This book collects revised versions of papers first delivered at the “Understanding Different Geographies Symposium” held in Puchberg am Schneeberg, Austria in 2011. The Symposium focussed on “Communicating Meaning with [Geo]Graphic Artefacts”. The general topics of the chapters cover: - Exploring geographic knowledge - Maps in exhibition spaces - Information and exhibition design with (geo)graphic artefacts - Extracting meaning from visualisations of different geographies - Deconstructing maps of information - and other spaces
This book brings together the latest research in this new and exciting area of visualization, looking at classifying and modelling cognitive biases, together with user studies which reveal their undesirable impact on human judgement, and demonstrating how visual analytic techniques can provide effective support for mitigating key biases. A comprehensive coverage of this very relevant topic is provided though this collection of extended papers from the successful DECISIVe workshop at IEEE VIS, together with an introduction to cognitive biases and an invited chapter from a leading expert in intelligence analysis. Cognitive Biases in Visualizations will be of interest to a wide audience from those studying cognitive biases to visualization designers and practitioners. It offers a choice of research frameworks, help with the design of user studies, and proposals for the effective measurement of biases. The impact of human visualization literacy, competence and human cognition on cognitive biases are also examined, as well as the notion of system-induced biases. The well referenced chapters provide an excellent starting point for gaining an awareness of the detrimental effect that some cognitive biases can have on users’ decision-making. Human behavior is complex and we are only just starting to unravel the processes involved and investigate ways in which the computer can assist, however the final section supports the prospect that visual analytics, in particular, can counter some of the more common cognitive errors, which have been proven to be so costly.
How should we understand and visualise the uncertainty inherent in decision-making? Using the right visualisation tools can improve our decisions. But this positive impact should never be taken for granted: visualisations can also have unexpected side-effects, and there is the risk that they can be misinterpreted or otherwise misused.
This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.
Climate change communication is a topical and relevant issue, and it is widely acknowledged that public communication about causes, impacts and action alternatives is integral to addressing the challenges of the changing climate. Climate visualization concerns the communication of climate information and data through the use of different information technologies and different modes of visual representation. In the context of climate change communication, climate visualization is highlighted as a potential way of increasing public engagement with climate change. In particular, developments within information technology have provided significant advancements that are claimed to be transformative in engaging lay audiences with issues relating to the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research exploring climate visualization from an audience perspective. This thesis addresses this gap. The overarching aim is thus to explore the role of climate visualization in climate change communication from an audience perspective, focusing specifically on how lay audiences make meaning of climate change as represented in two examples of climate visualization. In addition, the thesis discusses the potential contributions and/or limitations of climate visualization from a communication perspective. Based on a social semiotic theoretical framework, this thesis employs focus group interviews to study participants’ meaning-making related to two cases of climate visualization: a dome theatre movie developed for Swedish high school students with the aim of encouraging reflection on climate change causes, impacts and mitigation alternatives, and a web-based tool for climate change adaptation developed to assist Nordic homeowners in adapting to the local impacts of climate change. The results of this thesis show that climate visualization can help audiences concretize otherwise abstract aspects of climate change, and that the localized focus can make climate change appear more personally relevant and interesting for targeted audiences. Nevertheless, despite these communicative qualities, the analyses also show that participants’ interpretations are shaped by their preconceptions of climate change as a global and distant issue to be solved by other actors, such as national governments, or through international policy negotiations. Although climate visualization can enhance a sense of proximity with climate change, the localization of climate risk can also lead to participants downplaying the significance of climate impacts. In addition, despite the intentions of inducing a sense of agency in both cases of climate visualization, participants critically negotiated messages concerning their roles as individuals in mitigating or adapting to climate change, and assigned this responsibility onto other actors. These findings show that although climate visualization presents certain communicative qualities, it is not a panacea for engaging lay audiences with climate change. This also underlines the importance of considering cultural and social aspects of the communicative event when studying and developing climate visualization tools as a means of communication. Kommunikation kring klimatförändringar är ett aktuellt och relevant ämne, och många bedömare anser att kommunikation kring orsaker, effekter och åtgärdsalternativ är en viktig del i arbetet med att möta klimatutmaningarna. Klimatvisualisering är en process för att åskådliggöra klimatinformation och klimatdata med hjälp av olika tekniker och metoder för visuell framställning. I forskningslitteraturen om klimatkommunikation lyfts visualisering fram som ett möjligt sätt att öka allmänhetens engagemang i klimatfrågan. I synnerhet har utvecklingen inom informationsteknik lett till betydande framsteg som kan ses som omvälvande när det gäller att engagera lekmän i frågor som rör utsläppsminskningar