Alan MacEachren

• PhD
• Professor at Pennsylvania State University

Visualization linting is a proven effective tool in assisting users to follow established visualization guidelines. Despite its success, visualization linting for choropleth maps, one of the most popular visualizations on the internet, has yet to be investigated. In this paper, we present GeoLinter, a linting framework for choropleth maps that assi...

Tag weight differences in tag maps are usually reflected by different font sizes. With this strategy, low weighted tags may be ignored and tag sizes may be misjudged due to differing word length, character height and word width. To address these shortcomings, this paper improves the layout method of tag maps by presetting anchor points. We construc...

Sensemaking using automatically extracted information from text is a challenging problem. In this paper, we address a specific type of information extraction, namely extracting information related to descriptions of movement. Aggregating and understanding information related to descriptions of movement and lack of movement specified in text can lea...

Sensemaking using automatically extracted information from text is a challenging problem. In this paper, we address a specific type of information extraction, namely extracting information related to descriptions of movement. Aggregating and understanding information related to descriptions of movement and lack of movement specified in text can lea...

Understanding movement described in text documents is important since text descriptions of movement contain a wealth of geographic and contextual information about the movement of people, wildlife, goods, and much more. Our research makes several contributions to improve our understanding of movement descriptions in text. First, we show how interpr...

Understanding movement described in text documents is important since text descriptions of movement contain a wealth of geographic and contextual information about the movement of people, wildlife, goods, and much more. Our research makes several contributions to improve our understanding of movement descriptions in text. First, we show how interpr...

Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) is a sub-domain of both Information Retrieval (IR) and GIScience that has emphasized retrieval of documents that mention or are about places along with some focus on geographic feature extraction. GIR advances have created an as yet mostly unrealized potential to leverage text documents as sources for informat...

Individual movement traces recorded by users of activity tracking applications such as Strava provide opportunities that extend beyond delivering personal value or insight to the individual who engages in these “quantified-self” (QS) activities. The large volumes of data generated by these individuals, when aggregated and anonymized, can be used by...

Deep learning can discover intricate patterns hidden in big data, and has much better scalability than traditional machine learning when the volume of data increases dramatically. Thus, deep learning has gained many successes in various domains and applications such as image classification, text classification, and machine translation. In this pape...

The Women’s March of 2017 generated unprecedented levels of participation in the largest, single day, protest in history to date. The marchers protested the election of President Donald Trump and rallied in support of several civil issues such as women’s rights. “Sister marches” evolved in at least 680 locations across the United States. Both posit...

Characterizing event attendees’ travel patterns is key to understanding the dynamics of social events in cities. However, the scientific investigation of event travel patterns has been hindered by the difficulty in gathering travel diaries of participants. Geotagged microblogs provide new opportunities for studying event travel patterns by offering...

Intrinsic tag maps fit a tag cloud inside a geographic boundary to emphasize the association of the tags with a particular administrative region. So far, little is known about their utility and usability. Here, we present the results of an empirical study to help fill this gap. The study uses information retrieval tasks to evaluate intrinsic tag ma...

This paper advances the state-of-the-art in methodology design for empirical evaluation of (geo)visual analytics software. Specifically, we describe the process of design, development and application of a prototypical user study tailored to the evaluation of complex geovisual analytics tools that focus on social media analysis. We fist perform a sy...

This presentation will provide an overview of a Workshop-based effort on ethics in location-based, organized by the Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights, and Law Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). More specifically, the AAAS organized three workshops during 2017 and 2018 directed to exploring the ethical i...

With the widespread use of tag clouds, multiple map-based variations have been proposed. Like standard tag clouds (also called word clouds), these ‘tag maps’ all share the basic strategy of displaying words within a ‘geographic space’ and scaling the word size to depict frequency (or importance) of those words within some dataset. While some tag ma...

Ground-truth datasets are essential for the training and evaluation of any automated algorithm. As such, gold-standard annotated corpora underlie most advances in natural language processing (NLP). However, only a few relatively small (geo-)annotated datasets are available for geoparsing, i.e., the automatic recognition and geolocation of place ref...

