For me, the most interesting things happen far from the statistically averaged machine prediction zone. I can’t really explain how these marginalia bits of joy happen almost daily for me. I must be on a different internet than the one the social media choruses decry by the hour.
Follow along for another trip down the obscure internet holes.
A few clicks back, in our OEG Connect community space, the great Delmar Larsen of Libretexts shared an announcement of an upcoming CalOER conference, citing a panel of interest. Me, I look at lots of links, and went to the conference site to find the registration page.
I stared at the page a bit, as it has a magnificent landscape seen as a backdrop that just looked… familiar.
You see, I spent a good portion of my pre-edtech life as a Geology grad student at Arizona State University. In that life I got to see quite a bit of landforms in California (the place I did my field research), hiking and camping all over Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado. When I see landscapes in paintings or in movie scenes, I play my own mental game of trying to guess the location.
So I am looking at those mountains, and a prominent row of prickly pear cacti in the foreground, full of red fruit. And while I have seen plenty of cacti in southern California, by mind kept being tickled… “that does not look like California.” The cacti maybe, but the stratigraphy of the mountains, and the way they were eroded, kept saying to me that the photo was somewhere in northern Arizona or southern Utah.
Why did I have to bother looking? It’s not like I need to needle a conference in California (and hey, tangentially, I have been to Needles, California) about using imagery outside the state. It was more that bothersome feeling of wanting to know where the photo was taken.
Of I go into a Google reverse image search, and I get to some odd sites, some kind of Russian instagram account full of landscape photos. It showed up in some research paper.
I finally hit the source when I see the same photo on a web site for the Zion Ponderosa Ranch Resort, just adjacent to Zion National Park. The photo, as so often, is not attributed, but heck the answer is right there when you download the file, read the file name george-pagan-iii-DLqHu9V6WHE-unsplash.webp It takes just one web search to finally get to a source, and show the photo to you:
Indeed as I look at it, the geology to me is very clearly southern Utah. Is this a victory my cleverness in saying, HAH YOUR PHOTO IS NOT FROM CALIFORNIA — not really, that’s not the point. I did mention to Delmar, and there is now is on the conference registration page a very appropriate image, attributed, of California Poppies).
It was more of my testing my own “training” of experiences and a tingly sense of wonder that called for some digging about. But that’s not the real story.
I mentioned seeing a research pager that used this same image, I went back, and found myself deeply immersed in a wonderful resource I would have never come across if it were not for my stupid obsession with images. The paper that included this same image was a report from the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center – a published report titled “Synthesis of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Climate Change”
As a Graduate Research Assistant with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center at CU Boulder, Phurwa Dondrub synthesized findings from 42 sources to describe the state of knowledge on integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in understanding climate change. Additionally, he summarized 30 selected sources, including 28 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, one journal special issue, one guideline, and one PhD dissertation. This included works by ecologists, anthropologists, geographers, conservation and marine biologists, professionals such as forest service members and policy-makers, and a half dozen Indigenous scholars to ensure a well-rounded representation of knowledge. He wrote this synthesis report, as well as a bibliography consisting of 70 sources and a detailed summary of 28 selected works; based on his work, the NC CASC created a storymap and Zotero library (all available on the NC CASC website
https://nccasc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/2024-03/TEK_Synthesis.pdf
The photo appears on the bottom of page two where the author defines “Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)” leading to page 4’s discussion of “braiding” of Western and TEK, very central to the theme and vision of the 2023 OEGlobal Conference in Edmonton.
This continues to be a topic of interest I track. And now I come into a very relevant resource found because of my fixation of finding the source of a photo.
All of this might be just silly wallowing over accidents, but for this humble human, it speaks so much to what cannot be generated by statistical prediction machines. Yes, I bet a GenAI tool could have instantly identified the location of the photo. But where would it ever be curious about the photo, and trace it to something completely unrelated?
This is not a flailing effort to play a side of GenAI Bad/Good, worthless squabbling, but just to assert that plenty iof important findings happen out of pure curioist and seeking to find answers, not just having them extruded on a plate for you.
It’s something perhaps best discussed walking through a canyon at Zion? Those are the trails I want to be on, not the crowded highways (leading to the malls).
Featured Image: Of really no direct relevance, but when I opened a new tab to write this post, the Free to Use Browser Extension gave me this random photo Caruso & wife (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) I am feeling like that Caruso fellow just sensing something amiss, while all around hime the crowd in flowery hats are fixated on something else.
