Landscapes of Text - the Art and Science of Geographic Text Visualization

Landscapes of Text –
The Art and Science of
Geographic Text Visualization
Alexander Savelyev
Texas State University

Geo-textual phenomena
General vernacular.
Smells, sounds, emotions (qualitative social
metrics).
Symptoms (epidemiology).
Statements about:
Extreme natural events and hazards.
Political events, racial tension.
Social events (and daily living experience).
3

How to (geo)visualize text
1. Apply general visualization techniques.
2. Explicitly focus on typographic visual
variables.
4

General data visualization techniques used for
text visualization:
temporal visualizations,
network-based visualizations,
information spatialization.
5

6
ThemeRiver (Dork et al., 2010)

7
Network-based spatialization of the Reuters news dataset (Fabrikant & Skupin, 2005)

Data visualization techniques that focus on
typographic visual variables explicitly:
tag clouds,
structured tag clouds, and
geographic tag clouds.
9

Typographic variables in tag clouds
designs are often “abused, driven by a
single-minded fetish for filling space, at
the cost of using space in a cognitively
defendable manner”. (Skupin, 2011)
11

13
Parallel Tag Cloud (Collins, Viegas, et al., 2009)

14
WordBridge of Homer’s “Odyssey” (Kim et al., 2011)

15
WordGraph (Riehmann et al., 2012)

17
World Explorer (Ahern et al., 2007)

18
What’s in a Surname (Mateos, 2011)

Challenge of innovation
[There is] a certain myopia and lack of
imagination when it comes to the full
potential of using text within maps. (Skupin, 2011)
19

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“Steven Paul Jobs” (Roscover, n.d.)

21
Typographic Map of the USA (Mounce, 2011)

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Smell landscapes of Amsterdam (McLean, 2014)

Challenge of evaluation
Despite the impressive number of
contributions and wide variety of
approaches identified in the literature,
the field is still in its infancy. (Alencar et al., 2012)
[No adequate] basis for comparison
between existing studies. (Julien et al., 2008)
23

Challenges of adoption
1. Lack of text visualization tools.
2. Limitations of data processing tools.
3. Limited popular recognition (except for tag clouds)
25

Landscapes of Text - the Art and Science of Geographic Text Visualization

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