"Mapping Globalization" was the topic of today's Lunch 'n Learn featuring Professor Miguel Centeno and graduate student, Manish Nag, both of the Department of Sociology at Princeton.
Centeno began the talk by describing the origins of his interest in globalization, about 11 years ago, about the time of Thomas L. Friedman's first publications on his theories about the relationships between nations (The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 2000 and The World is Flat, 2004). Centeno said it occurred to him that there were many ways to frame the subject of globalization, and that the process, in fact, had been going on for thousands of years. How, he wondered, was the best approach to grasp the complexity of the concept without resorting to banalities--and what was the best way to diagram information as complex as that describing global trade?
The International Networks Archive
Centeno's first attempt to answer that question was to develop the International Networks Archive, (INA), where he used graphic arts, among other things, to try to depict complex relationships in easy-to-understand ways. Using some common reports published by the United Nations, he used trade data to support the generation of diagrams that showed some stunning conclusions about global transactions. Centeno calls these images "infographics." An example, The Magic Bean Shop and The Fries that Bind Us, are two of the diagrams in the INA collection. They show the effects of McDonalds and Starbuck's franchises on global trade. This diagram, he noted has been the most popular on the site, having been reprinted multiple times as an example of the sort of trends the INA is best at describing.
"Globalization is nothing more than a complex series of transactions across the planet," said Centeno, alluding to the strong connections that can be made by analyzing trade data. "Most of these data sets are available publicly," he noted, showing a table that tracks the annual number of minutes spent in phone communications between countries. Data about the imports of movies, books, as well as trade data, are among the many other ways to show how these transactions take place through what seems like simple exchanges.
The INA project was followed by the "Mapping Globalization," where data was visualized in three distinct ways.
Mapping Globalization
The first section of the Mapping Globalization site contains a collection of maps, and links to maps of various kinds: these include historic maps, interactive maps, and modern satellite imagery that help to convey the notion of geographic location as a critical, but often overlooked aspect of globalization. "Globalization involves connections between at least two places," the website explains, "and the first step in our understanding must be an appreciation of what this means in a concrete sense of place."
The second, and least developed, section of the "Mapping Globalization" site is the "Narratives" section, a series of animated movies that show general trends in globalization over time, such as "Migrations" and "Empires."
Finally, the "Data and Analysis" section uses diagrams generated by technology from NetMap Analytics, which creates diagrams showing the density of trade between nations. Using data from GKG trade statistics, NetMaps are circular diagrams that show relationships between various countries, grouped by continent. Thresholds can be set on the data depicted to clarify the diagrams. For instance, setting a threshold of f "0.3%" means that links corresponding to a trade share less than 0.3% of the total dollar value in the category are not shown in the diagram.
Despite best efforts at the time, there was no way for the NetMaps to be generated dynamically on the website, however images of several of the most interesting patterns can be found in the section of the site called "NetMap Combined Studies."
MapTrade
The talk next focused on a project undertaken by Manish Nag, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Princeton who now studies with Centeno. Nag explained his past career as an IT consultant, and his first interest in studying globalization at Harvard, studying with Jason Beckfield. At Harvard, Nag worked on a project called Sonoma, as a way to visualize statistical data using maps. When he came to Princeton to continue his studies, he began to work with Centeno on making an interactive database that would allow anyone to diagram world trade relationships. The result was the MapTrade project.
MapTrade, still in beta, shows various projections of a world map (Robinson, Winkel Trippel, Gall-Peters, or equirectangular are the map views that the interface supports). Trade flows can be diagrammed on top of the world projections, showing trade between selected nations, based on specific commodities, or all trade between all nations. Trade data is available for 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2009.
Using the interface, it is possible to save generated maps, so that comparisons can be drawn, and the results saved for use in research and presentation. As with the earlier NetMaps projects, filters can be applied to clarify the data by setting thresholds, or by limiting the transactions by their total percentage of world trade.
Centeno and Nag used the MapTrade interface to generate a series of maps, showing the shift in trade centers over time.
The audience then requested several maps showing various commodities, countries and time periods.
Who knew so many fish sticks were traded between the U.S. and China in 2009? That the top 50% of word trade involves only 10 countries? You may have suspected these things; MapTrade can draw you the picture to prove it!
A future phase of Centeno and Nag's collaboration will include making the NetMaps data interactive, much in the way that MapTrade currently is, so that users can generate and save their own diagrams.
Links to all three of the projects discussed in today's talk can be found at:
www.princeton.edu/globalization
A podcast of the talk can be found here.
Speaker Bio: H. Vincent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he also Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests lie in the area of wireless networking and related fields. Among his publications in these areas is the book MIMO Wireless Communications (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Dr. Poor is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom. He received the 2005 IEEE Education Medal and the 2009 Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society.
Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.
