Here’s What California’s Drought Looks Like

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This is a collaboration between Liam Andrew & Celeste LeCompte. Liam built a tool for collaboratively curating and annotating tweets (using Zotero) that we then used together to create this post. Read on to the bottom for more details!

Amid an ongoing drought, California’s water system is — like this man’s beer — more than half empty.

About 59 percent empty to be exact.

For some around the state, the issue has hit close to home.

But for others, a faltering water supply hasn’t changed much. Today, the California Water Board made another move to try and conserve the state’s dwindling resources.

The new rules target commercial and residential water use, including tighter limits on watering lawns and landscaping, providing water in restaurants, and washing hotel sheets daily for multi-day guests. Urban uses, including industrial ones, typically account for 20 percent of the state’s consumption. This may seem like a small share of the overall water supply, but it’s been a stubborn issue to confront. In part, because what looks like disaster to those in the know looks like a gorgeous, sunny winter day to everyone else.

Dry riverbeds and snowless peaks are a mere backdrop to hiking and outdoor adventures.

This misguided hiker seems to have missed the memo entirely.

our unlimited free water supply #hetchhetchy #yosemite #hiking #backpacking

A video posted by DenieceD (@deniecececil) on

What’s hidden behind these happy Tahoe hikers, though, is a looming disaster.

National Geographic photo editor and executive environment editor Dennis Dimick tweeted this photo.

For these folks, images of the drought have moved into the foreground.

That is on mighty low river. #water dryingofthewest

A photo posted by Carson Blume Photography (@carsonblume) on

Don Pedro Reservoir

Yay, some water! #California #drought

A photo posted by thatch (@thatchmaster) on

Scary how low the water level is at Don Pedro but had a fun night camping out there.

A photo posted by Nate Carlson (@nate_carlson) on

A view of water in Lake Don Pedro during the #CAdrought, as seen from the hwy 120 vista point:

A photo posted by Paul Baca (@paulbaca) on

Hetch Hetchy

As the new rules roll out, grass-free lawns, and #droughtshaming tweets (and their #h2no counterparts) could become increasingly common.

Liam writes:
I was thinking about how to build a tool that balances human curation with the conveniences of automation, especially when you’re a large group of reporters managing a collection of tweets in a breaking or ongoing event. Suddenly Zotero came to mind, as a way to both store and archive a tweet in case it gets deleted, and keep a synchronized, structured database of curated information. Zotero is conveniently open source so it’s customizable and hackable.

Building on an existing single tweet translator and Zotero’s translator framework, I added support for archiving multiple tweets from an index page, via a dialog box.

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I also added additional structure and metadata to the Zotero record, like indexing hashtags. Lastly, I built a new translator that exports these Zotero’d tweets (and any annotations on them) as Twitter embed cards, for easy copy/pasting into WordPress.

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Zotero allows for groups to collaborate on curating and collecting archives (it even recognizes duplicate entries!) You can add any custom metadata fields as well. I would be curious to see additional support for social media in Zotero (e.g. support for capturing Instagram), as I think it could prove a useful research and curation tool for journalists.

Celeste writes:
I really liked the idea of having a tool that we could use to collaboratively collect, vet, and annotate tweets as we were assembling this piece. In practice, it worked great.

Liam and I both scanned a variety of hashtags, search terms, and location-based searches on Twitter and dumped them into a shared archive. I got to work vetting images for originality (i.e., not taken from a news story about the drought) and confirming that the authors were regular people who are experiencing the drought, rather than environmental activists, journalists or politicians.

The California drought was a fairly random event that we grabbed largely because the water board rules were announced during our discussion. It wasn’t an ideal test case, but it was a great way to test out collaborative curation and see how the two-person model for find tweets, vet, and then publish as a collection could work. This was very fast work once the tool was up and running and I think it would be very handy in a real-time publishing environment where fact-checking and annotation were a necessary part of the publishing plan!

5 thoughts on “Here’s What California’s Drought Looks Like”

  1. Celeste and Liam, this is great story telling! You have constructed a flowing visual/textual narrative using content from the curated data. Your comments are terse and to the point and augment the impact of the narrative. Liam would love to hear about your experience with Zotero.

  2. this is so impressive. espec when you live in east coast you hear about drought but it’s largely abstract. being able to manipulate or identify a lot of public reflections about it – wow. This could be a very cool way of revealing public opinion as it shows up on soc media.

  3. This is really good! Loved the narrative, and the tool seems amazing. May be very useful in a newsroom. Is necessary to have some background in programing to use it?

    • No! None at all. It helped that I had used Zotero before, but it’s a VERY easy tool to use — aimed at academics, not tech folks.

  4. I loved this. Read last week from Arizona and gave me a really good idea on what´s happening.
    Great storytelling too,

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