News and Announcements

By Liam Farrell 

This article belongs in a museum.

Well, maybe not literally—but according to a new addition to the Washington, D.C. cultural scene helped by UMD faculty, the words and sentences that make up our written and spoken communications certainly deserve more attention.

That’s the goal of Planet Word, a museum that opened last week in the historic Franklin School. Using everything from voice-activated word walls to karaoke that highlights how artists put together pop song lyrics, Planet Word aims to show the depth, breadth and fun of human language.

It’s the passion project of Ann Friedman, a former teacher who helped fund the restoration and reimagining of the stately 1869 brick building. She first thought of a “word museum” seven years ago after reading about and visiting the National Museum of Mathematics in New York (her husband, Thomas Friedman, is a columnist for the New York Times). While Friedman is personally and professionally familiar with words, her search for academic expertise on language took her to UMD.

One of her first calls was to Colin Phillips, professor of linguistics and director of the Maryland Language Science Center (LSC), who helped brainstorm the scope of things that intersect with language, from engineering and sociology to art and psychology.

“It seemed too good to be true,” Phillips said, “but then it seemed more and more real.”

Along with Phillips, Associate Professor of English Linda Coleman and Rochelle Newman, professor and chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, are on the museum’s advisory board, and Shevaun Lewis, LSC assistant director, and Charlotte Vaughn, LSC visiting research scientist, also assisted on the concept. Friedman said consultations with UMD were “instrumental” in bringing her vision to reality.

“That expanded the idea of what the museum could be like,” she said. “Words are everywhere. They are in every subject and connected to everything we do.”

Planet Word aims to give an immersive experience in each of the former school’s preserved interior rooms on how language connects with life: a sculpted willow tree murmurs in hundreds of languages; a room blossoms with color, sound and movement when you “paint” it with words; a teleprompter gives you the chance to deliver a history-altering speech. The goal isn’t to lecture on how words should be used, but rather to show language’s many creative applications.

“Often we take language for granted,” Phillips said. “We want people to appreciate the amazing abilities they have.”

The museum could also provide fertile new ground for research, said hearing and speech sciences Professor Jan Edwards, who is part of a team working on proposals to use Planet Word as a site to explore how children and adults from different language backgrounds use words and sentences. Museums are fantastic places for academics to access a diverse participant pool, she said.

“It’s great for the researcher because we get a lot of people who might not come to the university to take part in a research study,” Edwards said. “And it’s great for the participants who can see science in action.”

Planet Word is open Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at 925 13th St., NW, Washington, D.C. General admission is free, with a suggested donation. To reserve a pass and learn about its COVID-19 safety guidelines, visit Planet Word’s website.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon in September, cell phones across College Park buzzed with a tornado warning from the National Weather Service (NWS) advising people to take shelter and avoid windows.

By 6 p.m. the threat had passed, the warning had expired and life resumed as normal.

That’s not always the case in areas where a tornado, flash flood or hurricane rips through a community, destroying property and taking lives—a tragedy often made worse because many Americans are either unfamiliar with or choose not to heed NWS severe weather alerts.

Now three faculty members from the University of Maryland’s Department of Communication are looking to improve how forecasters communicate such threats, through a $368,675 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA).

Over the next two years, Associate Professor Anita Atwell Seate, Professor Brooke Fisher Liu, Assistant Professor Jiyoun Kim and Meteorologist Daniel Hawblitzel from NWS Nashville will seek to provide a scientifically validated risk communication toolkit and integrate it into NWS’s training curriculum.

“The NWS has long sent out these warning messages aimed at ‘something’s gonna happen soon, take action,’” said Liu, whose research investigates how government messages, media and interpersonal communication can motivate people to respond to and recover from hazards. “But now with social media we have a lot more flexibility to design notifications. We have new channels and ways to make direct connections with folks to best inform them about severe weather.”

Ensuring these messages reach the public is especially urgent now as scientists across the world warn that intense weather events will continue to worsen due to climate change. The fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), released in 2018, said warming-charged extremes "have already become more frequent, intense, widespread or of long duration." With a little less than two months still left to go, the 2020 hurricane season is the second most active Atlantic hurricane season on record—after 2005—and has already exhausted the list of 21 names used to identify the tropical systems.

Beginning next month, the researchers will conduct two workshops with NWS forecasters and broadcast media partners from across the tornado-prone states of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. Whereas the Great Plains have the most tornado occurrences in the country, the Southeastern United States experiences the most death and destruction in the country from tornadoes, due in part to tornado activity throughout a large portion of the year and to strong storms known as “quick spin-ups.”

