By Tracey Daway
Create Caribbean Inc. is a non-profit academic research and teaching centre in the Commonwealth of Dominica. Aside from the effective and efficient administration at the centre, Create takes on interns yearly to assist with the more detailed tedious tasks. The administration oversees our work on projects but tries to give us as much free movement over our methods and instruction as they can allow. Currently, we are working on the Carisealand Project. Carisealand is a digital research and community project. It’s purpose and aim is to explore the impacts of climate change and disaster in the region. To imagine and possibly map out how our regional communities could deal with these issues to foster and build a more sustainable future that, according to Dr. Schuyler Esprit, will engage in sustainable living, community accountability and planetary responsibility.
This semester, we have been learning to use ArcGIS, it is a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information. Each intern has been assigned countries to work on. I was assigned the island of Barbados and Belize. This aspect of the project is to essentially remap previous locations that had been already positioned on the map on our old site to our new site, with the move things have shifted and so we’re each going in to fix any issues with placement. Learning to use the software is the biggest obstacle. I am not familiar with this field, however it does interest me. I like the technical aspect of it and the attention to detail. There have been many challenges with inputting data and I have not made significant progress to date. As we continue working on this, I hope to get a better understanding of this software to utilise it with data input for my two countries. I would like to think of my contribution as an intern on this project as mapping, for now. The project is not far from complete but it is ongoing. I am moving at a reasonable pace with my mapping and I foresee a breakthrough soon.