Programme
This half-day workshop will be informal and interactive, combining short presentations of the accepted workshop position papers with group discussions, aimed at assisting the authors and other participants with developing their research and design ideas. The main parts of the workshop are:
- 14:30: Workshop Welcome
- 14:40: Paper Presentations I (15+5 minutes each)
- Zones of Conflict — Maps in News Reporting
Jöns Mellgren - Making Maps with Gaps: Questioning Standardized Maps through Participatory Map-making Workshops
Adelaida Avila, Nicola Cerioli and Rupesh Vyas - Affective Cartography in Global Health Discourse
Shane Sheehan
- Zones of Conflict — Maps in News Reporting
- 15:40: Discussion
- 16:00: Coffee Break
- 16:30: Paper Presentations II (15+5 minutes each)
- A Flexible Approach to Redesigning Pedestrian Route Customisation
Jonas Hermann and Gian-Luca Savino - Uncertainty Visualization for Railway Planning
Rebecca Nowak, Alexander Meierhofer, Christoph Traxler and Johanna Schmidt - Towards a Design Space to Support the Interactive Visualization of Dynamic Spaces Allocation
Paolo Buono, Aline Menin and Marco Winckler
- A Flexible Approach to Redesigning Pedestrian Route Customisation
- 17:30: Discussion and planning for future directions and outcomes
- 18:00: Workshop ends
Abstracts
Zones of Conflict — Maps in News Reporting
Jöns Mellgren
Maps are a staple of infographic reporting around wars and conflict zones. They are used to convey different facts on the ground — casualties, territorial control, ethnic makeup and so on. Maps in news reports are generally presented as neutral and objective — as tools for reporting "just the facts". In actuality, "war maps" are almost universally presented with clear borders — a complete lack of fuzziness — reducing geopolitical complexity and thus representing a fantasy of objective knowledge. This presentation takes an artistic research project as a point of departure and explores how various conflicts have been presented visually. The work is based on a collecting hundreds of maps — reporting on the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza. Using various forms of visualisation methods this work presents the indexes of maps as images — a sort of "meta practice" or "mapping of the maps". The aim is to highlight the subjectivity inherent in map-based reporting, and show how differently various wars have been represented cartographically.
Making Maps with Gaps: Questioning Standardized Maps through Participatory Map-making Workshops
Adelaida Avila, Nicola Cerioli and Rupesh Vyas
Maps are widespread communication artefacts that convey visual narratives, wielding significant power in shaping our understanding of space. However, their apparent objectivity often belies underlying biases, subtly ingrained within the very fabric of their design. This issue has been brought to the forefront by research conducted in the fields of Critical Cartography and Data Feminism, which have highlighted the inherent problems stemming from biases and power dynamics within the realm of geographical data representation. Central to the inquiry presented here is the question of how participatory map- making workshops can effectively address the gaps in information present in conventional maps, thereby empowering individuals to engage in critical analysis of the traditional, standardized views of urban landscapes. We argue that collaborative environments, that encourage users to actively contribute to the generation of maps can foster awareness of the presence and nature of information gaps.
Affective Cartography in Global Health Discourse
Shane Sheehan
In recent years the encoding of emotion in visualisation has received increasing attention. This often underused aspect of visualisation design is undervalued in scientific visualisation, where clarity, accuracy, and minimalism are at the core of modern design paradigms. Affective encoding in map design is not uncommon. Modern participatory mapping techniques use emotional encoding and design to understand spatiotemporal human factors. Pre-enlightenment maps often used emotional encoding and decorative visual elements to encode information. While propaganda maps harness the rhetorical power of emotional appeals in an attempt to shape opinions and beliefs. Global and population health discourse makes extensive use of maps to communicate spatial health information to the reader. This presentation evaluates affective map visualisation in the global and population health discourse in the Sustainability and Health Corpus (SHE). The SHE corpus is designed to feature various discourses on global and public health, both mainstream and non-mainstream, allowing scholars to conduct studies on official and grass-roots discourses. The corpus is focused on discourse on Pandemics/Epidemics; Health and Environmental Sustainability; Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights; Adolescent and Young People's Health; and Knowledge Translation. This bimodal corpora contains text documents and images. These images are indexed and annotated, making them retrievable as part of a text search, or as a collection of images from a sub-corpus selection. To evaluate affective map visualisation in the SHE corpus, we collected all images annotated as maps in the corpus and identified in each the affective visualisation tasks and design techniques used. We found little evidence of affective map encoding in global health mapping in the SHE corpus. This contrasts starkly with the topics and images discussed, which are often quite emotive. This suggests that affective maps could be better used to influence discourse and enhance the emotional impact of global health reporting.
A Flexible Approach to Redesigning Pedestrian Route Customisation
Jonas Hermann and Gian-Luca Savino
When pedestrians embark on a journey from their starting point to their destination, they consider factors such as safety, familiarity, or scenicness for route selection, not just distance or time. Existing pedestrian navigation systems, however, are often limited to a single or a few criteria, lacking flexibility and customisation. To address this, we have developed FlexRoute, a novel system that allows for the customisation of route optimisation criteria using OpenStreetMap data. Users can select from various labelled entities like restaurants or natural features, tailoring the route to their preferences. This work presents FlexRoute as a solution providing enhanced navigation by considering diverse user preferences.
Uncertainty Visualization for Railway Planning
Rebecca Nowak, Alexander Meierhofer, Christoph Traxler and Johanna Schmidt
Decision-making under uncertainty is a pervasive challenge in critical applications, recognizing the pivotal role of incomplete information, risk assessment, and cognitive biases in practical domains like business and technical systems. The importance of uncertainty has already been addressed in several visualization and Visual Analytics applications, leading to a vast availability of uncertainty visualization techniques in different domains. Acknowledging these theoretical foundations, this work contributes empirical insights by presenting a real-world decision-making use case and conducting user interviews to gauge the impact of uncertainty visualization on different user types. Additionally, it evaluates existing uncertainty propagation approaches within the context of the real-world use case and user feedback.
Towards a Design Space to Support the Interactive Visualization of Dynamic Spaces Allocation
Paolo Buono, Aline Menin and Marco Winckler
Resource allocation has been faced in the past in many domains. Operation research has provided several solutions to optimize resources but humans pose unpredictable reasons that can make the optimal solution sub-optimal. Although algorithmic approaches are widely explored in the literature to solve the problem of resource optimization and have shown promising results, data presentation has not been well addressed yet. This work presents several case studies that report different domain-specific characteristics to propose cross-domain features that may help designers and developers in dynamic resource allocation.