Anthony C. Robinson

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Pennsylvania State University

Geospatial big data present a new set of challenges and opportunities for cartographic researchers in technical, methodological and artistic realms. New computational and technical paradigms for cartography are accompanying the rise of geospatial big data. Additionally, the art and science of cartography needs to focus its contemporary efforts on w...

Faceted search is a common approach for helping users query multivariate data. While the method is found widely in contemporary tools, so far there has been little exploration of its potential to incorporate a spatial perspective. In this article we extend multivariate faceted search through the application of a brute force computational process to...

A key cartographic challenge associated with the rise of big data is to show when spatial data observations are missing and/or to communicate variables that indicate absence. For example, showing where people are tweeting during a disaster may be interesting, but visually identifying where normal signals are missing may in fact highlight the most i...

Making and sharing maps is easier than ever, and social media platforms make it possible for maps to rapidly attain widespread visibility and engagement. Such maps can be considered examples of viral cartography-maps that reach rapid popularity via social media dissemination. In this research we propose a framework for evaluating the design and soc...

Recent work in data visualization has demonstrated that small, perceptually-distinct color palettes such as those used in categorical mapping can connote significant affective qualities. Data that are mapped or otherwise visualized are also often emotive in nature, either inherently (e.g., climate change, disease mortality rates), or by design, suc...

In recent decades, we have witnessed great advances on the Internet of Things, mobile devices, sensor-based systems, and resulting big data infrastructures, which have gradually, yet fundamentally influenced the way people interact with and in the digital and physical world. Many human activities now not only operate in geographical (physical) spac...

A key challenge for mitigating poaching within protected areas is to understand the geospatial data that are collected by practitioners in protected areas and to characterize the ability to synthesize those data with landscape-level data to form a holistic picture of the movement patterns of humans and animals. Literature reviewed from the past 15...

Interactive maps can serve as powerful environmental decision-support tools. However, designing an interactive map that meets the needs of diverse constituencies is a challenge. In this article, we evaluate and characterize user needs for an interactive map and spatial decision-support tool called Beescape. Beescape is designed to visualize resourc...

In the future, farmers will have increasing opportunities to use collaborative smartphone applications for agricultural management. Geospatial information in combination with agricultural-relevant information is a great source of knowledge for farmers. Including maps in collaborative mobile agriculture applications benefits communication processes...

Large US colleges and universities that re-opened campuses in the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021 experienced high per capita rates of COVID-19. Returns to campus were controversial because they posed a potential risk to surrounding communities. A large university in Pennsylvania that returned to in-person instruction for Fall 2020 and Spring 2...

The increased use of mobile maps in our highly mobile digital culture has resulted in a large variety of map users and map use situations. For mobile map applications that engage a broad user base and feature diverging map usage contexts, one-size-fits-all map interface designs might result in significant usability tradeoffs. To respond to this cha...

Following the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, early outbreak response relied on behavioural interventions. In the USA, local governments implemented restrictions aimed at reducing movements and contacts to limit viral transmission. In Pennsylvania, restrictions closed schools and businesses in the spring of 2020 and interventions eased later through the s...

Mobile map applications are typically used by a broad range of users. Users can be diverse in their context attributes (e.g. map use experience, activities during map use), and several previous user experience (UX) studies have focused on understanding how some contextual factors influence the UX for designing maps that satisfy users’ needs. A need...

Pollinators, particularly managed honey bees, are crucial for global food systems. However, declines in populations of both wild and managed pollinators have been reported across the world. In the United States, approximately 30% of managed honey bee colonies die each year. The factors underlying these losses are well understood and include reducti...

Large US colleges and universities that re-opened campuses in the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021 experienced high per capita rates of COVID-19. Returns to campus were controversial because they posed a risk to the surrounding communities. A large university in Pennsylvania that returned to in-person instruction in the fall of 2020 and spring o...

Visualizations (i.e., thinking in images internally in the human mind) or externally expressing a concept via graphical means—such as documenting an observation in a hand-drawn or digital visuospatial sketch, or creating a visual output from data—have always been an integral part of scientific inquiry and communication. One might argue that the ‘gr...

Following the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, early outbreak response relied on behavioral interventions. In the United States, local governments implemented restrictions aimed at reducing movements and contacts to limit viral transmission. In Pennsylvania, restrictions closed schools and businesses in the spring of 2020 and interventions eased later thro...

Contemporary systems for supporting digital learning are capable of collecting a wide range of data on learner behaviours. The emerging science and technology of learning analytics seeks to use this information to improve learning outcomes and support institutional assessment. In this work we explore the potential for the spatial dimension in learn...

In this open-access Special Issue, we feature a set of publications under the theme “Human-Centered Geovisual Analytics and Visuospatial Display Design” [...]

In this chapter, we review and summarize the current state of the art in geovisualization and extended reality (i.e., virtual, augmented and mixed reality), covering a wide range of approaches to these subjects in domains that are related to geographic information science. We introduce the relationship between geovisualization, extended reality and...

