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Jodi, familiar with my newfound obsession with usability of maps, sent along a fabulous pointer to research at Stanford in Rendering Effective Route Maps. Really smart work that takes the cognitive psychology behind drawing and reading route maps, and derives from that algorithms for depicting clear, easy-to-use driving directions. What I find intriguing is how the model for successful route maps are the kind that people typically draw--heavily distorted depictions of highways and streets, shortening long segments and lengthening short ones, bending all turns into 90-degree angles. This work is interesting in how, given this fairly well-understood task, "vernacular" cartography proves to be quite useful, definitely moreso than traditional methods. Which leads me to wonder, "Is there a 'vernacular' information architecture? How does it address the needs at hand?"
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COMMENT #1
This "vernacular cartography" has been around for a while. See: -The map of the London Underground subway system.
-The map of the Boston T system (also a subway) etc. Also, any "flat" map of the earth is distorted in ways that fulfill the needs of the audience for which it's created. So, one could say that this is a very old practice.
Posted by Anne @ 08/01/2001 10:47 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #2
I think you're missing the point. Kind of. Yes, maps like the London Underground maps are great for providing a simple navigation system, and they utilize distortion intelligently so as to make reading it easier. But they're maps of *extremely specific* well-defined systems. It's 'easy' to draw the London Underground map, well, much easier than it is to draw a map between any two points in space. W/r/t "flat" maps, I would say that they've proven to be *unusable* for the vast majority (my point which started all of my grousing about using maps as visualizations of information spaces). That, except in highly specialized situations, such maps don't fulfill an audience's needs. I guess what's the most exciting thing about LineDrive is that it's one of the first attempts at harnessing processing power to generate in real-time ultimately usable maps. It calls into question the existing concept of "maps" as printed objects that must be all things to all people. It encourages the separation of presentation from content, where the presentation is tailored to the specific understood need.
Posted by peterme @ 08/01/2001 05:54 PM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #3
I sent the 'LineDrive' link to a friend who has been in the computer mapping industry for a while. He told me that the paper and the ideas were nearly identical to work done by Marv White in 1989. There are some other shady details about this, but I'll leave the research for someone with more of a stake in the results. Here's some more info: Marv White has been with Etak for a long time (15 years?). The paper was sponsored by Vicinity, a competitor to Etak, which was coincidentally founded by an ex-Etak employee after he was fired. Coincidence? There's plenty of research left to do on this story.
Posted by Kurt @ 08/10/2001 12:25 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #4
I sent the 'LineDrive' link to a friend who has been in the computer mapping industry for a while. He told me that the paper and the ideas were nearly identical to work done by Marv White in 1989. There are some other shady details about this, but I'll leave the research for someone with more of a stake in the results. Here's some more info: Marv White has been with Etak for a long time (15 years?). The paper was sponsored by Vicinity, a competitor to Etak, which was coincidentally founded by an ex-Etak employee after he was fired. Coincidence? There's plenty of research left to do on this story.
Posted by Kurt @ 08/10/2001 12:25 AM PST [link to this comment]
COMMENT #5
Please excuse the duplicate posts; it seems the page and Mozilla 0.9.3 don't get along well.
Posted by Kurt @ 08/10/2001 12:32 AM PST [link to this comment]
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