During the workshops—which were intended to be in person but will be held virtually—the participants and researchers will construct messages that aim to increase the public’s tornado literacy, encourage appropriate and increase trust and satisfaction with local weather forecast offices.

“We’re going to take a participant-action approach, relying on the lived experience of these meteorologists,” said Atwell Seate, a self-described “weather nerd” who uses social science research to study intergroup communication. “Together we’ll look at existing messages and figure out why we think they’re effective and how we can make them better.”

The team will then finalize a number of sample messages that will be tested in nine online experiments with an estimated 10,000 people throughout 2021.

In the final project stage, the research team will work with the NWS Training Center to develop new risk communication training modules for forecasters across the nation.

Kim, who studies how the public processes science messages, said the project is an excellent opportunity to examine how a combination of science and social science can enhance the public good.

“This is an awesome synergistic project because we have expertise on both sides,” she said.

By Jessica Weiss ’05 | Maryland Today

Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via AP.

Sensors deployed in the Arctic provide critical information to scientists such as thickness of ice, and air and water temperature. But the devices can cost $40,000 each, and researchers are lucky if the sensors make it a full year before being encased in ice or succumbing to a curious polar bear.

Cy Keener knows this firsthand. The UMD assistant professor of sculpture and emerging technology lost his last two sensors in 2019 to those exact perils. Now he’s hoping to make sensors more accessible and less expensive for himself and other researchers through a nearly $207,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The five-year grant will allow Keener to continue to develop and test a low-cost, open-source buoy to provide meteorological and oceanographic data, a project he has been working on since 2016. In collaboration with Ignatius Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington, the grant enables Keener to join Rigor’s team for annual travels to the Arctic, and funds new visual art pieces depicting the thinning of Arctic Sea ice.

Keener is working with the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization and outside counsel to form a company that will manufacture and sell a deployable sensor package for roughly $500, a fraction of their current commercial cost. This could “double the number of sensors” currently operating in the Arctic Ocean, he said, potentially enhancing a critical dataset used in weather forecasting and studies of climate and climate change.

Collaborating with the U.S. Naval Academy, Keener is also developing a sensor package that can survive being dropped from an airplane. 

“That’s the way to get more of them in the field, because access is really difficult,” Keener said. He hopes to be able to eventually deploy 200 sensors annually, a significant increase from the five or six he’s used in the past.

Keener traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Programme, whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. On that trip, Keener installed measuring instruments that he then used to create a series of art pieces. 

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he displayed “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice as collected daily via satellite from the buoys.  

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of 1,000 LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real time. 

“It’s an honor to be involved in this work and to use my art to get people to understand what’s happening up there,” he said. 

By Sala Levin ’10 
Jessica Weiss ’05 contributed to this article. 

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology Cy Keener has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work blending science, technology and art to convey the thinning of Arctic Sea ice.

The five-year grant, totaling nearly $207,000, will allow Keener to develop and test a low-cost, open-source buoy to provide meteorological and oceanographic data, a project he has been working on since 2018. In collaboration with research scientist Ignatius Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington, Keener will also travel to the Arctic and make visual art with data collected through the instruments deployed.

Given that such buoys normally cost thousands—or even tens of thousands—of dollars, the $300-$500 device Keener is seeking to develop could potentially “double the number of sensors” currently being used in the Arctic Ocean, he said. That could enhance a critical dataset used in weather forecasting and studies of climate and climate change.

“It’s an honor to be involved in this work,” said Keener, who teaches art and electronics at UMD. “And to use my art to get people to understand what’s happening up there.”

Keener first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, who is the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP), whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. On that trip, Keener installed measuring instruments that he then used to create a series of art pieces. 

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he displayed “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice as collected daily via satellite from the buoys.  

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of one thousand LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real time. 

Currently, he is seeking to improve a custom circuit and code that he has been working on since 2016, that will go in the sensors. He is hoping to travel to the Arctic in Spring 2021.

Photos courtesy of Cy Keener.

On Monday, September 14, 2020, the University of Maryland Libraries' will move to Phase 3 of reopening, which includes appointment-based access to McKeldin Library's study spaces and Hornbake's Maryland Room. Researchers will also have access to a newly launched "Virtual Maryland Room" to obtain services from Special Collections and University Archives.

Curbside pickup of materials from McKeldin's extensive general collections will continue and will expand to include items from branch libraries, followed by items requested from USMAI and BTAA libraries. Access to 900,000+ digital books through HathiTrust's Emergency Temporary Access Service will continue in Phase 3.

More details are available on the University of Maryland Libraries' website.