Cartography & geovisual analytics in personal contexts: designing for the data creator

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the rise of the Quantified-Self movement and widespread adoption of self tracking technologies, 'personal' has become a new dimension in the map and geovisualization design process. Despite a rich cartographic literature on how to map movement data, and an equally extensive geovisual analytics literature on how to make sense of complex visual representations of movement data at scale, opportunities exist to adapt and create new map and interaction design paradigms to meet the disparate needs of an ever-growing number of data creators. This paper presents a cross-disciplinary review of literature that reports on the design and evaluation of personal geovisualizations. Specifically, this review paper: contextualizes individual movement data types and provides a short synthesis of cartographic and geovisual analytics approaches that have been employed to explore such data in non-personal contexts; surveys a growing yet disconnected body of foundational work beyond the GIScience discipline; presents a detailed discussion on a collection of works that exemplifies the potential of applying a geographic perspective to personal visualization; and outlines key challenges and opportunities for advancing the state-of-the-art & science in the design of maps and geovisual analytics applications constructed from personal data and that benefit the data creator.