The caption does a good job of providing information on citizens' autodidactic practices and the multiple bureaucratic, technical, and political barriers they have to overcome to make their case. However, I would like to know more about the map itself, about the document in which it was buried, what spatial and environmental conclusions can be drawn from this representation.
I also think it would be pertinent to explore and perhaps forefront the idea of the “language” of monitoring (I'm not sure if it is or ought to be the same language of reparation). This element of the title and the caption is a bit uncharted.
Also, what do you mean by ‘esoteric.’ It seems to me that by describing science that way, the author emphasizes even more the so-called obscure, complicated, and expert character of scientific knowledge.
I would also be attentive to the language used to describe the interlocutors. Although they are portrayed as active agents, they still seem to be inexperienced, ignorant —their expertise always running behind scientific practices.
I believe there is a leap from acquiring (cartographic) knowledge to remediation requests and access to political stakeholders. Maybe remediation needs its own visualization?
I really can't. The caption beautifully captures what is happening in the image, visible or not.
I can't. The caption explains the image while posing relevant questions about the (in)visibility of toxicity in the daily lives and markets of the community.
Could you explain what the relevance of the image is beyond it being about a religious ordination? How does this relate to toxic places and the military? Who is the individual? Why did you choose him rather than any other Roman Catholic holy man?
Could you explain what interstitial time involves in the clergy or in the military? What are these people doing during the buffer period?
You mention toxicity here, but I am not sure I know what toxicity you are referring to specifically - I can guess for military personnel (and you allude to injuries) but it is not explicit. What is the toxic place being discussed?
I think that the image and its composition are a very creative communication tool, however, it is not clear what words are at first sight. Maybe dividing the vocabulary inventory and allocating part of it in the top left corner and right-bottom would allow the author to have more space well distributed with legible words.
There is no information on this aspect. I suspect that this image was taken by the author. I like the composition: the tension between a full and empty space, clean and dusty... I also feel that the image suggests that the boxes of documents produce a clearly defined path…
It also reminds me of images that I have seen that refer to cold cases.
On boxes, archives and (a)historical events: Marisol de la Cadena’s book, Earth Beings. She has a wonderful chapter on this: Story 4: Mariano’s archive. The eventfulness of the ahistorical.
I think the caption is too elaborate, the main arguement of the caption brought in the beginning for a better reading of the artifact.
I'm so curious about the connection between masculinity and polluted places. The particular tension you foreground in this image--the stakes of pursuing recreation in contaminated waters--is also something that emerges in my own field work in Michigan. The Great Lakes and rivers in my fieldsite are tremendously valued for the sport and leisure they enable (like fishing, swimming, or kayaking), although admittedly I haven't tracked as carefully the gendered dynamics of this valuation as your project does. I would love to hear more about two terms that briefly come up in your caption here, sabetsu and mendokusai, and how specifically "discrimination" and "trouble-making" are endured or experiences as gendered acts.
I think your caption addresses very well the frustrations of the uptake of this type of map for citizen scientists. I would also love to know more about places where this map might be leveraged, or contested--are there public meetings where citizen scientists and experts can have some kind of dialogue, however limited? And I would love to know what strategies citizen scientists develop as alternatives to the kind of "data treadmill" it seems such maps are symptomatic of.
The visual is a representation of a developer’s text analyzed and categorized by the author . I would like to know what potential residents or activists think about this analysis. I also feel there is room to draw connections with this common story of toxicity and dispossession with similar sites (even within southern california) as well as similarities of the narratives about an “idyllic” future that capitalist expansion might bring along (in and beyond California).