Climate change presents a critical challenge that requires public understanding and engagement to address effectively. The ClimateViz project, based the Engineering Science Department at the University of Oxford, is at the forefront of transforming how the public interacts with climate data. Our research focuses on converting complex climate-related graphics into easy-to-understand textual descriptions.
This transformation is crucial for several reasons:
Enhanced Clarity and Accessibility: By distilling detailed scientific visuals into clear, textual interpretations, we make climate science accessible to a broader audience. This clarity is vital in a world where misinformation can easily spread.
Data Integrity and Trustworthiness: Our project ensures that each graphic is interpreted accurately, maintaining the integrity of the original data. Volunteers contribute by extracting precise information from graphics, which we use to build a dataset of reliable textual interpretations.
Support for Informed Decision-Making: The textual data produced helps individuals and policymakers make informed decisions based on scientifically accurate information.
Public Engagement and Scientific Literacy: By involving the public in the data interpretation process, we demystify scientific data and promote scientific literacy.
Resource for Fact-Checking and Journalism: The accurate descriptions generated serve as a valuable resource for journalists and fact-checkers, enabling them to quickly verify claims related to climate science and counteract misinformation effectively.
Our goal is to develop an automatic fact-checking system using the data extracted from scientific graphics. In specific, we can train machine learning models to recognize the veracity of statements related to climate science graphics.
How does it work?
Title Extraction - The title typically summarizes the main theme or focus of the visual data displayed.
Data Representations - Choose types of data representation of the graphic.
Summary of True Facts - Describe the key information of a climate graphic such as data points, trends, and historical data converts complex visual information into an accessible textual format, imagine you're describing the true facts you can observe from the graphic to someone who cannot see it.
To generate a volunteer certificate confirming your service hours, you must have a Zooniverse.org account.
Go to zooniverse.org, sign in, and click ‘More Stats’. Use the drop-down options on the upper-right of the stats bar chart to filter to a specific time period and/or project of interest. Then click on ‘Generate Volunteer Certificate’ (the button to the bottom-right of your stats bar chart).
