Turning Data into Poetry: An Interview with Samantha F. Jones
BY THE ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA LAB
EML: When we heard/saw you present your work at the geography conference (winter 2022), you explained that you used flood data to generate poetry. Can you explain this process?
SJ: I started with annual peak flow data for the Bow River collected by the Water Survey of Canada gauging station located in downtown Calgary a short distance upstream of the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. These data are accessible to the public online and can be downloaded for this station (and stations all over the country) from the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) Historical Hydrometric Data website. The annual peak flow data set includes one value per year that represents the highest flow (biggest flood) that occurred each year. As soon as I looked at the flood data using the ECCC’s online interface, I could see that the shape of the data would make an interesting structure for a poem and could be used to create constraints or rules for the writing.
After downloading the data, I normalized it—which is a process that generates a series of factors between zero and one based on calculations that use the minimum and maximum flood values in the data set. A value of zero represents the smallest flood year in the data set and a value of one represents the largest flood. I then used that series of factors to calculate the number of characters of text that should appear in each line of the poem. There were a few other steps to arrive at the final character count for each line (which you can read about in detail in the GeoHumanities paper if desired), but the end product was a poem recipe that indicated line lengths for a 105-line poem that represented data from 1915 to 2019. Years where no data were available show up as blank lines in the poem. Adding the meandering look to the piece was the last step and was done to create a river aesthetic to support the storytelling.
EML: Can you say more about what this approach does differently than other, possibly more conventional, methods used by social scientists?
SJ: I can’t comment on the social sciences much, because although I sit in the Faculty of Arts, my background and experience is largely in the natural sciences. In comparison with the typical methods I would use in my scientific research, a poetic approach feels like it has more breathing room. I am able to embark on a project without a research question, although sometimes I may have a question in mind. And it wouldn’t be unusual for a project to evolve into something completely different as it progresses. This is also possible for science research—I know that my science thesis objectives have changed since the beginning of my PhD as an example—but, it happens in a different way when I’m engaging in an art space. I’m able to linger in an exploratory realm for much longer in my creative writing practice than in my science work and because I largely do poetry and writing as a freelancer, I’m typically not bound to promised deliverables. The deliverable or outcome can just be. First person writing and acknowledging the self is becoming more popular in the sciences, but poetic practice allows me to be publicly emotional with a freedom that isn’t possible at this time in my science life. I say “publicly” because many scientists are passionate about their topics and feel deep personal motivation to address challenges like climate change or make medical advances, but we don’t often see this from the outside and my overall impression is that being a researcher who is viewed as emotional or as an activist is frowned upon. I do think that changing this perception is an important step that could help to diversify disciplines. One of the reasons that I’m happy about having landed in a geography department for my PhD program is that there is a broad range of methods and interests between researchers. I believe that geography as a discipline has a lot to offer as a potential homebase for future related (or unrelated) projects.
EML: Can you tell us a bit about your creative background and how you came to merge scientific data and art?
SJ: I have engaged with different types of art as creative outlets and recreation since I was a child. In particular, I have always been drawn to literature, but didn’t discover my love of poetry until adulthood. About a decade ago, I started to get serious about wanting to pursue writing beyond my own note taking and I enrolled in the Creative Writing Certificate program offered by Continuing Education at the University of Calgary. More recently I attended the Banff Centre Spring Writers Retreat and the Iceland Writers Retreat. A few years ago, I had a chance encounter with a piece called “Various Instructions for the Practice of Poetic Field Research”* by Eric Magrane in issue 27 of the literary magazine Ecotone. It’s in the “From the Editor” section and takes the form of a list that ends with the line, “16. Write a poem that is 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now.” I was stunned as I had never read something like it before and it led me to a whole bunch of folks working in the realm of geopoetics. It was a real lightbulb moment that inspired a change in the trajectory of my writing practice. It showed me that I could merge the scientific and the literary hemispheres of my life into a practice that would not only allow me to generate authentic and interesting pieces, but to integrate it into my career.
The intensive program at the Banff Centre that I attended in 2021 was a perfect match for me as it included mentors actively working in geopoetics and science poetics. That retreat was where the river data poem was born. I had already been tinkering with the idea of expressing scientific concepts and performing processes on the page, but toggling back and forth between the retreat (which was virtual) and my PhD research (which is not related) during the week really started to blur the boundaries. I started to think about how I could create poems that told the nuanced stories that were contained in data and how narrative and visual aspects could tease out details or present information that a scientific figure could not.
EML: Do you have other projects like this in mind? Or does each project call for its own kind of creative process?
SJ: I’m certainly interested in pursuing data and poetry intersections in future projects. I think this is an area where I could develop a specialty or unique style. One of the things I’ve been considering and tinkering with is how coastal erosion data could be used to create poetic forms. In particular, I’m curious about how shapes and lines (like receding coastlines) can be used as agents of erasure in texts. These shifting lines capture geospatial relationships and are intriguing as potential boundaries that could create containers for poetic narratives (someone can commission me to dedicate time to this project! Ha!).
I’m also curious about how visual aspects of poetry can be used to represent or perform a scientific concept or process. I explored this in the poem “Ocean Acidification,” which was published in 2021 in Watch Your Head and later adapted into a short multimedia clip with science and policy partners. As you move through the poem you see the progressive undoing of a system mimicking the impacts of ocean acidification on organisms and ecosystems. Geology appears throughout my writing and some of my work-in-progress uses weather map symbols to build metaphors for more personal phenomena—shifts in relationships, the body, and the mind.
Each project does have its own process to some degree, but I think in general I work in a way that focuses on connections, so I’m always looking at how I can bring seemingly disparate things together to tell a cohesive story. This comes through in my creative writing, but also influences the type of science I enjoy and practice.
*This poem is available to read online temporarily
Addendum:
In addition to using data in poetry, Jones also incorporates scientific concepts and imagery into her work. This interview was updated to include two examples of her work on October 19, 2022.
“Advancing Air I” and “Advancing Air IV” are part of a series of poems that borrow visual elements and symbols from meteorology and atmospheric science to explore different types of change. .”Advancing Air I” introduces a geometry that “Advancing Air IV” then builds on through its narrative. This pair of poems is an example of how the series intertwines the human experience with the surrounding environment.
References
Samantha F. Jones (2022) 05BH004 (1915–2019): Generation of Poetic Constraints from River Flow Data, GeoHumanities, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1990783
Environment and Climate Change Canada. 2021. Historical peak flow data for gauging station 05BH004, Bow River, Calgary, AB extracted from the Environment and Climate Change Canada Historical Hydrometric Data website. Accessed March 22, 2021. https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/mainmenu/historical_data_index_e.html
