October 20, 2011
Managing Geography With a Unique Global Reach
I’m very pleased to present our new format for Research Works, Carleton University’s flagship research publication. Retitled ‘Research Works: Shaping the future’, it maintains the same award-winning quality and, of course, award-winning material. The change is that we are choosing to send a more focused and powerful message that our researchers and the teams around them are conducting internationally recognized work that is making a difference, and is indeed, shaping the future of science, technology, and society. In our new format, we’ll be sharing their contributions one story at a time, released a couple times per month. I hope you’ll take the time to discover the incredible Carleton edge.
Kim Matheson,
Vice-President (Research and International)
One of Carleton University’s great legacies hinges on international collaborations to share innovative technologies, advance fresh approaches to research and create ties with outstanding scientific organizations around the globe.
A new and rapidly strengthening partnership with India, cemented earlier this year by a commitment to a Canada-India Centre for Excellence in Science, Trade, Technology and Policy and a Visiting Chair focused on India-related studies with Carleton, underpins a vast new project with the university’s renowned Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC).
Founded by Distinguished Research Professor Fraser Taylor who is the director, the GCRC carries the stature of a national organization that stands the test in its scope and breadth of research.
The centre will work with both Natural Resources Canada and India’s national Department of Science and Technology to help build and study a spatial data infrastructure – a highly complex tool that integrates an exceptionally large package of significant information.
The centre has earned a wide reputation for creating and applying geographic technologies to build information bases that examine themes from population and soil patterns to climate change and roadways. Applications for how this data can be manipulated are virtually limitless: land-use planning, transportation, housing, energy usage, environmental assessment, social policy and so much more. For India, one priority is a landslide early warning system, which Natural Resources and the GCRC can help develop.
India is very interested in issues related to environment, science, agriculture, industry
“India is very interested in issues related to environment, science, agriculture, industry and they are actively using location, which is a very powerful organizing tool,” says Taylor. “Just look at environmental issues such as deforestation and see how it relates to planning (in relation to landslides).”
Further, India plans to build a new institute of technology of geomatics. Taylor will serve as advisor to help develop the curriculum. “I have an international life and a national life in geomatics and the two are interconnected,” he says.
At Carleton, Taylor’s team encompasses multiple disciplines such as human computer interaction, the environment, the arts and northern development.
“We have six, eight or sometimes 10 different disciplines working on any one of our projects. Each one contributes something so that the sum of what we do in added value is greater than the initial parts and it’s very challenging,” he says.
Among Taylor’s associates is Claudio Aporta, winner of Carleton’s 2011 Research Achievement Award, who has spent more than a decade investigating Inuit land and sea ice use together with a network of trails linking Inuit communities. “This network certainly pre-existed the European explorers,” he says. “Trails represented a complex social network across the North.”
Aporta’s project with support of an extensive cast of researchers, was also shepherded by Gita Ljubicic (Laidler) of Carleton’s Department of Geography and Environmental. She recently won a five-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant to further explore northern educational policy, caribou research and community health implications of shifting Inuit-caribou relations.
The teamwork of Taylor’s network at Carleton extends far beyond the concept of topographical mapping. New mapping systems – cybercartography and geomatics – serve to build a dynamic atlas of distinct regional areas using narratives in online interactive displays. One recent signature project is a living atlas for Arctic Bay, Nunavut, 750 km north of the Arctic Circle at the top of Baffin Island. The spoken map is both unique but especially valuable in the Far North where Canada’s pursuit of Arctic Sovereignty dictates the need for accurate, quality data.
More than data, the Arctic Bay atlas covers the rich panorama of the Far North including its vibrant culture. Carleton’s Carol Payne, professor of art history, lends a special human element to a technology-driven aspect of geographic information by revealing historic photographs and artistic endeavours of the Inuit. “The tools developed by the GCRC will help renew Inuit culture and bonds between generations of Inuit,” she says.
For Taylor, the research centre and its continuing reach into the international realm are remarkable achievements. Taylor is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading cartographers, he is a prolific writer and chair of the international steering committee for Global Map. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
“I use the word unique carefully, but I would say what we’re doing is unique in the national and international fields,” he says.
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