The name is absent

WJ Clancey — Visualizing Practical Knowledge

Study representational media

Figure 4 illustrates the problem of field recording—how are the data in different media
recorded at this one site correlated? For example, the biologist on the left is using pen and
paper to correlate the temperature reading with the depth of the thermometer. The video
camera is recording sound and image together. But wouldn’t it be useful to relate the
photographs with the complete audio recording (taken over the forty minutes of this
excavation and study)? Yet this is only one stop from at least a half-dozen during that
traverse, and just one traverse from the entire expedition. No database exists that brings
all the participants’ data together, relates individual data and observations at a given place
or time, or produces a coherent scientific image of the crater.

Figure 4: Typical use of recording media in scientific fieldwork. Data is not easily
correlated.

This example suggests a single recording device that combines video, photographs,
audio, time, and GPS (global position system) would be helpful. But even then, the
thermometer would probably need to be separate. How is that data to be related? And
finally, knowing how to present the database would require further study of how data is
actually used during and after a mission. What presentations of live data from Mars
would be useful to scientists and engineers back on Earth, who are monitoring the
mission and making suggestions?

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