Anthropocene and Digital Technologies

In the emerging field of Anthropocene research, which aims to connect different aspects of how human intervention shapes the surfaces of the Earth and its ecosystems, we face the challenge of how to present contributions to a curriculum for teaching these developments so that the relations between the different ideas can be seen and followed in a web-presentation. By simply relying on the use of keywords chosen by the authors and editors of articles to combine a set of heterogeneous topics, there is a danger of not revealing any new interconnections between different fields, and representing only those that are already known. These hidden relations are crucial, however, in representing the dynamics of a research field in formation. A prototypical way of navigating through the website was therefore developed that combines traditional keyword searches with the results of network analysis. Based on search results, the reader is presented with a network of possible connections to his or her own search. On every page, the possible relations between the search results and other themes can be seen.