Getting into the Project
Hi, my name is Athena Zeng, and I use she/her pronouns. I am a senior studying business and design strategies at UT.
0. Situate
I am an Asian-American woman of Chinese descent who grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, MO. Normally, I would be in Austin, TX, but due to the pandemic, I have returned back to my home in St. Louis County for the time being. The ecoregion I will be working in is the Eastern Ozark Border, which is characterized by “moderately dissected hills,” “sheer bluffs,” rocky and thin soils, and “areas of claypan or loess” according to user aaroncarlson on iNaturalist. There is an array of land cover, including forests, woodlands, and cleared areas for cropland and pasture. With my hometown being the home of the St. Louis Cardinals, I have always appreciated the Northern Cardinal. Not as much because of my love for baseball, but more so because of its striking appearance. The Eastern Bluebird and Blue Jay are other cool birds that can be found in St. Louis. There is generally a lot less state pride here than in Texas.
Species I have seen while home:
White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus)
Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)
Woodpecker
I. Purpose
I tried to gather some of my own data through exportable data from Google, Strava (a running application), and Spotify. Through this process, I learned how strenuous the act of gathering and exporting data is, as all of these services reported it could take up to 30 days to finish exporting this data.
Therefore, I decided to download the dataset3.csv provided by our project instructor, Cat Ploehn.
Cat gathered this data through iNaturalist, an application that community members around the world can use to log sightings/sounds/visuals of species. IT is used for research and citizen science efforts. Cat situates herself as a designer as follows:
I begin this project by situating my perspective as a designer. I am a white (of Mexican and European + descent) woman who grew up in the suburbs. I am currently living in Texas, specifically the blackland prairie ecoregion. Here, little bluestem grass, switchgrass, asters, pecan trees, sycamore trees, yucca, make this place I call home livable.
It is important to understand how Cat’s perspective led her to organize her data to include bird sightings found in Texas from January 1st 2021 to February 2nd, 2021, probably more relevant to her upbringing. It is also important to understand how my interpretation of this data incorporates my worldview. It is further important to understand how my perspective as a human will never fully be able to understand the intent or meaning behind the place and movement of birds.
This data can give us an understanding of the relationship between birds and humans as well as between birds and the environment. This data set provides information on these parameters:
- Species name (common and scientific)
- General location (Latitude / longitude)
- Time of observation
- Based on the prior data types, you might be able to derive whether this species is endangered, or the healthiness of the environment based on type/volume of
II. Attunement
I think this data set should convey comfort in temporality. Observing a bird is a fleeting moment. It can end as soon as it begins, and it can be kind of tense for a human who is trying to log a bird. However, for nature, there is less pressure in this context and there is a more expansive history of time. I feel like the environment understands that nothing is permanent and there is more calmness in that sense. Therefore, I think the audience should feel a sense of calmness and motion.
With this data collection, something important to remember is that it was gathered by volunteers. Therefore, the information is not necessarily entirely reflective of what actually happened. There may have been potential misidentifications. Certain weather conditions may have prevented people from going out to explore.
III. Relationship
I will likely project a lot of my own perspective as a human living in a highly capitalistic society onto the facts of these birds. Even the fact that I am mentioning capitalism probably indicates some sort of bias in the way I will interpret certain bird data. I am a business major with a very cynical view of business, especially in the way it has affected our environment and society. I tend to have a lot of cognitive dissonance, and I will naturally search for information in the data that probably supports my views. This is something to keep in mind as I think about this data set.
However, it is also important to remember that birds have lives outside of birds in the eyes of humans. I don’t know if it is truly possible to separate myself from this dynamic, as I can never truly be not human. Maybe I could address this dynamic by doing more research on the birds listed in the data set, such as the Bufflehead, the Eastern Towhee, and Pine Siskin.
I think the the audience should try to see this data from primarily the perspective of the environment rather than from the perspective of human. Meaning that the data should make the user feel like a “fly on the wall” or one with nature or merely just an observer. This data could help humans feel more in tune with understanding their place as a piece of the puzzle than the whole thing.
