Visualize spatio-temporal data with micromaps

This book addresses the visualization of spatio-temporal data for the purposes of communication, understanding, discovery, and analysis. A common approach to spatio-temporal visualization seeks to convey changes by showing a sequence of maps over time, which causes the problem of change blindness. The book builds on the work of Dr. Carr and Dr. Pickle on micromaps, addresses change blindness by adding dynamic interactivity to the comparative micromaps, develops new designs and demonstrates their use. Examples use the resulting interactive visualization tool named TCmaps (Temporal Change maps) to illustrate the designs and general utility by showing data from a variety of domains including health, education, environment, demography, and ecology. The examples show that one can see, point at and talk about all the changes designated by interactive thresholds since the changes are shown explicitly in separate maps sequences. Since the research and methodology development in this book builds on advances in the cognitive, statistics, and computing sciences, the results are of potential interest for a large domain of application and for professionals in Data Visualization fields.