An illustrated approach to Soft Textual Cartography

Soft textual cartography is an approach aimed at extracting clusters of regions taking into account both their spatial relationships and a their textual description within a corpus. The strategy consists in constructing a complex weighted network, reflecting the geographical layout, and whose nodes are further characterized by their thematic dissimilarity, extracted form topic modelling. A soft k-means procedure, taking into account both aspects through expectation maximisation on Gaussian mixture models and label propagation, converges towards a soft membership, to be further compared with expert knowledge on regions. Application on the Wikipedia pages of Swiss municipalities demonstrate the potential of the approach, revealing textual autocorrelation and associations with official classifications. The synergy of the spatial and textual aspects appears promising in topic interpretation and geographical information retrieval, and able to incorporate expert knowledge through the choice of the initial membership

Soft Textual Cartography Based on Topic Modeling and Clustering of Irregular, Multivariate Marked Networks

Soft textual cartography is an original approach aimed to study communities on spatially embedded and textually defined complex weighted networks. The present approach relies on the integration of topic modeling and soft clustering procedures. These two aspects can be combined using topic distances, and weighted unoriented networks representing the spatial configuration; their synergy is promising in topic interpretation and geographical information retrieval. This paper proposes an unified formalism, underlining the compatibility of the two aspects, as illustrated on the textual descriptions of the municipalities of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. It also points to possible extensions and applications of the method, potentially useful for dealing with the ever growing amount of georeferenced textual content

Edutainment in cartography

Edutainment is a mixture of education and entertainment. In the software industry edutainment was very popular in the 80’s and the first part of the 90’s when the graphic capabilities of PC-s were very limited. The early computer games were based on textual information. From the second part of the 80’s low resolution pictures became a part of a computer game, but that was still quite far from the so called multimedia. As the CPUs and graphic cards became more powerful computer games started to develop rapidly. Nowadays the 3D, the virtual reality, the real time animation and the high quality sound are the essential parts of computer games. The computer games in edutainment are nearly totally disappeared. In the last some years the internet games turned to be more popular: the relatively low bandwidth and the lack of web multimedia standards gave new opportunities for the edutainment in this environment. Cartography can profit form this revival because maps are very popular content of the web

Embedding Spatial Software Visualization in the IDE: an Exploratory Study

Software visualization can be of great use for understanding and exploring a software system in an intuitive manner. Spatial representation of software is a promising approach of increasing interest. However, little is known about how developers interact with spatial visualizations that are embedded in the IDE. In this paper, we present a pilot study that explores the use of Software Cartography for program comprehension of an unknown system. We investigated whether developers establish a spatial memory of the system, whether clustering by topic offers a sound base layout, and how developers interact with maps. We report our results in the form of observations, hypotheses, and implications. Key findings are a) that developers made good use of the map to inspect search results and call graphs, and b) that developers found the base layout surprising and often confusing. We conclude with concrete advice for the design of embedded software maps.Comment: To appear in proceedings of SOFTVIS 2010 conferenc

Encounters with the Levant: The late medieval illustrated Jerusalem Travelogue by Paul Walter von Guglingen

The late medieval illustrated Jerusalem travelogue by the Franciscan friar Paul Walther von Guglingen has heretofore received scant scholarly attention, perhaps owing to the unusual nature of some of its images. Guglingen charts decidedly Islamic spaces with his maps and plan, instead of the conventional sacred shrines of Christianity; these topographical features are interlaced with personal travelling experiences. Illustrations of flora and fauna encountered along the way are the result of careful observation, and meticulous recording. The author experiments with forms to visually represent his own lived experience. In all cases, text and image are closely intertwined and testify that non-religious aspects form a legitimate aspect of this pilgrimage account. Consideration of the illustrations in Guglingen’s Itinerarium, alongside, for example, those in the travelogue of his famous travel companion Bernhard von Breydenbach, allows us to illuminate more facets of the late medieval pilgrimage experience

Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning:Foregrounding lived experience and community voices in studies of cities with participatory and digital visual methods

“Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning” synthesizes more than three years of industrial research conducted within Gehl and the Techno–Anthropology Lab at Aalborg University. Through practical experiments with social media images, digital photovoice, and participatory mapmaking, the project explores how visual materials created by citizens can be used within a digital and participatory methodology to reconfigure the empirical ground of data-driven urbanism. Drawing on a data feminist framework, the project uses visual research to elevate community voices and situate urban issues in lived experiences. As a Science and Technology Studies project, the PhD also utilizes its industrial position as an opportunity to study Gehl’s practices up close, unpacking collectively held narratives and visions that form a particular “data imaginary” and contribute to the production and perpetuation of the role of data in urban planning. The dissertation identifies seven epistemological commitments that shape the data imaginary at Gehl and act as discursive closures within their practice. To illustrate how planners might expand on these, the dissertation uses its own data experiments as speculative demonstrations of how to make alternative modes of knowing cities possible through participatory and digital visual methods

