CAREER: Elements of Interactive Cartography: Design Principles for Interactive, Online, and Mobile Maps

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Maps are now ubiquitous to society. They are found in cars, on phones, and across social media news feeds. Professionals in a variety of fields now use mapping technologies to address many of the Earth's most pressing problems, with the U.S. Department of Labor estimating that the American geospatial workforce exceeded 425,000 people by 2010. Recent advances in personal computing and information technologies have fundamentally transformed how maps are produced and consumed, which requires educators to rethink how mapping is taught in educational settings and professionals to retool in response to a new range of technical competencies. While much of the empirical research in in the field of cartography over the past half century has addressed representation design (the graphic encoding of geographic information), relatively few empirically derived and time-tested principles exist regarding interaction design (implementation of a digital interface for manipulating an online or mobile map). The investigator undertaking this project will undertake four research activities that address critical, overarching needs for interaction design in cartography and GIScience. The investigator will characterize current practices in interaction map design through a content analysis of online news maps. He will develop guidelines for interactive map design through a controlled experiment evaluating the utility of unique forms of interactivity for different map reading tasks. He will integrate representation and interaction design principles through a second experiment evaluating the utility of interactivity for different thematic map types (e.g., choropleth, dot density, isoline, proportional symbol), and he will identify best practices for cartographic design on mobile devices through a field study evaluating mobile map designs in various application settings. This Faculty Early-Career Development (CAREER) award will support a project that investigates the design of maps that are interactive and are delivered online or through mobile devices. This project will use mixed-method research to establish first principles for designing effective interactive, online, and mobile maps, thereby providing guidance regarding contemporary map design for the geospatial workforce. The project will respond to numerous calls for research about interaction design within cartography and geographic information science (GIScience), and it will contribute to the emerging and interdisciplinary science of interaction crossing human-computer interaction, information visualization, usability engineering, and visual analytics. The project will create unique undergraduate and graduate student learning opportunities through new coursework and design apprenticeships, and it will produce several open-access, publicly available products, including an extensible web mapping code repository, a blog with design and technical instructional material, and an electronic textbook on interactive cartography. An ultimate result of this project should be better interactive, online, and mobile maps.