Visualizing geo-temporal documents: an application to data from crisis maps

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Date
2012, 2014
Authors
Aman, Hina
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ISCRAM
IEEE PacificVis
Abstract

Crowd-sourced crisis mapping is a relatively new phenomenon and platform that enables the collection and visualization of real-time crisis data submitted by users through social media tools and cellular technologies. Crisis maps are generally used by both state and nonstate actors for sense-making and as a reference point for action. The current crisis map visualizations only show the location documents such as reports or short messages have been generated from. Such a limited representation fails to immediately show important content, such as themes from a document and their changes over time. As a result, sense-making becomes time-consuming and cognitively demanding. I present a set of visualization tools: Geo-Temporal Tag Visualization (GTViz), Geo-Temporal Pies and Geo-SparkClouds that treat the tags on the crowd-sourced reports as spatio-temporal textual datasets and provide interaction tools to explore the content of the reports. I also demonstrate the value of such tools with case studies and a controlled user study.

Description
Keywords
visualization, geo-temporal documents, crisis mapping, neo-geography
Citation
Hina Aman, Pourang Irani and Hai-Ning Liang. A Review of Common Tasks Supported by Information Communication Technology for Times of Emergency. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), 2012
Hina Aman, Pourang Irani and Fereshteh Amini. Revisiting Crisis Maps with Geo-Temporal Tag Visualization. In Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis), 2014