Bleisch, Susanne
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Square-glyphs. Assessing the readability of multidimensional spatial data visualized as square-glyphs
Glyphs have long been used to approach the challenge of visualising multidimensional data with geospatial reference. Depending on the glyph design, data-dense visualizations of several concurrent data dimensions can be created. The square-glyph is a compound glyph to represent up to four data dimensions, e.g. walkability indices, with reference to a gridded geographic space (Bleisch and Hollenstein 2018 [Exploring multivariate representations of indices along linear geographic features. Proceedings of the 2017 International Cartographic Conference, Washington D.C. (pp. 1–5)]). In this paper, we present a user study to evaluate the readability and interpretability of the square-glyphs. We compare user performance with square-glyph plots containing two and four simultaneously mapped data dimensions under different value compositions. Our results show that the user performance with square-glyphs does not decrease as the number of data dimensions represented increases from two to four. The study results indicate no significant differences in efficiency and effectiveness between the four-dimensional square-glyphs and the two-dimensional square-glyphs. The average values of five adjacent glyphs can be estimated with a mean error of eight percentage points. The results suggest that equal value distances between the displayed dimensions are more accurately perceived in a lower-value composition than in higher-value arrangements.
Exploratory bivariate and multivariate geovisualizations of a social vulnerability index
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national agency that conducts and supports public health research and practice. Among the CDC’s many achievements is the development of a social vulnerability index (SVI) to aid planners and emergency responders when identifying vulnerable segments of the population, especially during natural hazard events. The index includes an overall social vulnerability ranking as well as four individual themes: socioeconomic, household composition & disability, ethnicity & language, and housing & transportation. This makes the SVI dataset multivariate, but it is typically viewed via maps that show one theme at a time. This paper explores a suite of cartographic techniques that can represent the SVI beyond the univariate view. Specifically, we recommend three techniques: (1) bivariate mapping to illustrate overall vulnerability and population density, (2) multivariate mapping using cartographic glyphs to disaggregate levels of the four vulnerability themes, and (3) visual analytics using Euler diagrams to depict overlap between the vulnerability themes. The CDC’s SVI, and by extension, vulnerability indices in other countries, can be viewed in a variety of cartographic forms that illustrate the location of vulnerable groups of society. Viewing data from various perspectives can facilitate the understanding and analysis of the growing amount and complexity of data.
Investigating roundabout properties and bicycle accident occurrence at Swiss roundabouts: A logistic regression approach
The positive effects of active mobility on mental and physical health as well as on air quality are widely acknowledged. Increasing the share of active travel is therefore an aim in many countries. Providing bicycle-safe infrastructure is one way to promote cycling. Roundabouts are a common traffic infrastructure and are supposed to facilitate safe and smooth traffic flow. However, data on road traffic accidents indicate an over-proportional involvement of cyclists in accidents at roundabouts. In the present study, the influence of roundabout geometry and traffic flow on bicycle accident occurrence was investigated using a logistic regression approach on twelve parameters of N = 294 mostly small- and mini-sized single-lane roundabouts in the Canton of Berne, Switzerland. Average weekday motorized traffic was identified as a major factor in explaining bicycle accident occurrence at roundabouts. Further, the radius of the central island, the location of the roundabout (in town vs. out of town) and the number of legs were significantly related to bicycle accident occurrence. While these results are in general agreement with findings from similar studies, the findings regarding the central island’s radius and the number of legs underpin the need for roundabout type-specific studies: Some parameters may not prove relevant in intermediate- to large-sized roundabouts, but become critical in small or mini roundabouts, which are common in Switzerland and numerous in the present sample.
Toward flexible visual analytics augmented through smooth display transitions
Visualizing big and complex multivariate data is challenging. To address this challenge, we propose flexible visual analytics (FVA) with the aim to mitigate visual complexity and interaction complexity challenges in visual analytics, while maintaining the strengths of multiple perspectives on the studied data. At the heart of our proposed approach are transitions that fluidly transform data between user-relevant views to offer various perspectives and insights into the data. While smooth display transitions have been already proposed, there has not yet been an interdisciplinary discussion to systematically conceptualize and formalize these ideas. As a call to further action, we argue that future research is necessary to develop a conceptual framework for flexible visual analytics. We discuss preliminary ideas for prioritizing multi-aspect visual representations and multi-aspect transitions between them, and consider the display user for whom such depictions are produced and made available for visual analytics. With this contribution we aim to further facilitate visual analytics on complex data sets for varying data exploration tasks and purposes based on different user characteristics and data use contexts.
