The Power of Geographical Visualizations - Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications - page 2

1.1 Aims
'Geography' has the potential to provide the key to a whole raft of innovative means of
information representation through the use of interactive spatial visualizations. This use
is clearly seen in the rapid growth and uptake of geographic information systems (GIS),
multimedia cartography, virtual globes and all manner of Web-based mapping tools that
are currently available. Geographic visualization is a significant and growing area and for
this topic we take a necessarily broad view of what it constitutes. Drawing upon Harley
and Woodward's (1987, xvi) definition of mapping, we see geographic visualization as the
application of any graphic designed to facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts,
conditions, processes or events in the human world.
The goal of this topic is to explore the 'state of the art' of geographic visualization relevant
to the social scientists, in particular, reviewing current and popular methods and techniques,
examining software tools, and reporting on the development of new applications to sup-
port both research and pedagogy. In some senses this topic represents a 10-year updating
of the Advisory Group on Computer Graphics-sponsored 'Graphics, Visualization and the
Social Sciences' 1 workshop held in May 1997. It is relevant now to see what has changed
(for example, affordable mobile tracking and mass market in-car satellite navigation with
increasingly sophisticated dynamic graphics) and what unexpected developments have oc-
curred (powerful and accessible 'geoweb' tools for example, Google Maps, Google Earth,
NASA World Wind, TerrainView-Globe and Microsoft Virtual Earth). It is also important
to see where weaknesses and blockages still lie; so in the future these areas, through further
research, can be resolved and social sciences then can exploit geographic visualizations to
another level.
1.2 The nature of geographic visualization
To understand the power of visualization, one must grasp how it both stirs the imagination
for exploration and works instrumentally in the exploitation of new spaces. As Joseph
Conrad's narrator Marlow makes clear in the famous passage from the Heart of Darkness ,
maps (an archetype of geographic visualization) open up space to the imagination, even
from a very early age. Furthermore, geographic visualization, primarily in the form of paper
maps has, over millennia, provided uniquely powerful instruments by which to classify,
represent and communicate information about spaces that are too large and too complex
to be seen directly.
The ability to create and use geographic visualizations in the form of cartographic maps has
been one of the most basic means of human communication, at least as old as the invention
of language and arguably as significant as the discovery of mathematics. The recorded
history of cartography, for example, clearly demonstrates the long pedigree and practical
utility of geographic visualization in all aspects of Western society, being most important for
organizing spatial knowledges, facilitating navigation and controlling territory. Some have
gone further, to argue that spatial mapping processes are culturally universal, evident across
1 Organized by Anne Mumford, Michael Batty and David Unwin; workshop report available at: http://www.
agocg.ac.uk/wshop/33/33.pdf.