Gary Gereffi, Sociology, Arts & Sciences

Project Description

In Gereffi’s Marketing and Management capstone course, undergraduate students collect and analyze data involving several key North Carolina industries, helping Gereffi and his team (the Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness) create visualizations like value chains and maps for the public and highly-visible North Carolina and the Global Economy website.

CIT provided funding and support to help Gereffi and his team develop interactive visualizations for the project. These visualizations included representations of value chains using tools like Adobe Flash, and an exploration of the use of mapping tools like Google Earth to rethink the way industry data can be presented visually in a more global context.

Re-visualizing Value Chains

Gereffi and his team consulted with CIT on several possible approaches to creating more interactive and visually appealing value chain diagrams. Key challenges included considering uniform color schemes and layouts (to create a common visual language between all value chains), and finding a solution for presenting data and textual content in context within the diagram, yet without cluttering the visual representation.

Making mappable data more accessible

Google Maps and Google Earth have made it much easier to publish and share mappable data. Since much of the data collected by the Gereffi’s research team included location data, CIT worked with the team to use Google’s mapping tools to create clickable, interactive maps that could be included directly in context within  webpages on the NCGE site. The team created custom icons with colors that corresponded to the colors of different aspects of the value chain.

The same mappable data used to create the Google Maps was also used to create Google Earth files. The Google Earth “virtual globe” browser allows users more flexibility to view, sort and zoom into locations. By providing the data as Google Earth files, users in the community and industry also have greater access to the data.

The following video is an excerpt from the presentation “Everybody’s Doing It: Web-based Visualizations and Mashups in the Social Sciences” which CIT consultant Shawn Miller gave at Duke’s Visualization Forum in September 2008. In the video, Miller describes several aspects of the project, and demos some of the unpublished visualization experiments that he and the team explored. The full video is available from the Visualization Forum website.

For more information, visit the North Carolina and the Global Economy website. The site also includes videos that demo many of the key features, including the value chains, Google Maps and Google Earth.

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $11,000

Trudi Abel, History, Arts & Sciences

Project Description

“How do they connect? The past and the present?”

CIT provided Trudi Abel with funding and student support to create digital versions of historic maps of Durham using Google Earth. Using high quality digital copies of maps from the late 1800’s, Abel worked with CIT staff to figure out the best methods for converting, importing and placing images as overlays into Google Earth. The “georectification” of these maps presented several obstacles, requiring the team to consult with local Durham mapping and historical experts to complete the placement and positioning of these maps.

Several of the resulting digital maps have recently been added to Abel’s ongoing project – the Digital Durham website. Google Earth files can be downloaded and opened on users’ computers for exploration. Visitors to the site can also access several high resolution screen captures of the map overlays without the need to open or use Google Earth. The resulting maps can also be used in Abel’s work with Duke and local high school students – providing a basis for student research projects. Audio pieces created on iPods, geotagged photography and even short video clips can be linked directly to their historical and/or present-day locations.

“I think these maps will help users visualize an industrializing city and gain a better understanding of the process of urbanization in this New South community.”

Click here to view the Digital Durham page for Sanborn 1884

Click here to view the Digital Durham page for Sanborn 1888

Presentations

The following video is an excerpt from the presentation “Everybody’s Doing It: Web-based Visualizations and Mashups in the Social Sciences” which CIT consultant Shawn Miller gave at Duke’s Visualization Forum in September 2008. The full video is available from the Visualization Forum website.

Trudi Abel also presented about the project and the larger Digital Durham project at a Visualization Forum in March 2009. The video from her talk is available here.

Abel and Miller discussed future possibilities for the Digital Durham project at Duke’s Tech and New Media Tuesdays forum. The presentation is accessible on iTunesU.

Articles about the project

The Digital Durham Project: Creating Community through History, Technology, and Service Learning by Trudi Abel

Duke News article: New Map Collaboration Helps Tell Story of Durham’s History

MyNC.com article: Duke, Durham Merge Google Earth technology with historic city maps

Duke Research Blog: Seeing Through Time: Historic Maps, Google Earth, and the Transformation of Durham

Independent article: What Google Earth doesn’t show you: A small movement of alternative mapmakers seek to revolutionize our understanding of the Triangle and the world

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $1650

Victoria Szabo, Program Director for Information Science + Information Studies, Arts & Sciences

Project description
ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) explored Second Life for teaching and learning. Students studied virtual worlds as social phenomena and “texts” as well as technical aspects like 3d modeling, scripting, and virtual space design. Projects included: construction of a student project gallery and virtual labyrinth for the ISIS Focus cluster; research assignments in Gender and Digital Culture; developing virtual world content in ISIS 140 and 240; a “getting started” script garden; a Next Newsroom prototype, and a virtual economics experiment (co-funded by VSI).

