June workings

It has been a while since I last posted.  End of the semester, sickness, working, traveling are my excuses.  Despite all of that, I feel like I've made quite some progress in the last month or so. The project is taking off.

1. There is a new public blog (http://arabianseaclimate.blogspot.com) for the project. Hopefully students in Oman as well as scientists on the project will chip in to create a dialog about climate change in the arabian sea. The first post on Cyclone Gonu went up last week. Next I need to come up with a list of topics to write about each/every other week.  I should also offer any of the researcher's posting privileges if they want it.
2. Next week my MERITS student begins work. I've been getting her workstation set up, as well as fleshing out her project. She will be responsible for finding data for the social implications perspective of the project. I want her to look at fish stocks, political, economical and public aspects of climate change in the region. I'm sketching out resources for her to use, while I also determine what type of data I want to support the story. She will have to give a presentation at the end of her internship, so I want to talk with Annette about what we could put together.
3. Concept Mapping. This is my new tool. I sketched out my story of climate change in the Arabian Sea into a concept map. It is not unlike sketching out the chapters, acts, paragraphs, etc of a story you will write. I started out (with Annette's help) identifying the general topics of my story: climate, wind, current, productivity, fishery and people. The purpose of creating a general storyline is so it can be used for multiple stories. I will use it for the Arabian Sea, but one could also use this storyline for the Gulf of Maine. Next step was to figure out the Arabian Sea (AS) specific aspects of this story. Most of the AS I had figured out: global warming, monsoon, circulation, upwelling, phytoplankton, stock. But I ran into a problem with what the 'people' part was going to be. Here was my first road block. I tried working back from details that I knew I wanted to include, but wasn't happy with the summation. I tried approaching from a completely different angle. Nope. Storytelling can look deceptively easy, but I found out it is not. Eventually I was happy with politics, economics, and public as the 'people' part of my story. Both of my advisors have helped me revise the storyline and it's parts (aka what data I want included). I know it will have more revisions as I go along.  I am keeping copies of the versions to track the progress of how the story is emerging. (CAS anyone?)

version 1 brain storming 'people'

version 3