Daniel C. Kurtzer retired from the U.S. Foreign Service with the rank of Career-Minister. From 2001-2005 he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and from 1997-2001 as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. He served as a political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, Deputy Director of the Office of Egyptian Affairs, speechwriter on the Policy Planning Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. Kurtzer was a member of the American delegation to the Israel-Palestinian autonomy negotiations (1979-1982), helped negotiate the creation of the Multinational Force and Observers (1981-1982), negotiated and oversaw the successful arbitration of the Taba border dispute between Israel and Egypt, crafted the 1988 peace initiative of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and in 1991 served as a member of the U.S. peace team that brought about the Madrid Peace Conference. Subsequently, he served as coordinator of the multilateral peace negotiations and as the U.S. Representative in the Multilateral Refugee Working Group. Kurtzer received several of the U.S. Government’s most prestigious awards, including the President’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State Distinguished Service Award, the National Intelligence Community’s Award for Achievement, and the Director General of the Foreign Service Award for Political Reporting. Ph.D. Columbia University.
Stanley Katz is president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He is also a commentator on higher education policy. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Katz is a scholar of American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. He is the editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States and of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Legal History (OUP, 2009). The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History and as vice president of the Research Division of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library, the Copyright Clearance Center and numerous other institutions. He is a commissioner of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission. He also currently serves as chair of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba. Katz is a member of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians; a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and an academico correspondiente of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has honorary degrees from several universities. Ph.D. Harvard University. Katz is director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
Trevor A. Dawes is the Circulation Services Director at the Princeton University Library, where he is responsible for the circulation, reserve, current periodicals, stack, remote storage and Borrow Direct operations in the library. He previously held several positions at the Columbia University Libraries. Mr. Dawes earned his MLS from Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, and has two additional Masters Degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an active member of the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries.
After undergraduate studies at the University La Sapienza, Roma (Italy), Annabella Selloni graduated from the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne-Switzerland (1979). This was followed by a postdoctoral position at IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights (1980-1982). She has been Assistant Professor at the University La Sapienza in Roma (1982-1988), Associate Professor at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy (1988-1995), and Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1996-1999). In 1999 she joined the Dept of Chemistry of Princeton University, initially as Senior Research Staff and Lecturer, and as a full Professor (since 2009). Her research interests are in theoretical and computational condensed matter physics and chemistry, with particular focus on the use of first principles electronic structure and molecular dynamics methods to obtain an atomic scale understanding of the structural and electronic properties of surfaces and interfaces, including organic-inorganic and solid-liquid interfaces, surface reactions and catalysis, photochemistry and photocatalysis. Prof. Selloni has over 160 publications in the area of theoretical / computational chemical physics. She is part of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Chemical Physics and Surface Science.
Professor Clarence Rowley received his B.S.E degree from Princeton University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2001, and he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an Associated faculty member in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. His research interests involve modeling and control of complex systems, particularly fluids systems with specific areas of interest including modeling and model reduction for bifurcation analysis and control; numerical methods, both for fluids simulations, and analysis of dynamical systems; and applications of geometric methods in fluid mechanics.
Curt Hillegas received his B.S. in Chemistry from Lehigh University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton University. Curt is the Director of Princeton’s TIGRESS High Performance Computing and Visualization Center, a collaboration between the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering and the Office of Information Technology. He has helped to build a centrally managed research computing infrastructure that includes 65 TFLOPS of computational systems and 1 PB of shared storage as well as staffing for system administration, programming, and visualization support. He also serves on the Steering Committee for the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure working group. Curt’s past work at Princeton includes managing the enterprise Unix group, architecting enterprise server and storage solutions, designing and managing central email infrastructure, and general Unix system administration.
Speaker Bio: Before working in the University’s History Department, Carla worked for the Art Museum for seven years, and before that Graduate Admissions. Carla has degrees from Blackburn College in Music and a Masters in Communication and Information from Rutgers.
William Tang is the Director of the Fusion Simulation Program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the U. S. Department of Energy (DoE) national laboratory for fusion research. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and on October 15, 2005, he received the Chinese Institute of Engineers-USA (CIE-USA) Distinguished Achievement Award. The CIE-USA, which is the oldest and most widely recognized Chinese-American Professional Society in North America, honored him “for his outstanding leadership in fusion research and contributions to fundamentals of plasma science.” He has been a Principal Research Physicist at PPPL and Lecturer with Rank & Title of Professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences since 1979, served as Head of the PPPL Theory Department from 1992 through 2004, and was the Chief Scientist at PPPL from 1997 until 2009. He also played a prominent national leadership role in the formulation and development of the DoE’s multi-disciplinary program in advanced scientific computing applications, SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing). For the next two years he will be the PI (Principal Investigator) leading a national multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team of plasma scientists, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians from 6 national laboratories, 2 private industry companies, and 9 universities to carry out the program definition and planning of DoE’s Fusion Simulation Program (FSP).