Route schematization with landmarks

Predominant navigation applications make use of a turn-by-turn instructions approach and are mostly supported by small screen devices. This combination does little to improve users\u27 orientation or spatial knowledge acquisition. Considering this limitation, we propose a route schematization method aimed for small screen devices to facilitate the readability of route information and survey knowledge acquisition. Current schematization methods focus on the route path and ignore context information, specially polygonal landmarks (such as lakes, parks, and regions), which is crucial for promoting orientation. Our schematization method, in addition to the route path, takes as input: adjacent streets, point-like landmarks, and polygonal landmarks. Moreover, our schematic route map layout highlights spatial relations between route and context information, improves the readability of turns at decision points, and the visibility of survey information on small screen devices. The schematization algorithm combines geometric transformations and integer linear programming to produce the maps. The contribution of this paper is a method that produces schematic route maps with context information to support the user in wayfinding and orientation

From Metacartography to Metaatlasgraphy

Metaatlasgraphy is a new theoretic-epistemological concept with synthesis of cartographic/cartosemiotic traditions and atlasgraphic/ atlassemiotic traditions. The monograph presents a new trend from a map-centric concept to a multidisciplinary atlas-centric concept. Further, it projects a new metascience direction: from metacartography to metaatlasgraphy.:Table of contents Introduction 4 1. Cartography 1970s-2020s: Digitalitization, Semiotization, Ubiquitization... 5 1.1. Selected scientific structures and concepts of cartography (1970-2020) 1.2. About paradigmatic transformations of cartography 1.3. Critical cartography as post-critical paradigm 1.4. Cybercartography: Canadian model of interactive atlascartography and theory- technological concept 2. Theoretical-Semiotic Evolution in Cartography 2010s - 2020s without Mainstream Cartography 15 2.1. Cartographic thinking and cartosemiotics 2.2. Atlases and atlascartography 2.3. Semiotic-related atlassing 2.4. Evolutionary trajectories in cartography and cartosemiotics 3. New Atlassemiotic Тrend: Photoаtlassing 35 3.1. Ubiquitous thematic photoatlases 3.2. Semiotik of photoatlases 3.2.1. Structure-semiotic features of photoatlases 3.2.2. Derivative photoatlases 3.2.3. Photoatlas design of one, two and three slide/parts layout 3.2.4.Methodic-analytical photoatlases 3.2.5. Meta-photoatlases 3.2.6. On robotic photoatlases 3.3. Cyberphotoatlassing – a new interdiscipline synthesis 3.4. Photoatlas science as academic discipline 4. About Metaatlasgraphy 59 4.1. Models of metatheoretical research and metacartographic epicenters 4.2. From metacartography and metacartosemiotics to metaatlasgraphy 4.3. Metaatlasgraphy 4.3.1. Terminological aspects 4.3.2. From cartosemiotic models to atlassemiotic models 4.3.3. Structural model of metaatlasgraphy 4.3.4. New metatheoretic epicenters 4.3.5 Metaatlasgraphic democratic principles 5. Conclusion 70 6. References 72 7. List of selected photoatlases 77 8. Short atlas semiotic dictionary 78 9. Information-semiotic profile and potential of book 8

Challenges toward Sustainability? Experiences and Approaches to Literary Tourism from Iran

Interdisciplinary narrative studies are of great importance in several disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Cultural tourism and its sub-disciplines, including the complex issue of ‘literary tourism’, is an interdisciplinary field of investigation, positioned in between geography and urban–rural studies. In Iran, this form of tourism has been neglected so far—with no distinction between urban and rural areas—despite a particularly rich literary heritage. The present study recognizes the challenge of literary tourism in Iran, delineating some possible actions to develop it as a future engine of economic growth, especially in rural districts. As a contribution to a refined comprehension of literary tourism development paths, a content analysis was run collecting views and textual data on literary tourism in Iran. The empirical results of this study indicate that the mentioned challenges can be classified into several main dimensions and a broader set of sub-themes. The possible actions responding to such challenges can be classified into more dimensions and a vast number of sub-themes. Actions reducing territorial disparities and fueling entrepreneurship in local communities are appropriate to stimulate the emergence (and, possibly, consolidation) of literary tourism districts in Iran, giving an original contribution to sustainable development especially—but not exclusively—in rural settlements