Ground-truth datasets are essential for training and evaluation of any automated algorithm. As such, gold-standard annotated corpora underlie most advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, only a few relatively small (geo-)annotated datasets are available for geoparsing, i.e. the automatic recognition and geolocation of place referenc...

In this article we present GeoTxt, a scalable geoparsing system for the recognition and geolocation of place names in unstructured text. GeoTxt offers six named entity recognition (NER) algorithms for place name recognition, and utilizes an enterprise search engine for the indexing, ranking, and retrieval of toponyms, enabling scalable geoparsing f...

This paper investigates the feasibility, from a user perspective, of integrating a heterogeneous information network mining (HINM) technique into SensePlace3 (SP3), a web-based geovisual analytics environment. The core contribution of this paper is a user study that determines whether an analyst with minimal background can comprehend the network da...

Facsimile of the study hand-out. This file contains the facsimile of the study tutorial and analytical task definitions. (DOCX)

Facsimile of the feedback questionnaire. (DOCX)

Complete questionnaire results. This file contains, in a compressed format, the raw data provided by the participants of the study by means of the study questionnaire. (ZIP)

This paper highlights a selection of core ideas articulated by Bertin and leveraged by many researchers over time, with particular attention to how the ideas relate to developments in cartography, big data, and visual analytics. A primary contribution is a bibliometric analysis of the impact of Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics at its 50th anniversary...

Text often includes references to places by name; in prior work, more than 20% of a sample of event-related tweets were found to include place names. Research has addressed the challenge of leveraging the geographic data reflected in text statements, with well-developed methods to recognize location mentions in text and related work on automated to...

The Visual Analytics (VA) approach has become an important tool for gaining insights on various data sets. Thus, significant research has been conducted to integrate statistical methods in the interactive environment of VA where data visualization provides support to analysts in understanding and exploring the data. However, much of the data explor...

This paper investigates recent research on active learning for (geo) text and image classification, with an emphasis on methods that combine visual analytics and/or deep learning. Deep learning has attracted substantial attention across many domains of science and practice, because it can find intricate patterns in big data; but successful applicat...

SensePlace3 (SP3) is a geovisual analytics framework and web application that supports overview + detail analysis of social media, focusing on extracting meaningful information from the Twitterverse. SP3 leverages social media related to crisis events. It differs from most existing systems by enabling an analyst to obtain place-relevant information...

In this article, we present the GeoCorpora corpus building framework and software tools as well as a geo-annotated Twitter corpus built with these tools to foster research and development in the areas of microblog/Twitter geoparsing and geographic information retrieval. The developed framework employs crowdsourcing and geovisual analytics to suppor...

A tension exists in the discipline of Geography between the concepts of space and place. Most research and development in Geographical Information Science (GIScience) has been focused on the former, through methods to formally structure data about the world and to systematically model and analyze aspects of the world as represented through those st...

It is sometimes easy to forget that massive crowdsourced data products such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap (OSM) are the sum of individual human efforts stemming from a variety of personal and institutional interests. We present a geovisual analytics tool called Crowd Lens for OpenStreetMap designed to help professional users of OSM make sense of t...

This article reports on the development and application of a visual analytics approach to big data cleaning and integration focused on very large graphs, constructed in support of national-scale hydrological modeling. We explain why large graphs are required for hydrology modeling and describe how we create two graphs using continental United State...

Among the most pressing research and development challenges facing geovisual analytics is the establishment of a science of interaction to inform the design of visual interfaces to computational methods. The most promising work on interaction to date has attempted to identify and articulate the fundamental interaction primitives that define the com...

While many datasets carry geographic and temporal references, our ability to analyze these datasets lags behind our ability to collect them because of the challenges posed by both data complexity and scalability issues. This study develops a visual analytics approach that integrates human knowledge and judgments with visual, computational, and cart...

In this paper, we address the topic of user-centered design (UCD) for cartography, GIScience, and visual analytics. Interactive maps are ubiquitous in modern society, yet they often fail to “work” as they could or should. UCD describes the process of ensuring interface success—map-based or otherwise—by gathering input and feedback from target users...

We introduce spatial patterns of Tweets visualization (SPoTvis), a web-based geovisual analytics tool for exploring messages on Twitter (or "tweets") collected about political discourse, and illustrate the potential of the approach with a case study focused on a set of linked political events in the United States. In October 2013, the U.S. Congress...

