This week in ENVS 220, we were preparing to ask the big framing questions for our next group project for which we chose to explore Portland environmental organizations and attempt to explore an issue that is related to one of the organizations. We chose to address the topic of green spaces versus grey spaces in […]
Archives for 2015
Defining a Framing Question – Urban Greenspaces
This past week in lab, we explored several possible topics to study in our situated projects. One of the biggest problems our lab teams collectively faced was how to frame our topic with a huge, global question. It was easy enough to bring the problem outside of Portland, but it was a challenge to address […]
Hi-tech agriculture is freeing the farmer from his fields | The Guardian
by John Vidal The big, blue 18-tonne New Holland T8.435 tractor is not the heaviest or the tallest in the world but its £3,000 tyres and tank-style tracks stand two metres high, it bristles with antenna and at, about £250,000, it must be one of the most expensive. For that, the farmer gets a monster […]
Interviews – Conducting Qualitative Research
Conducting and analyzing interviews was a weird process. Never having been involved in the social sciences until now, I was unaware of just how different interviews are from surveys or any other research method. Coming from a natural science focused background, I am so used to pure quantitative research. The had to be mathematical proofs […]
Wilderness Interview Lab
Audrey Stuart, Liza Tungangui, Blake Slattengren Background According to the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness is described as “A place untrammeled by man; where man is a visitor who does not remain”. Although this term is widely misused, interpreted into many different ways, applied to many different spaces, and is a generally abstract idea, this […]
Refining My Concentration
As with the whole concentration process so far, editing my concentration has been more difficult than planned. I mean just editing a rough draft couldn’t be that hard, right? Well according to all the time I put into it this past week, not quite. I had felt pretty good about my concentration draft when that […]
Wilderness Survey Lab
Audrey Stuart, Liza Tugangui, Blake Slattengren Introduction The notion of “wilderness” holds vastly different meanings for different people as shaped by our cultural influences. In recent years the concept of wilderness has been criticized by various environmentalists for lacking any scientific basis. For example, in the days of the American frontier the term used to […]
ENVX Symposium – Elizabeth Demaray and Rock Graffiti
Elizabeth Demaray, the keynote speaker for the Environment Across Boundaries Symposium, blew me away with her unique and utterly fascinating ideas. She uses art to convey complex ideas about the boundaries between the built and natural world, the humorous and the serious, and the pragmatic and impractical. She described one of my favorite examples of […]
ENVX Symposium – Reactions
As this year’s symposium comes to an end, I am enormously proud of all the work I and so many others put in. I was really unsure of how it would work out and there was a lot of scrambling in the past couple weeks to finalize everything, but it was really rewarding to see […]
Social Network Lab
Liza Tugangui, Audrey Stuart, Blake Slattengren Background Social networks provide a myriad of information about a population of people. Social network analysis allows us to study the connections between people and ideas, of which we can then draw theories about the reasons behind these connections. In this lab, we collected data from the ENVS 220 […]