Geography: Information Visualization in the Social Sciences

Abstract

This review of scientific visualization in the social sciences contains an extensive review of recent literature and Internet sources on visualization and discusses the extent to which four key visualization technologies—the World Wide Web, multimedia, virtual reality, and computer graphics—are prevalent in the different social sciences. The review includes examples taken from political science, psychology, social statistics, economics, and geography. It concludes that visualization research in the social sciences is, at present, relatively uncoordinated with no central core. It tends to be dominated by those subjects with the closest links to the natural sciences, with a clear pattern of diffusion from scientific to social scientific research.