This project will be about the weight of data and internet usage in the modern era, with an emphasis on the environmental impact. Our group (called Team Data) will be investigating this issue with the goal of determining its severity and investigating potential solutions. Our final project we are working towards is a HTML website with an interactive map that is designed to provide insights into
Ainsleigh Douglas - Designer
Will focus on the design and visual aesthetic of the map and data visualization outputs. For this midterm assignment she took charge of the web design portion
Ryan Orlando - Content Creator
Will primarily aid with narrative development and data analysis. For this midterm assignment he took charge of applying the layers to the map.
Sebastien Dills - Data Analytics and Historical Background
Will work in data analytics and help provide a historical background. For this assignment I focused on editing our proposal.
In this project, we want to investigate the environmental impact of technology, particularly the internet and web-hosting services. Internet access and usage requires an enormous amount of energy, and there are now over 2000 data centers around the world. These data centers are a significant source of carbon emissions, and have a large impact on the total carbon footprint of the world. Our goal is to investigate where these data centers are and compare those locations to areas with high carbon emissions, with the goal of determining if internet usage is one of the leading causes of carbon dioxide pollution. This research will potentially push the world to develop new, more efficient ways to host internet access as the climate change crisis continues to worsen. The connection is studied and scientifically proven, but we want to provide a clear way to intuitively show the effects of this issue. There is a lack of clear data on this availble on the internet so we think our site can provide real value.
Web mapping will be used as a main methodology for this investigation. The nature of our research requires us to compare location data between data centers and carbon emissions, with the goal of analyzing this relationship to determine the severity of this issue. Using mapping will allow us to create a cohesive story regarding big data storage and the impact it has on climate change as a whole. Mapping will not make up the entirety of the project, but it will be the main method through which we reach our final conclusions. More research efforts will be devoted to reading literature and viewing other similar research projects so we can create a full picture of the issue at hand. We will also include written components, data visualizations and statistics that don't fit into a map.
These are the upcoming group assignments, along with a general outline of when they may need to be completed. The main timeline goal on this project will be to pace out the creation of the site to be ready for additions every week. For this week we are adding an external data source which is the first tangible step in our workflow.
| Week | Assignment |
|---|---|
| 1 | Project Proposal |
| 3-4 | Storyboard |
| 5-6 | External Data Source Addition |
| 6-7 | Incorporate Additional Interactivity |
Will be focusing on the geospatial relationship between the developing data centers and their environmental impact. This will involve us taking a look at their geolocation and comparatively mapping them on a mercator map. The workflow for something like this will involve us programming in HTML and using git to collaboratively create a web page. Programs like leaflet and JavaScript will allow us to create interactive maps in order to make more immersive visualizations for the viewer. We are doing all of this through Visual Studios Code,
In terms of geographic scope the entire world is of relevance in terms of the environment and access to the internet and emerging technologies. When it comes to tracking the impact of actual data centers much of the geographic information will be centered in the United States who accounts for around 40 percent of cloud and internet data centers. Additional regions of importance are Europe, East Asia and Australia; specifically Japan, China, Germany and the United Kingdom. We will see that many countries of South America and Africa are far less represented in terms of concentrations of data centers. The implications and reasons for this are worth investigating.
This dataset contains carbon emissions per capita for countries over time. This data will be useful for us in examining pollution rates, increases, and geographic tendencies. The data can be found here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC We ultimatly decided not to use this data and use a similar data set with information regarding Carbon emissions per unit of GDP. This helps contextualize our project better. This data can be found here: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/undesa::indicator-9-4-1-carbon-dioxide-emissions-per-unit-of-gdp-kilogrammes-of-co2-per-constant-2010-united-states-dollars-5?geometry=140.855%2C-39.570%2C-72.895%2C62.146
This second dataset contains the locations of all internet data centers in the world. It is not organized in a table or graph, so inputting this data could present a challenge, but it has potential to be very useful for our research. This data can be found here: https://www.datacenters.com/locations From this data source we made an additonal excel sheet with the count of data centers in different countries. This data can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xN3N2g7UtXSojj0bK3SVI-5LIGqJrMuJOjnGYc_XlC4/edit#gid=0