Stories often convey emotions, and they convey a narrative that make us understand how it would be to be in the position of the protagonist. By providing a description of an idiosynchratic experience, stories are more than a formal representation of shared conceptualizations of what happens. This is in contrast to cartographic representations, which in many cases aim to provide an ‘objective’ view of our environment. If a story shall be convey by a map, other media are usually included. For instance, multimedia maps can convey stories by adding pictures, videos, and audio recordings.

Mocnik and Fairbairn (2018) have explored novel ways of how to adapt maps in order to make them more text-alike in their structure, thus hoping for being able to convey stories in more engaging and idosynchratic ways. This thesis project aims at implementing and testing the proposed and similar cartographic means. For implementing the cartographic means, either the rendering of maps would need to be adapted, or the depiction of prerendered map tiles would be extended by additional elements using Leaflet, D3.js, and similar technologies. Then, a story would be chosen and visualized by utilizing the implemented cartographic means. Finally, the produced visualization would be compared to a textual one. By making use of suitable techniques (eg. eyetracking, interviews, and audio recordings), both the implemented visualization and the textual representation will be evaluated in terms of how well they are able to convey emotions and idiosynchratic views.

Staff involved Barend Köbben (b.j.kobben@utwente.nl), Menno-Jan Kraak (m.j.kraak@utwente.nl)