Illah Nourbakhsh, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says the Guelph biologist is “pioneering new ways in which gigapixel imagery can be used to capture the biodiversity of our planet.”read more:
"I've been working with the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska to do language and cultural documentation using GigaPan. GigaPan allows us to capture images of broad scenes - places and practices of cultural importance - and talk about fine detail in context. By introducing GigaPan as a tool for documenting endangered languages, we hope to capture linguistic events that are not easily elicited using conventional techniques while at the same time recording valuable cultural and environmental information and providing a tangible resource - the photographic archive - to the community. The larger objective is to develop standards for using GigaPan as a language documentation tool, so that the many endangered language communities that do have the necessary resources - technological infrastructure and language advocacy - are empowered to undertake their own documentation projects.
Preservation and perpetuation of the Inupiaq language is of critical importance to the community. Elders are most comfortable speaking Inupiaq. Their children - today's community leaders - are bilingual, but at a great price - they were punished for speaking their own language and sent away to schools in other parts of the country. As a result, English dominates among youth. Providing opportunities for youth to engage authentically in Inupiaq conversation is imperative for the survival of the language.
At the recent Elders and Youth Conference, which focuses on intergenerational learning and transmitting of core Inupiat values and knowledge, I ran several workshops to introduce GigaPan to the community. Some of the sessions focused on prints, which triggered animated discussion between elders about the difference between villages. Youth from several villages learned to use the GigaPan equipment, and hope to prepare a traveling gallery in the weeks leading up to or following the upcoming Messenger Feast (Kivgiq). Native speakers at the Heritage Center are developing annotations for panoramas in Inupiaq, as we develop best practices for cross-generational interaction with GigaPan panoramas for language documentation."
"GigaPans have captured the public's imagination. Five thousand systems have been bought, and today the site hosts 40,000 public panoramas that draw 20 million visitors a year; another 20,000 are in private areas of the site while contributors work on them. Sargent and Nourbakhsh began training scientists to shoot GigaPans in 2008, and some 120 investigators are now using the system in their research. In mid-November, scientists will share findings at the Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science, hosted by CMU and the CREATE lab." Click here to read the rest of this awesome article.
Science 5 November 2010:
Vol. 330. no. 6005, pp. 748 - 749
DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6005.748
Alex concludes, "There are many parallels between the GigaPan and DNA barcoding as complementary forces for democratizing information and bolstering bioliteracy. Both are publicly accessible, both will be annotated through time by a community of experts and non-experts alike and both exist as a synthetic connection from the digital to the natural world.
One key to our capacity to understand the changes caused by the increasing pressures of the urbanization and degradation of natural environments will be ongoing monitoring through time. If such monitoring is democratized and publically available as DNA barcodes and GigaPans, then a marginalized environment may become more valued by the human population."
