❮ Projects page New Mexico Consortium

Spatial Analysis Project:

The student would advance the visualization and understanding of unique geospatial data from the Aurorasaurus platform. Data includes the first citizen science reports, tweets, and photos of the beautiful Northern Lights during rare events in 2014-2015.

The student would be integrated to our virtual interdisciplinary team, and expected to translate their expertise creatively both within the team and to the public (via our blog and working with our outreach coordinator). The student will work to bring their training to bear on this new experiential opportunity in the new, growing field of citizen science. The student would be encouraged to compare and critically assess the use of mapping in various citizen science applications in order to propose improvements to the Aurorasaurus platform. In addition to offline analyses the student could contribute to the software development to support real-time analysis and architecture for the site, if appropriate to their interests.

Data available:

We have ~25000 geo-located tweets, several hundred reports and photos, and several hundred registered participants spanning October 2014 through to May 2015. We also have analytics on page usage. We have the relevant “space-based data” to compare the citizen science data to.

The project is growing and assistance with appropriate data visualization would galvanize the citizen scientists, help publicize the effort, and contribute to the use of the data in other fields of space science.

Maps and Reports that will be created:

1. Creating innovative geographic visualizations and movies of our citizen science dataset.
2. Aid in the creation of a wide-range of reports based upon this dataset and various variables and analytics.
3. A student report summarizing the work completed and their assessment of the citizen science map features and improvements possible.
4. A comparison of other next-generation methods of collecting relevant geospatial information.

How the maps and reports will be used:

The visualizations will be presented on our website, blog and social media outlets to better disseminate the information contained in our dataset to the general public. Additionally, the products will be used for subsequent analysis by our team of researchers and may appear in academic journals and other outlets (with student co-authorship, as appropriate). The visualizations will facilitate subsequent research in the areas of disaster response, auroral science and citizen science engagement.