Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Multiple Small Maps as an Information Seeking Tool (15 May 2005) The core of the problem is dimensionality. Most maps represent space in two dimensions, height and width. Color may be used to easily illustrate a third dimension. Issues of the components of color such as hue, saturation, and brightness, or red, green, and blue have been addressed elsewhere. While useful, color can only convey a limited amount of information in a single map. (Egbert & Slocum 1992; Brewer & Pickle, 2002) Visual devices such as lines, superimposed shapes, and even tiny graphs have been used to increase the dimensionality of geographical visual displays, although these methods require extra space (for example Werschkul, 2004). Extra dimensions are useful because we often want to consider multiple variables at the same time, be they separate measures or similar measures over different times. One approach that has been overlooked is the use of multiple small maps as a way of searching for information. This report briefly describes this approach and a research plan for investigating its usefulness. Attempts at using multiple maps have been made by Brewer & Pickle (2002) and MacEachren, et al. (2003), among others, but neither have tried using more than a few maps at a time. I think it might prove useful to display a large number of maps on a screen, perhaps 100 or more, to allow a user to view many variables across time at once, and then select the ones they wish to study in more detail (following Shneiderman, 1998). Note that although many types of maps are useful for conveying information, the discussion here is limited to choropleth maps. (These maps contain regions, each of which is drawn with a single color to represent some datum, such as the familiar red-and-blue electoral map.) If these techniques prove useful for choropleth maps, they might be adapted for other types of maps. Article URL: ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2005-17html/2005-17.htm Read 62 more articles from University Of Maryland sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: On Communication -- Welcome to the SIGCHI EC Blog     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy