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The politics of zoom
(2019)
Following the mandate in the Paris Agreement for signatories to provide “climate services” to their constituents, “downscaled” climate visualizations are proliferating. But the process of downscaling climate visualizations does not neutralize the political problems with their synoptic global sources—namely, their failure to empower communities to take action and their replication of neoliberal paradigms of globalization. In this study we examine these problems as they apply to interactive climate‐visualization platforms, which allow their users to localize global climate information to support local political action. By scrutinizing the political implications of the “zoom” tool from the perspective of media studies and rhetoric, we add to perspectives of cultural cartography on the issue of scaling from our fields. Namely, we break down the cinematic trope of “zooming” to reveal how it imports the political problems of synopticism to the level of individual communities. As a potential antidote to the politics of zoom, we recommend a downscaling strategy of connectivity, which associates rather than reduces situated views of climate to global ones.
Flooding is an imminent natural hazard threatening most river deltas, e.g. the Mekong Delta. An appropriate flood management is thus required for a sustainable development of the often densely populated regions. Recently, the traditional event-based hazard control shifted towards a risk management approach in many regions, driven by intensive research leading to new legal regulation on flood management. However, a large-scale flood risk assessment does not exist for the Mekong Delta. Particularly, flood risk to paddy rice cultivation, the most important economic activity in the delta, has not been performed yet. Therefore, the present study was developed to provide the very first insight into delta-scale flood damages and risks to rice cultivation. The flood hazard was quantified by probabilistic flood hazard maps of the whole delta using a bivariate extreme value statistics, synthetic flood hydrographs, and a large-scale hydraulic model. The flood risk to paddy rice was then quantified considering cropping calendars, rice phenology, and harvest times based on a time series of enhanced vegetation index (EVI) derived from MODIS satellite data, and a published rice flood damage function. The proposed concept provided flood risk maps to paddy rice for the Mekong Delta in terms of expected annual damage. The presented concept can be used as a blueprint for regions facing similar problems due to its generic approach. Furthermore, the changes in flood risk to paddy rice caused by changes in land use currently under discussion in the Mekong Delta were estimated. Two land-use scenarios either intensifying or reducing rice cropping were considered, and the changes in risk were presented in spatially explicit flood risk maps. The basic risk maps could serve as guidance for the authorities to develop spatially explicit flood management and mitigation plans for the delta. The land-use change risk maps could further be used for adaptive risk management plans and as a basis for a cost-benefit of the discussed land-use change scenarios. Additionally, the damage and risks maps may support the recently initiated agricultural insurance programme in Vietnam.
Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via platform application programming interfaces has arguably led to the predominance of single-platform research of social media. Such research has also privileged the role of text in social media analysis, as a form of data that is more readily gathered and searchable than images. In this paper, we challenge both of these prevailing forms of social media research by outlining a methodology for visual cross-platform analysis (VCPA), defined as the study of still and moving images across two or more social media platforms. Our argument contains three steps. First, we argue that cross-platform analysis addresses a gap in research methods in that it acknowledges the interplay between a social phenomenon under investigation and the medium within which it is being researched, thus illuminating the different affordances and cultures of web platforms. Second, we build on the literature on multimodal communication and platform vernacular to provide a rationale for incorporating the visual into cross-platform analysis. Third, we reflect on an experimental cross-platform analysis of images within social media posts (n = 471,033) used to communicate climate change to advance different modes of macro- and meso-levels of analysis that are natively visual: image-text networks, image plots and composite images. We conclude by assessing the research pathways opened up by VCPA, delineating potential contributions to empirical research and theory and the potential impact on practitioners of social media communication.