From April Fool's to Hollywood - The Making of the LA Typographical MapJosh Ryan, Axis MapsI knew Axis Maps originally for their typographical maps of various cities. So as the most recent member of Axis Maps, I knew I just had to create the worst possible version as an April Fool's day joke. After the presentation, the decision was made to transform the map into an actual product. So goes the origin story of the LA Typographic Map. This talk will detail the process of making a proper typographic map; from getting and processing the data from OSM to producing the map in Illustrator. Due to being made completely out of type, typographic hierarchies, color, and style are extremely important and will be covered, using the original April Fool's version for contrast.
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Microaesthetics, Part Deux: typeface design and semantic effectsElaine Guidero, Pennsylvania State University
Cynthia Brewer, Pennsylvania State University
Maps are a multilayered semiotic system, and map text comprises an important part of this system. Among its many utilitarian functions, such as labeling places and features, type contributes to the semiotic code of a map through its aesthetic appearance, often conceived as personality, or semantic effect. Effective typographic design for maps requires careful attention to the personality-linked characteristics of type, called microaesthetics, that influence reader perception. I propose a redefined subset of cartographic visual variables that involve type, and demonstrate how I derived a list of microaesthetics and linked them to semantic effects using ecological statistics. These links form the basis of a framework that could be used by cartographers and other designers to determine an appropriate typeface for their map.
View Slides »Multivariate Thematic Maps using Font AttributesRichard Brath, London South Bank University
Ebad Banissi, London South Bank University
We introduce label-based cartograms as a form of thematic map that overcomes some limitations of choropleth maps and area-based cartograms. Labels explicitly encode geographic entities facilitating identification for a less geographically literate audience. Labels can encode multivariate data using a variety of visual attributes, including typographic attributes, not otherwise used in other types of encoding such as the area encoding used in choropleth maps. It is feasible to encode ten variables within labels including quantitative attributes. Labels can be equally sized, so that larger items are not more salient than other entities. To ensure readability, the underlying label locations can be adjusted to ensure readability. Label-based representations can be readily transformed in to other types of visualizations. The approach can be extended to more abstract maps such as knowledge maps. A number of examples will be shown.
View Slides »Landscapes of Text - the Art and Science of Geographic Text VisualizationAlexander Savelyev, Texas State UniversityGeographic textual information is abundant - for example, data such as place mentions can be extracted from news articles and books, and social media data is frequently associated with explicit geographic coordinates. Such data was demonstrated to contribute to our understanding of a particular place from perspectives such as those of health, crime and political sciences. A promising approach to analysis of such data is geovisual text analytics: the science of analytical reasoning about large collections of geo-textual information facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.This talk will present a comprehensive overview of existing text visualization techniques and discuss the theoretical and practical challenges of geographic visualization of textual information - that is, making maps of text.
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