Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
separate them (Galton
2009
). These beliefs are more often based on the intuition of
the researchers than on empirical data (Knauff et al.
1997
). However, there is some
evidence both in favor of and against this belief. Knauff et al. (
1997
) found that
topological relationships are a relevant and dominant factor in judging spatial
configurations, while others have found that topology was not always the main
criterion for conceptualizing spatial information (Klippel et al.
2013
) and that the
salience of topological relations changes, depending on the semantic domain
(Klippel
2012
).
Case Study
The case study looked at four insights gained by an analyst (the first author)
watching a case of a simple animated map. The goal was to dissect the insights
into chains of reasoning arising from the basic relations in the spatial and temporal
dimensions through introspection and reverse engineering. Reverse engineering
(Pinker
2009
) is to take something apart, e.g., a machine, and try to figure out
what the parts are for and what they do to make the machine work. Focus was laid
on the qualitative categorical representations that the basic relations were given
once they had been processed cognitively and on the role that the thematic infor-
mation and the analyst
s knowledge played in the reasoning. The dissected insights
are presented in the form of diagrams in the results section.
The approach taken here is that of distributed cognition, where cognition is seen
as an emergent property of interactions between an individual and the environment
(Liu et al.
2008
; Arias-Hernandez et al.
2012
). Central to this theory is the concept
of cognitive artifacts (Norman
1993
), which are external aids that help us overcome
the limits imposed on our memory, thought, and reasoning (Arias-Hernandez
et al.
2012
). Graphic inventions of all sorts, such as maps, are one class of cognitive
artifacts.
In the literature, the word
'
has been used with two parallel meanings: as
a term meaning a moment of enlightenment (mainly in cognition science) and as a
term meaning an advance in knowledge (mainly in the visualization community)
(Chang et al.
2009
). Here, the term is used with the second meaning: an “individual
observation about the data” being “a unit of discovery” (Saraiya et al.
2005
, p. 444).
Humans are essentially storytellers (Fisher
1984
) and they understand their
world through causal relationships (Sloman
2009
). In order to make sense of and
organize their knowledge, people create causally structured narratives that guide
the organization of insights into meaningful structures and patterns (Eccles
et al.
2008
). In order to understand the insights and the knowledge used in the
reasoning, we thus also need the analyst
insight
'
'
s narratives. They are not directly based on
the basic relations in the data but they reveal the background knowledge used by the
analyst.
The animated map used in the case study is a multimedia artwork named 1945-
1998 (Hashimoto
2003
) showing the time and location of every known nuclear
'