Social media has made it possible for maps to reach massive audiences outside of traditional media sources. In some cases, social media maps are original designs crafted by users, in other cases they are modified or replicated from previous sources. It is now relatively easy for novice Internet users to create new maps or manipulate existing images...

In the same way that discrete global grid systems (DGGS) are used to index data on the spherical Earth, they can aggregate point data, with their spherical polygons serving as bins. DGGS are particularly useful at multiple map scales because they are spatially hierarchical and exist on the sphere or ellipsoid, allowing large or small scale binning...

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...

Geovisual analytics refers to the science of analytical reasoning with spatial information as facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. It is distinguished by its focus on novel approaches to analysis rather than novel approaches to visualization or computational methods alone. As a result, Geovisual analytics is usually grounded in real-world...

This article introduces a special issue of the International Journal of Cartography that envisions the future of cartographic research. Following a process of collaborative ideation among International Cartographic Association (ICA) commissions, their members and other allied scholars and professionals, five articles have been crafted to highlight...

The 1980s saw the rise of research focused on translating digital data sources from their original tabular formats into visual representations that could prompt thinking and help users make new discoveries. This work, known broadly as visualization, was quickly adopted by geographers who shifted focus toward geographic datasets and the challenges p...

We compared the ability of two legend designs on a soil-landscape map to efficiently and effectively support map reading tasks with the goal of better understanding how the design choices affect user performance. Developing such knowledge is essential to design effective interfaces for digital earth systems. One of the two legends contained an alph...

It remains difficult to develop a clear understanding of geo-located events and their relationships to one another, particularly when it comes to identifying patterns of events in less-structured textual sources, such as news feeds and social media streams. Here we present a geovisualization tool that can leverage computational methods, such as T-p...

3D desktop-based virtual environments provide a means for displaying quantitative data in context. Data that is inherently spatial in three-dimensions may benefit from visual exploration and analysis in relation to the environment in which they were collected and to which they relate. We empirically evaluate how effectively and efficiently such dat...

New forms of cartographic education are becoming possible with the synthesis of easy to use web GIS tools and learning platforms that support online education at a massive scale. The internet classroom can now support tens of thousands of learners at a time, and while some common types of assessments scale very easily, others face significant hurdl...

Current research in the Cartographic and Geographic Information Sciences at Penn State emphasizes map design, geovisual analytics, spatiotemporal pattern detection, spatial cognition, CyberGIS, geographic information retrieval, image analysis, and novel methods for geospatial education. Cartography and GIScience research and education at Penn State...

Pattern analysis techniques currently common within geography tend to focus either on characterizing patterns of spatial and/or temporal recurrence of a single event type (e.g., incidence of flu cases) or on comparing sequences of a limited number of event types where relationships between events are already represented in the data (e.g., movement...

In most coordinated view geovisualization tools, a transient visual effect is used to highlight observations across views when brushed with a mouse or other input device. Most current geovisualization and information visualization systems use colored outlines or fills to highlight observations, but there remain a wide range of alternative visual st...

The massive open online course (MOOC) is a new approach for teaching online. MOOCs stand apart from traditional online classes in that they support thousands of learners through content and assessment mechanisms that can scale. A reason for their size is that MOOCs are free for anyone to take. Here we describe the design, development, and teaching...

The rise of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has led to its application in Cartographic education. Students in these classes generate enormous amounts of text data in the form of discussion forum posts. Here we explore the topics and geographic references found in over 95,000 forum posts collected during the 2013 launch of Maps and the Geospat...

This study investigates the effect of geographic distance on students’ distance learning experience with the aim to provide tentative answers to a fundamental question – does geographic distance matter in distance education? Using educational outcome data collected from an online master’s program in Geographic Information Systems, this study calcul...

Peer grading affords a scalable and sustainable way of providing assessment and feedback to a massive student population, and has been used in massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the Coursera platform. However, currently there is little empirical evidence to support the credentials of peer grading as a learning assessment method in the MOOC cont...

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...

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...

The conceptualization of spatio-temporal information is an interdisciplinary research area. The focus of this article is on human conceptualizations of spatio-temporal geographic phenomena (also referred to as events). Identifying and understanding human conceptualizations is a crucial component in defining the semantics of spatio-temporal informat...

Coordinated view geovisualizations allow users to interactively pick and attend to data observations across multiple views. This is frequently supported by the transient application of a visual effect to an observation during a mouse selection or rollover. This technique, known as highlighting, is typically implemented using a dedicated bright and...

Emergency management in transnational contexts can be a challenging endeavour. Cultural and language differences among multiple countries can hinder the exchange of information during dynamic emergency response. With increasing international threats and the explosion of near real-time data availability, the emergency response process has become mir...

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...

