Missions

SPHEROGRAPHIA is a research project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) for three years from January 2023 (ANR-22-CE-55-0005-01).
This eighteen-month post-doctoral contract, with the possibility of extension for a further 4 to 5 months, is aimed at strengthening the team to work on the 3rd axis of the project, dedicated to the analysis of virtual globe. Depending on the availability of the successful candidate, it could start between November 2023 and February 2024.

CONTEXT :
Between Al Gore's seminal speech "The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st Century" in 1998, and the release of Google's Timelapse service in April 2021[1], the use of virtual globes has grown remarkably over the past 20 years. They are an extension of the classic iconographic representations of the world and are the heirs of both the methods and military viewpoint of modern cartography and of the geomatic technologies. Omnipresent in documentaries [2], scientific reports [3], international events [4], museums [5] or pieces of fiction, virtual globes thus appear as one of the latest avatars of the mapping of global change. Going beyond mere aesthetic purposes, these images of the Earth seen from space base their authority on publications from international journals and organizations, or through learned societies[6] and contribute to shaping our imaginations and the way in which environmental issues are contemplated and evaluated. Virtual globes are thus invested as much by the political as by the scientific and NGO domains. From an anthropocenic perspective, they tend to supplant planispheres: more synthetic, they favor a holistic vision of what is happening to the Earth as a whole.

These overhanging visualizations, widespread and conventional, smooth out space, erase its irregularities and make invisible our different levels of knowledge of territories. No, we don't know the world in a continuous, uniform way. The globalizing narratives - from grand narratives on globalization to eschatological discourses on anthropocenic evolutions - that feed (and nurture) virtual globes obscure the uneven geonumerization of the World. One of the aims of the SPHEROGRAPHIA project is precisely to demonstrate that the digital divide, often approached solely through the prism of unequal access to high-speed networks, goes hand in hand with an informational divide: the data deluge does not uniformly cover virtual globes, and blank maps or data deserts are still a reality in many parts of the world.
The objective of the SPHEROGRAPHIA project is to propose a critical analysis of these digital artifacts using a two-pronged approach : first, concerning their creation, in order to unravel the sociotechnical processes that participate in the cartographic story of global change and to reveal the disparity of the data underlying such visualizations; and secondly, the decoding of the performativity of these virtual globes on the imaginations and political commitments of those who promote or feed them.
The originality of the project lies in the fact that it uses an as yet little-worked object (virtual globes) to address the issue of informational equity in territories, combining a multi-faceted (spatial analysis, discourse analysis, geovisualization, participant observation, Arts/Sciences creation) and multi-scalar approach.
Several axis of analysis are envisaged in this project :
1- An inventory of virtual globes to assess their technical and semiotic specifications and understand the aesthetic visions of the world they convey.
2- Interviews with the promoters of these virtual globes to show how they do or do not fit into the continuity of images of the global environment.
3- A deconstruction of their content through an analysis of their source, highlighting the blanks in the maps, the data deserts that the globes mask.
4- A co-construction with artists of other forms of representation of the World to show its unequal geonumerization.
The aim of this postdoctoral contract is to contribute to Axis 3 of the project. The team comprises ten French researchers (social and cultural geography, political geography of the environment, geographic information science, cartography, semiotics, environmental history) and four groups of engineers (geomatics, cartography, statistics, digital humanities). Three foreign research laboratories are associated (Université Laval à Québec, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Université de Genève), as are three artists' collectives (visual arts, digital arts and maitre-artisan globe-makers).

[1] On April 15, 2021, Google Earth was enriched with the Timelapse feature, which makes it possible to visualize the evolution of land cover from 1984 to 2020 at any point on the globe. 20 million satellite images have been assembled to form 37 annual global covers.
[2] Virtual globes provide, for example, the narrative thread for the documentary Our Planet Has Limits. The Science Warning and the book Breaking Boundaries : The Science Behind our Planet, with a foreword by Greta Thunberg, which accompanies its release on Netflix (2021).
[3] The globes produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre based on climate change scenarios are, for example, used by the IPCC or IPBES.
[4] The many biodiversity visualization tools presented at the IUCN Congress are good examples (Marseille, sept. 2021).
[5] The American agency NOAA has created Science On a Sphere®: a museographic device that allows data to be projected onto a globe several
meters in diameter. Installed in 23 countries, this physical device is coupled with a website (https://sos.noaa.gov/).
[6] The International Society for Digital Earth created in Beijing in 2006 and the International Journal of Digital Earth, published since 2011, testify to the international influence and dynamics of this interdisciplinary alliance.

The person recruited will be involved in the design and implementation of a program to analyze the data sources that drape virtual globes. The aim is to design a program that extracts, analyzes and spatializes the thematic, spatial and temporal coverage of the planetary databases used by the globes, in order to highlight the effects of heterogeneity, concentration and data deserts.

Activités

The postdoctoral research work will focus on three main points :
1) the design of a data mining program for virtual globes,
2) the development of customized spatial analysis programs based on the globes analyzed,
3) experimentation with innovative geovisualizations to demonstrate the results obtained. Five or six virtual globes will be treated in priority around the themes of biodiversity, deforestation, oceans, population distribution and satellite imagery.
The person recruited will work closely with several project teams : with a PhD student from Laval University (Quebec) and the PASSAGES and PRODIG teams for the conceptualization of the notion of data desert (1), with the PASSAGES and LETG engineering teams for the development of the analysis program (2), with the PASSAGES, LETG, EVS and LISST teams for the search for innovative geovisualizations. For this last point, collaboration with the artists' collectives associated with the project (visual arts, digital arts) could be expected to explore novel uses for the results, which could feed into the traveling exhibitions associated with the project.

Compétences

Expected knowledge:
- Expertise in the field of web development.
- In-depth knowledge of database management systems.
- Knowledge of data science issues (particularly spatial and statistical data analysis).
- Knowledge of (geo)visualization and graphic semiology issues.
- Knowledge of personal data protection regulations and issues.

Know-how:
- Master a programming language to automate a processing chain (Python, R).
- Master a web-oriented programming language (Javascript, HTML , CSS).
- Master a database management system (PostgreSQL, PostGis).
- Know how to use a geographic information system (QGIS).
- Know how to build a database from the web.
- Ability to perform spatial and statistical analysis of data.
- Good writing skills.

Personal skills:
- Interest in open science and reproducibility issues.
- Interest in exploratory approaches and geovisualization of data.
- Taste for teamwork
- Creativity, capacity for self-learning, ability to make proposals.
- Appetence for Arts / Sciences collaborations

Contexte de travail

The candidate will work within the PASSAGES Joint Research Unit (UMR), which is headquartered at the Maison des Suds (Pessac) but also has premises in Bordeaux, Talence and Bayonne. He or she will take part in the active life of the research unit: seminars, general assemblies and the transversal workshop "mesure et démesure".
He or she will be supervised by Matthieu Noucher, researcher at the CNRS in Bordeaux (France), who specializes in the political issues of cartography and geomatics, and who is coordinating the SPHEROGRAPHIA project [1].
[1] https://spherographia.cnrs.fr/
Support for applications for academic positions will also be offered.

Contraintes et risques

Occasional trips to project partners (Paris, Brest, Nantes, Toulouse, Lyon) are envisaged. Two missions to accompany the installation of the traveling exhibition (Mana, French Guiana in 2024 and Val d'Or, Quebec in 2025) are possible.

Informations complémentaires

The candidate must provide a CV including publications, and a two-page cover letter describing his or her research experience and interest in the subject.