The mission of the Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab is “advancing justice in Earth’s complex systems using designs enabled by space.” The readings contained in this repository inform the research direction and theoretical foundations of the Space Enabled Research Group. The readings are divided into categories that reflect the mission statement of the group, but the unique contribution of the group will be to integrate the thinking of these readings into a coherent call to action.
This repository is organized as an Obsidian vault with each individual entry taking the form of a Markdown file, a commonly used format for basic typesetting. While you can certainly use any number of applications to browse these files, Obsidian is strongly recommended for a whole host of reasons.
Other useful Obsidian plugins are Cross-reference-Navigation and Dataview.
There are a variety of ways to navigate, use, and refer to this repository. Below are some of the commonly used ways / good jumping of points. If you have a good one of your own, add it to the list.
The field tag, #field , is one of the main heirachies in this repository. It is organized around three components of the Space Enabled mission. Obviously many references cut across multiple fields or mission components, so you may very well see articles with multiple field tags. Here is the general organization of this tag, and you can click on each major mission component to see more detailed descriptions:
- [[Advancing Justice and Development]] #field/advancing_justice
- Development #field/advancing_justice/development
- General Development Theory #field/advancing_justice/development/theory
- International Development #field/advancing_justice/development/international
- Sustainable Development #field/advancing_justice/development/sustainable
- Innovation Theory #field/advancing_justice/development/innovation
- Justice & Anti-Racist Thought #field/advancing_justice/justice
- Race & Colonialism #field/advancing_justice/justice/race
- Big Data, Algorithms, & Surveillance Capitalism #field/advancing_justice/justice/data
- Design Justice #field/advancing_justice/justice/design
- Development #field/advancing_justice/development
- [[In Earth's Complex Systems]] #field/earth_complex
- Modeling Complex Systems #field/earth_complex/modeling
- Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence #field/earth_complex/machine_learning
- Ecosystem Services #field/earth_complex/ecosystem_services
- Environmental Systems #field/earth_complex/environment
- Descision Support & Scenario Planning #field/earth_complex/decision
- Geospatial Information Systems #field/earth_complex/gis
- [[Using Designs Enabled by Space]] #field/space
- System Engineering & Architecture #field/space/system
- Design & Development of Space Systems #field/space/design
- Satellite Engineering #field/space/design/satellites
- Propulsion Systems #field/space/design/propulsion
- Space Program & Capability Development #field/space/design/program
- Remote Observation of Earth #field/space/remote
- Law, Ethics, Sustainability, & Society in Space #field/space/society
The foundational tag, #foundational , is put on any reference that Space Enabled folks consider to be, well, foundational. These can be revolutionary texts within certain fields, particularly good literature reviews, or just plain important pieces. If you are new to a field, one good place to start is to combine search for both a field tag and the foundational tag.
One of the virtues of Obsidian is its graph view. Through it you can visually browse and filter the various references, and how they link to one another.
First off, make sure that your system is set up to upload your changes back to the repository. To do that, after you install Obsidian, go and install the obsidian-git plugin. If you've never used git, don't be intimidated, there's a pretty nice tutorial on using git and Obsidian togethere here.
If you want to semi-automate the process of adding a new reference, I recommend setting up using Zotero as a citation manager and setting up the Zotero-mdnotes plugin. This will enable you to automatically export citations into the correct Markdown file template, specifically using the [[Zotero Metadata Template]]. For a more detailed walkthrough of this process, see Cat's workflow guide. When you get to the custom placeholder step of Cat's guide, see [[custom placeholders]] for the specific ones used in this repository.
Once all that is set up, the easiest way is to go to the [[Zotero Metadata Template]] and copy the contents into a new file. then just fill out the various parts. You can use the Template plugin (under Core plugins) to streamline the process, as desribed here. Make sure you slot it into at least one of the field tag categories (feel free to use multiple). And add whatever additional tags strike your fancy!
Tags: #description