Geospatially-oriented social media communications have emerged as a common information resource to support crisis management. Our research compares the capabilities of two popular systems used to collect and visualize such information -Project Epic's Tweak the Tweet (TtT) and Ushahidi. Our research uses geospatially-oriented social media gathered b...

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...

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...

Current GIS solutions for evacuation planning are frequently based on expensive and difficult to use commercial software solutions. These tools require a GIS analyst to generate and interpret results for decision makers. This paper introduces a web-based interactive mapping tool called EvacSpace that can provide emergency managers with actionable s...

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...

A generalized conceptual framework for regional carrying capacity evaluation along with its implementation approaches is introduced in this article, demonstrated by the case study in the Yangtze River Delta region, China. Following the data preprocessing, ...

Geovisualization tools are intended to support analysts in complex task domains like crisis management, disease surveillance, and threat analysis. It is likely that analysts in these domains will use geovisualizations to develop many analytical results over time. This calls for attention to the problem of collecting, organizing, and making sense ou...

In this paper we present the GeoViz Toolkit, an open-source, internet-delivered program for geographic visualization and analysis that features a diverse set of software components which can be flexibly combined by users who do not have programming expertise. The design and architecture of the GeoViz Toolkit allows us to address three key research...

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...

Analysts are faced with increasing volume and complexity of spatially and spatio-temporally referenced events to analyze. One means of taming this volume and complexity is to develop methods and tools that can identify patterns, including spatio-temporal structure like clusters, in event data. To understand these methods and tools, we first present...

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...

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...

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...

Information synthesis is a key portion of the analysis process with visual analytics tools. This stage of work requires users to collect, organize, and add meaning to individual analytical results. This paper reports the results of a needs assessment study with technical and bio/chemical security analysts intended to characterize the ways in which...

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...

Visual analytic tools allow analysts to generate large collections of useful analytical results. We anticipate that analysts in most real world situations will draw from these collections when working together to solve complicated problems. This indicates a need to understand how users synthesize multiple collections of results. This paper reports...

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...

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...

The Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas (PA-CA) is an interactive online atlas to help policy-makers, program managers, and epidemiologists with tasks related to cancer prevention and control. The PA-CA includes maps, graphs, tables, that are dynamically linked to support data exploration and decision-making with spatio-temporal cancer data. Our Atlas develo...

Appendix. Issues and responses to user feedback

This paper presents a design framework for geographic visualization based on iterative evaluations of a toolkit designed to support cancer epidemiology. The Exploratory Spatio-Temporal Analysis Toolkit (ESTAT), is intended to support visual exploration through multivariate health data. Its purpose is to provide epidemiologists with the ability to g...

TexPlorer is an integrated system for exploring and analyzing large amounts of text documents. The data processing modules of TexPlorer consist of named entity extraction, entity relation extraction, hierarchical clustering, and text summarization tools. Using a timeline tool, tree-view, table-view, and concept maps, TexPlorer provides an analytica...

Understanding the spatial and temporal characteristics of individual and group behavior in social networks is a critical component of visual tools for intel- ligence analysis, emergency management, consumer analysis, and human geography. Identification and analysis of patterns of recurring events is an es- sential feature of such tools. In this pap...

Understanding the space and time characteristics of human interaction in complex social networks is a critical component of visual tools for intelligence analysis, consumer behavior analysis, and human geography. Visual identification and comparison of patterns of recurring events is an essential feature of such tools. In this paper, we describe a...

Designing usable geovisualization tools is an emerging problem in GIScience software development. We are often satisfied that a new method provides an innovative window on our data, but functionality alone is insufficient assurance that a tool is applicable to a problem in situ. As extensions of the static methods they evolved from, geovisualizatio...

Developing reliable methods for representing and managing information uncertainty remains a persistent and relevant challenge to GIScience. Information uncertainty is an intricate idea, and recent examinations of this concept have generated many perspectives on its representation and visualization, with perspectives emerging from a wide range of di...

This paper describes the creation of a general design framework for a geovisualization toolkit to support epidemiological work. The framework is based on the iterative, user-centered design and development of ESTAT, the exploratory spatio-temporal analysis toolkit. Specifically, this framework is informed by a series of knowledge elicitation and to...

Developing reliable methods for representing and managing information uncertainty remains a persistent and relevant challenge to GIScience. Information uncertainty is an intricate idea, and recent examinations of this concept have generated many perspectives on its representation and visualization, with perspectives emerging from a wide range of di...

The transition from geovisual analysis to presentation involves an intermediate stage called synthesis. In this stage of analysis, analysts collect and combine results to generalize their discoveries. Despite its presence in most theories of geovisualization design, synthesis is a topic that has remained largely unexplored in geovisualization resea...

Single analytical results are rarely "magic bullets." To complete most analytical tasks, analysts must combine results from multiple tools derived from heterogeneous data over a significant period of time. Current visual analytics tools do not offer much in the way of dedicated tools for this activity – a portion of the analytical process called sy...