Hanrahan C1, Bateman N1, Kaluza O1, Chun F1, Beucher R1, Zeng R1
1ACCESS-NRI, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Corey Hanrahan is a science communicator at Australia’s climate simulator, ACCESS-NRI, the national research infrastructure responsible for codeveloping and supporting climate models. His work contributes to ACCESS-NRI’s public-facing communications including its newsletter, website, social media, outreach events, and the communication of its data visualisations.
Corey holds a Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours) in Physics from the University of Queensland, and a Master of Science Communication Outreach from the Australian National University. His science communication experience spans research infrastructure, school outreach, event organisation, and textbook publishing. Outside of work, Corey enjoys activities in the outdoors including hiking, canyoning and caving.
Abstract:
Climate and weather models are powerful tools for researchers and decision makers to understand the changing climate. ACCESS-NRI, Australia’s climate simulator, is the national research infrastructure responsible for co-developing and maintaining these models. ACCESS-NRI faces a challenge common in the eResearch community: our output is software-based, which means we can’t use physical infrastructure to demonstrate our impact.
Data visualisations offer one solution to this problem, enabling complex information to be conveyed to diverse audiences in an engaging, accessible format. Furthermore, videos incorporating these visualisations can be powerful tools for storytelling, helping to convey research narratives to policymakers, journalists and the public.
However, producing a data visualisation in a vacuum has limited value. Without input and feedback from researchers, a visualisation can easily become disconnected from the interesting scientific problems that produced the data. It can also be difficult to retrofit a narrative to an existing visualisation, limiting the communication potential of related visualisation-based videos.
This talk presents a collaborative approach to developing climate data visualisations and associated videos that involves researchers, science communicators, and research software engineers. It will explore the lessons and learnings from ACCESS-NRI’s recent visualisation projects. What’s the value of community engagement to call for projects? How does simultaneous development of visualisations and narratives improve outcomes? This talk will showcase perspectives from the different groups involved, as well as highlights from the recent visualisations and videos that ACCESS-NRI has cocreated.
