Mashup: Contemporary Oil Spill Coverage/Visualization

Post date: Feb 25, 2011 7:01:40 PM

Group Members: Christopher Reid, Vishnu Anantha, John Payne, Danielle Parnes

The User is presented with a map with multicolored icons on the locations of five of the largest oil disasters in history.

When they click on an icon, they get a New York Times article from that era about that event.

Furthermore, there is a demonstration in a water tank with ink as a visualization of the oil spill in question. The different colored balls would correspond with the color of the icons so that the volume of the lost oil can be visually compared.

We had considered this project as something that could be easily installed in a museum: the visual (and potentially kinesthetic?) experience would be directed at children. A sense of the time and the media coverage given by the New York Times Historical Article Archive would be aimed at an older audience. The main idea was "give a sense of being there".

Some of the ideas given during the critique are worth considering: ex. from the "interactive children's museum" perspective, the act of cleaning the water or whatever is in it ("Animals"?) is especially provocative.