Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Supported user-tasks involve searching, backtracking and history-logging. User interface
techniques attempt to preserve user-context and support smooth transitions between
locations.
'
Questioning
': these are full visual discovery and modelling structures. These systems
combine the visual insights communicated by presentation graphics with an ability to
probe, drill-down, filter and manipulate the display to answer the 'why' questions as well
as the 'what' question. The difference between answering a 'what' and a 'why' question
involves highly interactive operations and the capacity to simulate change. Interaction
techniques let the user directly control the display of data, for example through projections,
filtering, zooming and linked displays and brushing. Real-time response is necessary and
often the linkage of multiple visualizations metaphors. Distortion techniques can also help
in the interactive exploration process by providing a means for focusing while preserving
an overview of the data (so-called 'focus + context').
1.3 The visualization process
In essence, geographic visualization exploits the mind's ability to more readily see complex
relationships in images, and thus provide a clear understanding of a phenomenon, reducing
search time and revealing relationships that may otherwise not have been noticed. It is a
process which works essentially by helping people to see the unseen, premised on the simple
notion that humans can reason and learn more effectively in a visual environment than
when using textual or numerical description.
The ability of geographic visualization to elucidate meaningful patterns in complex data
is clearly illustrated by some of the 'classics' from the pre-digital era, such as John Snow's
'cholera map' of 1854 (Johnson, 2006), Charles Joseph Minard's 'Napoleon map' of 1869
(see Chapter 15) or Harry Beck's 'Tube diagram' of 1933 (Garland, 1994). Even though
these were all hand-drawn on paper, they are nonetheless still effective today and show the
potential of geographic visualization to provide new understanding and compelling means
of communicating to a wide audience. Their novel visual forms mean they also demonstrate
the extent to which geographic visualization can be a creative design practice in and of
itself. The best geographic visualizations go beyond merely representing to become a kind
of cognitive shorthand for the actual places and processes themselves, as is illustrated in
Beck's celebrated diagrammatic design of the London Underground (the Tube map), which
has become such a powerful spatial template for the 'real' layout of London in the minds of
many visitors and residents.
2
Geographic visualization works by providing graphical ideation to render a place, a phe-
nomenon or a process visible, enabling the most powerful human information-processing
abilities - those of spatial cognition associated with the eye-brain vision system - to be
directly brought to bear. Visualization is thus a cognitive process of learning through the
active engagement with graphical signs that make up the display, and it differs from passive
observation of a static scene, in that its purpose is also to discover unknowns, rather than
2
The 'problem' is that, although Beck's visualization works well for underground movement, it can be
confusing for surface navigation because it famously sacrifices geographic accuracy for topological clarity.
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