This article presents an approach to place reference corpus building and application of the approach to a Geo-Microblog Corpus that will foster research and development in the areas of microblog/twitter geoparsing and geographic information retrieval. Our corpus currently consists of 6000 tweets with identified and georeferenced place names. 30% of...

Spatial language, such as route directions, can be analyzed to shed light on how humans communicate and conceptualize spatial knowledge. This article details a computational linguistic approach using route directions to study regional variations in spatial language. We developed a web-sourcing approach to collect human-generated route direction doc...

Among the most pressing research and development challenges facing geovisual analytics is the establishment of a science of interaction that will inform the design of visual interfaces to computational methods. The most promising work on interaction to date has attempted to identify and articulate the fundamental interaction primitives that define...

Time-geographic approaches to human traveling behavior have traditionally used origin-destination data (e.g. Cascetta and Nguyen 1988) or activity-travel data collected via diaries and other forms of survey (e.g. Bowman et al. 2001). Origin-destination data is spatially coarse. It can be used to model interactions among places but is of limited use...

For decades, uncertainty visualisation has attracted attention in disciplines such as cartography and geographic visualisation, scientific visualisation and information visualisation. Most of this research deals with the development of new approaches to depict uncertainty visually; only a small part is concerned with empirical evaluation of such te...

The world has become a complex set of geo-social systems interconnected by networks, including transportation networks, telecommunications, and the internet. Understanding the interactions between spatial and social relationships within such geo-social systems is a challenge. This research aims to address this challenge through the framework of geo...

Associating place name mentions in unstructured text with their actual references in geographic space is vital to enable spatial queries and analysis. In this paper, we introduce GeoTxt, a web API plus human-usable web tool designed and implemented to tackle three components of place-reference processing from text, namely: extraction, disambiguatio...

In recent years, the amount of publicly available spatial, or spatially-enable, data has grown tremendously, due in large part to the proliferation of GPS-enabled technologies in mobile devices and in-car navigation systems, and from the location information integrated into web applications, especially social networking services. Networks like Twit...

Maps are often used to support each phase of emergency management activities, including disaster planning, response activities, and long-term recovery efforts. While there are many symbol standards for emergency management, interoperable map designs remain elusive for this domain. Informal symbol conventions are frequently applied by emergency mana...

Spatial analysis and social network analysis typically consider social processes in their own specific contexts, either geographical or network space. Both approaches demonstrate strong conceptual overlaps. For example, actors close to each other tend to have greater similarity than those far apart; this phenomenon has different labels in geography...

This article compares the current states of science and practice regarding spatiotemporal (space + time) crime analysis within intermediate- to large-size law enforcement agencies in the Northeastern United States. The contributions of the presented research are two-fold. First, a comprehensive literature review was completed spanning the domains o...

Maps are a primary means for supporting information sharing and collaboration in emergency management and crisis situations. While a variety of formalized map symbol standards for emergency contexts exist, they have not been widely adopted by mapmakers. Informal symbol conventions are commonly used within emergency management stakeholder groups, bu...

Digital "softcopy" maps are becoming the norm—replacing static paper maps in applications from wayfinding to scientific research. As a result, the design of interface tools that allow users to manipulate map parameters effectively and efficiently is likely to become as fundamental to cartography as the design of maps themselves. This article presen...

This paper presents two linked empirical studies focused on uncertainty visualization. The experiments are framed from two conceptual perspectives. First, a typology of uncertainty is used to delineate kinds of uncertainty matched with space, time, and attribute components of data. Second, concepts from visual semiotics are applied to characterize...

Geographic information is commonly disseminated and consumed via visual representations of features and their environmental context on maps. Map design inherently involves generalizing reality, and one method by which mapmakers do so is through the use of symbols to represent features. Here we focus on the challenges associated with supporting mapm...

Information foraging and sense-making with heterogeneous information are context-dependent activities. Thus visual analytics tools to support these activities must incorporate context. But, context is a difficult concept to define, model, and represent. Creating and representing context in support of visually-enabled reasoning about complex problem...

