Programme
This one-day workshop follows the successful format of the previous MAPII workshops and builds on the positive feedback received from their participants. It will be an informal and participatory workshop, combining presentations of the accepted papers with group discussions. The aim is to assist the participants with developing their future research and design or professional work. The workshop also includes a fun hands-on map design activity, during which the participants will work together in small groups on map related tasks.
The workshop timtable is:
- 08:00 (-5 CET): Registration
- 10:00: Coffee Break
- 10:30: Workshop Start and Welcome
- 10:45: Paper Presentations I (15+10 minutes each)
- Proper Maps
Alan Dix - Mapping Environmental Health Crises — Public Understanding Through Myths and Science
Masood Masoodian, Saturnino Luz, Jakleen Al-Dalal’a, Viktorija Bogdanova, Jenny Butler, Reet Hiiemae, Shane Sheehan, Artemis Skarlatidou and Iryna Stavynska
- Proper Maps
- 11:45: Lunch Break
- 13:45: Paper Presentations II (15+10 minutes each)
- Mapping Cholera: A Scoping Review of the Use of Maps in Cholera Research
Shane Sheehan, Masood Masoodian and Saturnino Luz - Can AI-Assistants Help in Tasks Related to Game World Building and NPC Steering when Prompted with Game-World Maps?
Thomas Rist - From Streets to Screens: A Digital Platform for Mapping Urban Narratives and Scaling Civic Dialogue
Loukas Anastasiou, Anna Moro, Irene Bianchi, Alberto Ardito, Stefano Beghi, Federico De Ambrosis, Francesco Purpura, Grazia Concilio and Anna De Liddo - Analysing Visuals in Medical Corpora
Boshko Koloski, Senja Pollak and Saturnino Luz
- Mapping Cholera: A Scoping Review of the Use of Maps in Cholera Research
- 15:30: Coffee Break
- 16:30: Hands-on Map Design Activity
- 18:00: Discussion and planning for future directions and outcomes
- 18:30: Workshop ends
Abstracts
Proper Maps
Alan Dix
GPS and digital mapping allow unprecedented accuracy, and the precision of digital storage has replaced the vagueness of the cartographer's pencil. We can dispense with sketch maps for tourism or how-to-get-here instructions instead using proper online maps. But a map is not just a miniature version of a landscape, but an instrument for navigation, education, stories, and experience – not all maps are 'proper' maps set on Cartesian grids. This paper discusses several maps of varying levels of propriety to explore the theoretical and practical world of cartography and suggest how digital technology can enable a diverse ecology of improper mapping.
Mapping Environmental Health Crises — Public Understanding Through Myths and Science
Masood Masoodian, Saturnino Luz, Jakleen Al-Dalal’a, Viktorija Bogdanova, Jenny Butler, Reet Hiiemae, Shane Sheehan, Artemis Skarlatidou and Iryna Stavynska
Environmental Health Crises (EHC) are increasing rapidly in their occurrence, intensity, and global spread. Humanity is facing climate change, biodiversity loss, the spread of infectious diseases, and many other such EHC on an unprecedented scale. The level and scope of public understanding play a crucial role in inciting human action in dealing with these worldwide EHC and mitigating their destructive consequences. The example of the recent COVID-19 crisis has, however, shown that the world at large faces many obstacles related to public understanding and communication of EHC. Current approaches to creating public understanding of such crises – stemming from disparate fields of study – are unable to cope with divisive prevalent narratives and representations of the complex multidisciplinary nature of these crises – as is the case, for instance, of media narratives surrounding the causes of global warming or the handling of pandemics. In this paper we describe the CHRYSES project, which aims to investigate the interplay between myths and science in the ways our societies conceptualise and represent environmental health crises, and to utilise maps to unify the corresponding perspectives and approaches of myths and science to enhance public understanding of such global crises.
Mapping Cholera: A Scoping Review of the Use of Maps in Cholera Research
Shane Sheehan, Masood Masoodian and Saturnino Luz
The contemporary COVID-19 pandemic and recent epidemics have once again brought to the fore the use of maps in representing disease, and as discursive tools in the service not only of public health but also of a range of political and socioeconomic perspectives. This phenomenon has a long history, going back several centuries, often incorporating cultural traditions such as those surrounding mythological accounts as well as scientific myths surrounding health crises. While the form and the media have undoubtedly changed over time, one might argue that the essential principles remained the same. Perhaps the best illustration of this fact spanning centuries is the way maps have been employed in the study and public health accounts of cholera, from the famous efforts of Snow, Farr and others in using maps to try to establish the origins and causes of the disease, to modern uses. We present a systematic review of the literature on the use of maps and related representations in characterisations of cholera outbreaks and epidemics. This review aims to categorise the use of mapping and visual representation techniques in cholera-related research. It classifies the types of maps (e.g., geographic, conceptual, causal, system), identifies their purposes (e.g., spatial analysis, communication, modelling, educational), assesses how mapping practices have evolved over time and across disciplines, and explore gaps, biases, or underutilised mapping approaches in the field. For this review, we searched several databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Global Health( CABI), IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library,WHO IRIS, and the UN Digital Library. We included peer-reviewed articles, and reports of studies that use any types of maps or diagrams in relation to cholera. These could, for instance, be GIS maps, spatial models, choropleth maps, outbreak plots, concept maps, mind maps, system diagrams, flowcharts. We did not impose any restrictions on disciplines - selecting papers in areas such as public health, epidemiology, policy, cartography, education, and history - on countries of research or publication or on dates, but limited the search to articles written in English. We excluded articles that focused solely on laboratory, genomic, or molecular representations (e.g., omics, microscopy) without a mapping component, and purely textual studies with no use of visual representations. We initially identified 665 studies matching the search criteria whose abstracts have been screened by two independent reviewers. Findings will be synthesized thematically and descriptively. A typology of maps used in cholera research will be presented, encompassing the frequency and distribution of map types over time, their functions and purposes across disciplines, identified gaps or biases in mapping approaches, a visual catalogue of mapping examples, and recommendations for future use of mapping in interdisciplinary epidemics related work.