ISIS is currently consulting with faculty in several departments: in Education, to create the English Café, in Nursing, to provide an online classroom environment; in Writing, to launch a Virtual Writing Center and with the Office of Institutional Equity to launch a virtual diversity training center. In addition, ISIS explored Croquet, Qwaq, and Project Wonderland to assess appropriate applications.

“We came into this project with some experience with Second Life, but also with the broader goal of understanding how virtual world environments can benefit our curriculum as well as be a rewarding object of inquiry. Second Life’s strengths are in its sociability, the ease in getting started, and the support resources available for it. Its limits are in house-only tool, the time it takes for users to get up to speed for construction activities and scripting (as opposed to just participating), and the challenges in integrating it into other systems.”

–Victoria Szabo

Find out more about these virtual world explorations, consider using Second Life in your class,  or learn how to get started with Second Life.

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 2,500

More information:
Focus Cluster on Virtual Realities
Course descriptions
Project wiki
Second Life at Duke

Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, Director, Duke Center for Science Education
Director, RISE (Raising Interest in Science Education)
Professor of Pharmacology

Project Description

The major goal of the project was to develop an immersive 3D virtual model to teach students chemical oxidation using a context that is relevant to students—alcohol metabolism. The model, developed for the DiVE, shows how alcohol is oxidized by 2 forms of the same liver enzyme, ADH. One form increases the risk of alcoholism, and another form decreases the risk. To carry out the project, 5 undergraduate students of different majors took Pharmacology 197/198 (Independent Study in Science Education). Working together the students developed the molecular models of alcohol and the enzymes according to their published structures, and built an interactive virtual reality experience, in the form of several games. The complete program takes about 35 minutes, and is also available in a web-based form. A separate group of students developed a tutorial for use by teachers interested in using the program in their chemistry classes.

Three different assessments were carried out during the funding period to assess content knowledge learned and student attitudes about the program. The first two provided formative data, and the third was a pilot study for a major grant. The first assessment targeted high school students, who demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge of chemical oxidation after viewing a preliminary version of the program in the DiVE. The second assessment, carried out in a Duke Pharmacology course (Pharm 150) during Fall 2008, showed that the interactive component of the program did not improve knowledge of oxidation compared to a non-interactive version. The small sample size (n=22) may have prevented detection of any significant differences. The third assessment was carried out in an accelerated intro chemistry course at Duke (Chem 23L) during the Spring 2009. ([The assessment was carried out as a senior thesis project by a Duke chemistry student (Dave McMullen)]. In this pilot study, students (n=121) were randomized into 3 groups to learn about alcohol oxidation; 1) a typical paper handout, 2) the DiVE program, and 3) a web-based version of the DiVE program (non-immersive), in the Duke LINK classrooms. Several outcomes were measured. There was no difference in the knowledge about oxidation among the 3 groups. It is possible that the immediate assessment (within 15 minutes of the intervention), or the single short exposure, did not allow the students to consolidate knowledge. However, the students in the DiVE group
expressed a greater interest in the content compared to the other groups, and they thought that they had a better understanding of oxidation (even though they did not demonstrate this). The pilot data will be used to write a major grant to carry out a more thorough assessment of the impact of the program on learning.

A summary of the program was presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality meeting in March, 2009 (abstract), and in January 2009 at the Visualization Friday Forum at Duke.   Finally, the webbased program will be made available to the public at http://www.rise.duke.edu/dive-adh (currently password-protected) and it will be submitted in September 2009 to the NSF-Science Visualization Challenge competition.

photo credit:  Les Todd

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 6,500

Additional information:

Duke University Visualization Technology Group

RISE (Raising Interest in Science Education)

Other projects by Pharmacology 150

Duke Center for Science Education

Description of project in Duke Research Blog

Kenneth E. Glander, Professor and DGS
Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Arts & Sciences

Project description

To introduce authentic research methods and give students practice in research, students in the Methods Primate Field Ecology course used three Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking collars to track primates at the Duke University Lemur Center. Combining these data with Google Earth would illustrate the lemur’s use of three-dimensional space.

The GPS collars were placed on three lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center during the Fall 2007 semester, but none of the collars functioned and no data was collected. Replacement collars are expected. This authentic research experience allowed students to gain first hand experience in the challenges of field work and cutting edge technology. When the tracking collars are replaced, other students will participate in this research experience. Below, lemurs with tracking collars.

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $3,200