Background: Ease of access to health care is of great importance in any country but particularly in countries such as Niger where restricted access can put people at risk of mortality from diseases such as measles, meningitis, polio, pneumonia and malaria. This paper analyzes the physical access of populations to health facilities within Niger wit...

Figure S1. Map illustrating district and regional level administration boundaries.

Table S1. Distribution of health facilities and population by district in Niger. The table highlights the total number of hospitals, maternity and integrated health facilities located within each district (see Additional file 2: Figure S1). Average distance (km) between health facilities (+/− SE) is summarized by district. Districts lacking health...

The articles in this special section contain selected papers from the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST).

Automatic extraction and understanding of human-generated route descriptions have been critical to research aiming at understanding human cognition of geospatial information. Among all research issues involved, road name disambiguation is the most important, because one road name can refer to more than one road. Compared with traditional toponym (p...

Geographic information is commonly disseminated and consumed via visual representations of features and their environmental context on maps. Map design inherently involves generalizing reality, and one method by which mapmakers do so is through the use of symbols to represent features. Here we focus on the challenges associated with supporting mapm...

This article focuses on integrating computational and visual methods in a system that supports analysts to identify, extract, map, and relate linguistic accounts of movement. We address two objectives: (1) build the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical framework needed to represent and interpret human-generated directions; and (2) design and impl...

Automatic and accurate extraction of destinations in human-generated route descriptions facilitates visualizing text route descriptions on digital maps. Such information further supports research aiming at understanding human cognition of geospatial information. However, as reproted in previous work, the recognition of destinations is not satisfact...

There has been considerable interest in applying social network analysis methods to geographically embedded networks such as population migration and international trade. However, research is hampered by a lack of support for exploratory spatial-social network analysis in integrated tools. To bridge the gap, this research introduces a spatial-socia...

Geographically-grounded situational awareness (SA) is critical to crisis management and is essential in many other decision making domains that range from infectious disease monitoring, through regional planning, to political campaigning. Social media are becoming an important information input to support situational assessment (to produce awarenes...

Interactive mapping and spatial analysis tools are under-utilized by health researchers and decision-makers as a result of scarce training materials, few examples demonstrating the successful use of geographic visualization, and poor mechanisms for sharing results generated by geovisualization. Here, we report on the development of the Geovisual EX...

Geographic features have traditionally been visualized with fairly high amount of geometric detail, while relationships among these features in attribute space have been represented at a much coarser resolution. This limits our ability to understand ...

This paper reports on the development and application of strategies and tools for geographic information seeking and knowledge building that leverages unstructured text resources found on the web. Geographic knowledge building from unstructured web sources starts with web document foraging during which the quantity, scope and diversity of web-based...

Editors' overviewExplorationConfirmationSynthesisPresentationSummaryReferencesFurther readingSee also

In this article we describe the potential utility of the card sorting method for structuring and refining large map symbol sets. Simply defined, card sorting requires that participants organize a set of items (i.e., cards) into categories according to some characteristic(s) of the cards (i.e., the sorting criterion). Card sorting has been proposed...

The potential for physical flora collections to support scientific research is being enhanced by rapid development of digital databases that represent characteristics of the physical specimens held in those collections and make this information available remotely. One example is the unified database of California flora observations from the Consort...

Standardizing and coordinating information is a key challenge for supporting effective emergency management practices. Conventions can be established to ensure collaborators can find common ground quickly during an emergency, but developing such conventions remains difficult amidst continual evolution and diversification in information sources and...

In this paper, we introduce a web-enabled geovisual analytics approach to leveraging Twitter in support of crisis management. The approach is implemented in a map-based, interactive web application that enables information foraging and sensemaking using "tweet" indexing and display based on place, time, and concept characteristics. In this paper, w...

Information foraging and sensemaking with heterogeneous information are context-dependent activities. Thus visual analytics tools to support these activities must incorporate context. But, context is a difficult concept to define, model, and represent. Creating and representing context in support of visually-enabled reasoning about complex problems...

Here, we describe the potential utility of the card sorting method for structuring and refining map symbol sets. Card sorting has been proposed as a method for delineating categories by researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines due to its ability to identify and explicate real or perceived structures in an information space; however...

