Visualizing Places

Suggested by: Franz-Benjamin Mocnik

Keywords: places, cartography, user testing

Objective: Developing and comparing different cartographic means to display places on a map.

Short description: 

When talking about spatial (and sometimes also non-spatial) entities, we refer to places.  Enschede, the ITC, shopping areas, and our homes are examples of such places for which objective descriptions are often hard to find.  In these cases, the spatial boundaries are usually unclear, and people have different understandings of what constitutes these places.  Independent of this fact, we are able to successfully refer to places in our everyday language, and we use them to conceptualize our environment.  It is, however, still unclear how places can be represented by formal means and visually be conveyed.

The proposed thesis topic seeks to explore opportunities of visually conveying places.  Aalbers (2014) has discussed several examples of maps that were influenced by and have influenced existing geographies.  The maps named by him, however, make only use of simple cartographic means.  Mocnik and Fairbairn (2018) have explored further ways of how to adapt maps in order to convey more idiosynchratic content.  As part of the thesis project, characteristics of places need to be discussed, as well as corresponding visual properties.  This includes the spatial extent of places, emotional attachments, place types, the identity of places, and various types of relations between places.  When representing such a characteristics of a place on the map, particular attention shall be paid to correspondences between the places and their visual counterparts in terms of affordances, structural referencing, and further means to create analogies.  The different ways of representing places shall be compared by user testing, including eyetracking, interviews, and screen logging.

Literature references: 

• MB Aalbers: Do Maps Make Geography? Part 1: Redlining, Planned Shrinkage, and the Places of Decline. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 13(4), 2014, 525–556
• FB Mocnik and D Fairbairn: Maps Telling Stories? The Cartographic Journal 55(1), 2018, 36–57

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