Publication: Dynamic metaphoric maps

One of the challenges that we faced during the implementation of the OpMap was to produce a map where every country has the size that corresponds to the number of people that hold opinions of that country. Such visualizations constructed starting from geographic maps are well known under the term of cartograms. The OpMap posed two additional challenges to such visualizations:

• The map of OpMap is not geographic and therefore the criterium of geographic accuracy that is relevant for cartograms does not apply anymore, and
• The OpMap is dynamic: countries can appear and disappear, shrink and grow, change their contact patterns.

Since no tool was available to satisfy these needs, we designed and implemented an algorithm that constructs such dynamic metaphoric maps. You can read about it in this paper. This work will be presented during the EuroVIS 2022, June 13-17 in Rome.

Written on May 23rd , 2022 by Tamara Mchedlidze