Can AI-Assistants Help in Tasks Related to Game World Building and NPC Steering when Prompted with Game-World Maps?
Thomas Rist
The application of AI techniques in computer games – particularly for intelligent procedural content generation (PCG) and NPC behavior steering – has significant potential to enhance gameplay adaptability based on player preferences and in-game actions. With the rise of versatile, multipurpose AI-assistants, these systems can now be leveraged to automate tasks related to game world construction and NPC decision-making. Human designers often start with map-like sketches of spatial context to perform such tasks efficiently. During gameplay, players may consult cartographic maps of the game world to orient themselves, i.e. to understand were they are in the game world relative to other game world locations were they could be, e.g. at a hiding place, or to learn about which NPC enemies or allies are in their vicinity. This contribution investigates the extent to which AI-assistants can effectively execute game-related tasks when equipped with both a task description and an accompanying map-like representation capturing task-relevant aspects of the spatial context.
From Streets to Screens: A Digital Platform for Mapping Urban Narratives and Scaling Civic Dialogue
Loukas Anastasiou, Anna Moro, Irene Bianchi, Alberto Ardito, Stefano Beghi, Federico De Ambrosis, Francesco Purpura, Grazia Concilio and Anna De Liddo
As digital technologies increasingly mediate participatory practices, there is a pressing need to understand how they can foster inclusive, yet scalable, and action-oriented engagement, in this context the use of mapping can be crucial. This paper explores how emerging digital technologies can enhance deliberative and creative processes in democratic decision-making, particularly in the context of urban transformation. The study focuses on collaborative mapping as a method to support public space transformation through collective participation. We examine two case studies from the European Commission research projects Palimpsest and Orbis, both of which have implemented a novel digital platform developed by the CALL research group at Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with the IDea (Intelligent Deliberation) research group at the Open University. This tool uses the accessible Telegram platform to collect geolocated images and text-based input and integrates it with the Bcause.app (a large-scale online deliberation platform), enabling participants to co-create maps that link spatial data with community dialogue — thus advancing the idea of "geo-deliberation". In Palimpsest, mapping is used to create narrative landscapes from waste objects carried by the Lambro River, in collaboration with artistic and theatrical practitioners. In Orbis, the tool supports community-led input in Milan’s Municipio 9, forming the basis for a participatory co-design process tied to a local urban mobility plan. Through a comparative lens, the paper investigates the diverse objectives, formats, and outcomes of each project, assessing the role of digital mapping in fostering civic participation and spatial awareness. It argues that simple, accessible technologies can expand the potential of participatory cartography, supporting new forms of collective knowledge production and contributing meaningfully to urban policy and design processes.
Analysing Visuals in Medical Corpora
Boshko Koloski, Senja Pollak and Saturnino Luz
In this paper we focus on the analysis of visuals in medical communications. Specifically, we examine the use of maps in the Sustainability and Health (SHE) corpus, collected by the University of Oslo, which contains electronic corpora of medical and related texts and features various mainstream and non‑mainstream discourses on global and public health. In the 1,152 documents we analysed, we identified 14,445 visuals in total, 14,357 of which included a textual counterpart-namely, an image caption or description. We show that typograms (language‑based visuals) represent 43.03% of the visual material, making them more common than cosmograms (33.37%), which depict spatial and object descriptions, and analograms (23.59%), which are abstract data representations. Among subcategories, cellulograms (visuals grouping text by category) are most frequent, representing 31.25% of visuals, followed by reigrams (figurations of natural or artificial objects) at 28.67%. We also observe statistically significant differences across text types: for top‑level categories, research articles and conventions contain more typograms, while web content, newsletters, and communications contain more cosmograms. At the subcategory level, newsletters and online magazines use more reigrams, whereas articles use more cellulograms. Beyond statistical analysis, we investigate topic detection using BERTopic. To jointly represent images and texts, we employ the multimodal OpenAI CLIP model, which aligns images and captions in a shared feature space. We identify several noteworthy topics based on text alone or on combined text and image data, and compare visual usage across topics.