och klimatanpassning. Det råder dock brist på forskning om klimatvisualisering ur ett mottagarperspektiv. Denna avhandling adresserar denna kunskapslucka. Det övergripande syftet är således att utforska visualiseringens roller i klimatkommunikation ur ett mottagarperspektiv, med särskilt fokus på hur lekmän tolkar innebörden av klimatförändringar så som de representeras i två exempel på klimatvisualisering. Avhandlingen behandlar även klimatvisualiseringens möjliga bidrag och/eller begränsningar ur ett kommunikationsperspektiv. Med utgångspunkt i ett teoretiskt ramverk som inspirerats av socialsemiotiska teorier genomfördes fokusgruppsstudier för att studera deltagarnas meningsskapande i relation till två exempel på klimatvisualisering: en film som visas i en domteater, framtagen för svenska gymnasieelever med målsättningen att uppmuntra till reflektion kring klimatförändringarnas orsaker, effekter och alternativ för utsläppsminskning, samt ett webbaserat verktyg för klimatanpassning, som utvecklats för att stödja husägare i Norden att anpassa sig till klimatförändringarnas lokala effekter. Resultaten av denna avhandling visar att klimatvisualisering kan stödja mottagarna att konkretisera annars abstrakta aspekter av klimatförändringar och att ett lokalt fokus kan få klimatförändringarna att framstå som mer personligt relevanta och intressanta för målgruppen. Dock visar analyserna även, trots dessa kommunikativa kvaliteter, att deltagarnas tolkningar formas av deras förförståelse om klimatförändringar som ett globalt och avlägset problem som ska lösas av andra aktörer, såsom nationella regeringar, eller genom internationella politiska förhandlingar. Även om klimatvisualisering kan förstärka känslan av närhet till klimatförändringar, kan lokaliseringen av klimatriskerna även leda till att deltagare tonar ned de lokala klimatriskernas betydelse. Dessutom, trots att båda fallen av klimatvisualisering avsåg att skapa en känsla av att kunna påverka, blev ansvaret för klimatåtgärder föremål för kritisk förhandling från deltagarnas sida – de förlade ansvaret för att hantera klimatutmaningarna till andra aktörer. Dessa resultat visar att klimatvisualisering visserligen har vissa kommunikativa kvaliteter, men inte är någon patentlösning för klimatkommunikation. Detta understryker även vikten av att ta hänsyn till kulturella och sociala aspekter av den kommunikativa händelsen när man studerar och utvecklar verktyg för klimatvisualisering.
Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually. This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.
Information visualization is a language. Like any language, it can be used for multiple purposes. A poem, a novel, and an essay all share the same language, but each one has its own set of rules. The same is true with information visualization: a product manager, statistician, and graphic designer each approach visualization from different perspectives. Data at Work was written with you, the spreadsheet user, in mind. This book will teach you how to think about and organize data in ways that directly relate to your work, using the skills you already have. In other words, you don’t need to be a graphic designer to create functional, elegant charts: this book will show you how. Although all of the examples in this book were created in Microsoft Excel, this is not a book about how to use Excel. Data at Work will help you to know which type of chart to use and how to format it, regardless of which spreadsheet application you use and whether or not you have any design experience. In this book, you’ll learn how to extract, clean, and transform data; sort data points to identify patterns and detect outliers; and understand how and when to use a variety of data visualizations including bar charts, slope charts, strip charts, scatter plots, bubble charts, boxplots, and more. Because this book is not a manual, it never specifies the steps required to make a chart, but the relevant charts will be available online for you to download, with brief explanations of how they were created.
Visualization in Modern Cartography explores links between the centuries-old discipline of cartography and today's revolutionary developments in scientific visualization. The book has three main goals: (1) to pass on design and symbolization expertise to the scientific visualization community - information that comes from centuries of pre-computer visualization by cartographers, and their more recent experiences with computerizing the discipline; (2) to help cartographers cope with the dramatic shift from print cartography to a dynamic virtual cartography for which their role is changing from that of map designer to one of spatial information display (and/or interface) designer; (3) to illustrate the expanded role for cartography in geographic, environmental, planning, and earth science applications that comes with the development of interactive geographic visualization tools. To achieve these goals, the book is divided into three parts. The first sets the historical, cognitive, and technological context for geographic/cartographic visualization tool development. The second covers key technological, symbolization, and user interface issues. The third provides a detailed look at selected prototype geographic/cartographic visualization tools and their applications.
A selective review of modern decision science and implications for decision-support systems. The study suggests ways to synthesize lessons from research on heuristics and biases with those from "naturalistic research." It also discusses modern tools, such as increasingly realistic simulations, multiresolution modeling, and exploratory analysis, which can assist decisionmakers in choosing strategies that are flexible, adaptive, and robust.
Visualizing the data is an essential part of any data analysis. Modern computing developments have led to big improvements in graphic capabilities and there are many new possibilities for data displays. This book gives an overview of modern data visualization methods, both in theory and practice. It details modern graphical tools such as mosaic plots, parallel coordinate plots, and linked views. Coverage also examines graphical methodology for particular areas of statistics, for example Bayesian analysis, genomic data and cluster analysis, as well software for graphics.