While high-risk geographic clusters of cervical cancer mortality have previously been assessed, factors associated with this geographic patterning have not been well studied. Once these factors are identified, etiologic hypotheses and targeted population-based interventions may be developed and lead to a reduction in geographic disparities in cervi...

Researchers from the cognitive and spatial sciences are studying text descriptions of movement patterns in order to examine how humans communicate and understand spatial information. In particular, route directions offer a rich source of information on how cognitive systems conceptualize movement patterns by segmenting them into meaningful parts. R...

The volume of health science publications is escalating rapidly. Thus, keeping up with developments is becoming harder as is the task of finding important cross-domain connections. When geographic location is a relevant component of research reported in publications, these tasks are more difficult because standard search and indexing facilities hav...

A wide range of local, regional, and federal authorities will generate maps to help respond to and recover from a disaster. It is essential that map users in an emergency situation can readily understand what they are seeing on these maps. Standardizing map symbology is one mechanism for ensuring that geospatial information is interpretable during...

A dendrogram that visualizes a clustering hierarchy is often integrated with a reorderable matrix for pattern identification. The method is widely used in many research fields including biology, geography, statistics, and data mining. However, most dendrograms do not scale up well, particularly with respect to problems of graphical and cognitive in...

Recent natural disasters indicate that modern technologies for environmental monitoring, modeling, and forecasting are not well integrated with cross-level social responses in many hazard-management systems. This research addresses this problem through a Java-based multi-agent prototype system, GeoAgent-based Knowledge System (GeoAgentKS). This sys...

INTRODUCTION: This paper describes the design and implementation of the G-EX Portal Learn Module, a web-based, geocollaborative application for organizing and distributing digital learning artifacts. G-EX falls into the broader context of geovisual analytics, a new research area with the goal of supporting visually-mediated reasoning about large, m...

Increasing data heterogeneity, fragmentation and volume, coupled with complex connections among specialists in disaster response, mitigation, and recovery situations demand new approaches for information technology to support crisis management. Advances in visual analytics tools show promise to support time-sensitive collaboration, analyti-cal reas...

ABSTRACT Linguists and geographers are more and more interested in route direction documents because they contain interesting motion descriptions and language patterns. A large num- ber of such documents can be easily found on the Internet. A challenging task is to automatically extract meaningful route parts, i.e. destinations, origins and instruc...

Kulldorff's spatial scan statistic and its software implementation - SaTScan - are widely used for detecting and evaluating geographic clusters. However, two issues make using the method and interpreting its results non-trivial: (1) the method lacks cartographic support for understanding the clusters in geographic context and (2) results from the m...

The VAST 2008 Challenge consisted of four heterogeneous synthetic data sets each organized into separate mini-challenges. The Grand Challenge required integrating the raw data from these four data sets as well as integrating results and findings from team members working on specific mini-challenges. Modeling the problem with a semantic network prov...

A fundamental challenge that must be met to achieve a usable conversational interface to Geographic Information System (GIS) is how to enable a more natural interaction between the user and the system. This paper presents a design of an agent-based computational model, PlanGraph, and implementation of this model in a software agent, GeoDialogue, as...

The design and development of a highly interactive web-based, GIS-enabled atlas is reported. The atlas is a prototype, designed as a model for implementation of atlases to support government cancer-control activities. This model integrates symbolisation and design principles from print cartography, interaction strategies from exploratory geovisuali...

Parallel coordinates, re-orderable matrices, and dendrograms are widely used for visual exploration of multivariate data. This research proposes an approach to systematically integrate the methods in a complementary manner for supporting multi-resolution visual data analysis with an enhanced overview+detail exploratory strategy. The paper focuses o...

There is an increasing need for new methods and tools that support knowledge construction from complex geospatial datasets related to public health. This study is part of a larger effort to develop, implement, and test such methods and tools. To be successful, the design of methods and tools must be grounded in a solid understanding of the work pra...

This paper describes the design and implementation of three web-based geovisualization and geocollaboration applications developed for the domain of public health. Each was implemented using Web 2.0 architecture. First, the Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas is a web-based geovisualization tool for the exploration of county- level cancer incidence rates usi...