Visualization of Mental Map Representation Patterns

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the automation of visual analytics of digital mental map representation sets. Digital mental map representations are digital drawings of some certain spaces made by humans, reflecting their spatial experience and distinctive thoughts they have about the considered spatial places. The subjectivity behind mental maps fundamentally distinguishes them from the geographical maps and makes them a very fruitful material for Digital Humanities research. To unveil the potential of this research, in the previous works we developed the Creative Maps Studio vector graphics editor to enable informants intuitively draw their mental maps. In the present work, we enrich Creative Maps Studio with ontology-driven analytical subsystem to enable in-place handling of mental map representations. The proposed subsystem provides visual tools to describe the processing pipeline of mental map representations using a data flow programming paradigm wherein each processing step is described by ontology. This approach proved its flexibility and efficiency in solving different visual analytics tasks. The implemented analytical modules allow automatically render a set of mental maps representations in the graphical form and to view statistical characteristics of individual objects from these representations. The process of data preparation and visualization is described. The suggestions are proposed on the interpretation of the result. The pros and cons of using the proposed method are discussed along with the possible directions for its further development.