Evaluating the impact of visualization of risk upon emergency route-planning
This paper reports on a controlled experiment evaluating how different cartographic representations of risk affect participants’ performance on a complex spatial decision task: route planning. The specific experimental scenario used is oriented towards emergency route-planning during flood response. The experiment compared six common abstract and metaphorical graphical symbolizations of risk. The results indicate a pattern of less-preferred graphical symbolizations associated with slower responses and lower-risk route choices. One mechanism that might explain these observed relationships would be that more complex and effortful maps promote closer attention paid by participants and lower levels of risk taking. Such user considerations have important implications for the design of maps and mapping interfaces for emergency planning and response. The data also highlights the importance of the ‘right decision, wrong outcome problem’ inherent in decision-making under uncertainty: in individual instances, more risky decisions do not always lead to worse outcomes.
Visual feature engineering
Feature engineering is a key concept in machine learning describing the process of defining the characteristics of an observed phenomenon in a way that makes it usable by an algorithm (e.g., [3]). This process often includes domain knowledge to make the features, as well as the results of the algorithms, meaningful in the respective application area. In data analysis generally, including visual data analysis, the obtained results or insights are often dependent on the employed analysis method as well as the parameters and their imensions used. A simple but well-known example is the modifiable area unit problem [5]. Depending on the size and form of the spatial units chosen to aggregate the data, different visualizations and potentially interpretations of the information may result. In some cases, the chosen methods or algorithms and their parameters can be argued to be the right ones to support a specific analysis task, in other cases a sensitivity analysis may be helpful in determining the optimal values. Additionally, visual analytics, allowing tight integration of the interaction with the methods and parameters and the visualizations, has the potential to support the evaluation of the right or sensible analysis method and its parameters as well as to provide provenance information for the finally employed approach.
Gaining overview with transient focus+context maps
Gaining an overview of large spatial data sets presents a challenge common to various domains. 'Overviewing' spatial data involves viewing different areas of focus and context at different scales and requires access to detail from zoomed-out views. Standard pan and zoom interfaces provide limited support with this. Motivated by the application scenario of flood risk monitoring, we extend pan and zoom affordances with a combination of focus+context techniques and multiple maps to support 'overviewing' spatial data with a graph-like information structure. A combination of transient overlays to preview context-on-demand as well as detail-on-demand with the option to decouple additional maps enables fast navigation through the graph-like information space. User-created and -positioned, resizable multiple maps allow for simultaneous exploration of distant regions at flexible scales. The seamless integration of these concepts and the versatility of its components allow for continuously adaptable, user-defined layouts that support various analysis situations. We present a prototype implementation of this interaction model and illustrate its working in application to a hydrometric network, but we believe the model could be transferred to graph-like data in other domains.
Exploratory geovisualizations for supporting the qualitative analysis and synthesis of place-related emotion data
Locations become places through personal significance and experience. While place data are not emotion data, per se, personal significance and experience are often emotional. In this paper, we explore the potential of using visual data exploration to support the qualitative analysis of place-related emotion data. To do so, we draw upon Creswell’s (2009) definition of place to define a generic data model that contains emotion data for a given location and its locale. For each data dimension in our model, we present symbolization options that can be combined to create a range of interactive visualizations, specifically supporting re-expression. We discuss the usefulness of example visualizations, created based on a data set from a pilot study on how elderly women experience their neighborhood. We find that the visualizations support four broad qualitative data analysis tasks: revising categorizations, making connections and relationships, aggregating for synthesis, and corroborating evidence by combining sense of place with locale information to support a holistic interpretation of place data. In conclusion, the paper contributes to the literature in three ways. It provides a generic data model and associated symbolization options, and uses examples to show how place-related emotion data can be visualized. Further, the example visualizations make explicit how re-expression, the combination of emotion data with locale information, and visualization of vagueness and linked data support the analysis of emotion data. Finally, we advocate for visualization-supported qualitative data analysis in interdisciplinary teams so that more suitable maps are used and so that cartographers can better understand and support qualitative data analysis.