The Visible Spectrum

Today I had a breakthrough in understanding about how we represent the world, and what needs to change. It’s about expanding the spectrum of what can be studied and captured. It’s like all we can see is the visible spectrum, but there are so many other wavelengths of data.

Image source: http://www.dnr.sc.gov/ael/personals/pjpb/lecture/spectrum.gif

Two things lead to it:
– one was listening to a young woman exclaiming and laughing with Judith that it’s not possible in English to explain a First Nations person’s connection to the land.
– the second was watching CBC’s coverage of the Journey of the Nishiyuu in horror, when twitter and FB had been such rich sources for documenting. And knowing those sources go largely unacknowledged by large, engine-driven bureaucratic machines that are unable to cope with the rich, meaningful data they provide.