The visualization of social phenomena through classical thematic mapping often leads to unsatisfying representations. Classical political referendum maps, for instance, lead to an underestimation of the opinions expressed by populations of large urban agglomerations. Classical maps of BIP, religious belief, or social segregation give a distorted image of the world by linking the relative import...

Received: 25 November 2002 Revised: 2 December 2002 Accepted: 5 December 2002 Abstract Cartograms are a well-known technique for showing geography-related statistical information, such as population demographics and epidemiological data. The basic idea is to distort a map by resizing its regions according to a statistical parameter, but in a way that keeps the map recognizable. In this paper, w...

Despite dramatic increases in the availability and cartographic processing capabilities of Geographic technologies, state delimited red and blue maps remain the dominant form of electoral result visualization disseminated by the mainstream media. While scaling the human voting process to physical geographic space and spatial aggregation are inherent weaknesses of red and blue state mapping, the...

Unfamiliar or esoteric visual forms arise in many areas of visualization. While such can be intriguing, it unclear how to make effective use them without long periods practice costly user studies. In this work we analyze the table cartogram—a graphic which visualizes tabular data by bringing a grid quadrilaterals into correspondence with input data, like heat map that has been “area-ed” rather ...

Spatially-aware information retrieval seeks to exploit the spatial information contained within web documents and thus allow searching based on not only thematic, but also geographic information. In this paper we describe the development of an interface for a spatially-aware information retrieval system. Query interfaces to allow users to specify queries textually or geographically are describe...

Endowing a computer with an ability to reason with diagrams could be of great benefit in terms of both human-computer interaction and computational efficiency through explicit representation. To date, research in diagrammatic reasoning has dealt with intra-diagrammatic reasoning (reasoning with a single diagram) almost to the exclusion of inter-diagrammatic reasoning (reasoning with related gro...

Given a collection of regions on a map, we seek a method of altering the regions over time so they are still visible when the map is scaled. This is formalized and brought to rigor as well-defined problems in homotopic deformation. We ask the regions to preserve topology, area-ratios and relative position as they change over time. A solution is conjectured, using differential methods, leading t...

This work builds upon the worldmapper project which utilises cartograms that preserve the shapes of countries while distorting the area according to a specific variable. These maps are open to potential criticism when it comes to their informative value. One such criticism is the variation of the depicted topic within the territorial borders is not taken into consideration. A possible solution ...

To teach the design of algorithms in an algorithmic GIS course, it is suggested to complement lectures with a particular type of project. How such a project can be set up is discussed, as well as a number of interesting results from the projects themselves. The projects address relative position of two regions, island group labeling, non-contiguous area cartograms, urban street network generali...