research. But I will spend more time to explore a unique problem we ran into when writing the paper: how to visualize a physically giant but non-congruous spatial dataset? Through our research, we found over 2900 km^2 of land had been mined during this time period; while simply communicating that number is easy, visualizing it in a meaningful, understandable way proved challenging. I will discuss how we approached this problem and perhaps even solicit your ideas for how you would have visually communicated these data.

Contact: Angela Zoss