Sarah Battersby

This paper explores scholarly literature published since the 1960s that examines peoples’ cognitive and perceptual understanding of map projections. Map projections present challenges to virtually everyone who uses them. Some of the challenges include selecting a projection, specifying projection parameters, and understanding distortion patterns. B...

What other locations are like my neighborhood? How? Why? The heart of many spatial analyses is in finding similarities or dissimilarities between locations. Discovering patterns and interpreting similarity is a complicated process that is based on both the spatial characteristics and the semantics or meaning that we assign to place. Human conceptua...

Binning is applied to categorize data values or to see distributions of data. Existing binning algorithms often rely on statistical properties of data. However, there are semantic considerations for selecting appropriate binning schemes. Surveys, for instance, gather respondent data for demographic-related questions such as age, salary, number of e...

How many crimes occurred in the city center? And exactly which part of town is the 'city center'? While location is at the heart of many data questions, geographic location can be difficult to specify in natural language (NL) queries. This is especially true when working with fuzzy cognitive regions or regions that may be defined based on data dist...

The Mercator effect is the widespread and persistent belief among cartographers and others that people’s global-scale cognitive maps are distorted in a particular way because of their exposure to world maps displayed with the common Mercator projection. In particular, such exposure has been claimed to lead people to believe that polar regions, such...

We created a global database of glacierized volcanoes, using a projection optimized for each volcano, to identify locations where land ice (glaciers and ice sheets) and volcanoes co-exist on Earth. Our spatial database melds the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Database (SGVD) and the Randolph Glacier Inventory 6.0 (RGI). We identified all Holocene vol...

A map projection fundamentally impacts the mapmaking process. Working with Map Projections: A Guide to Their Selection explains why, for any given map, there isn’t a single "best" map projection. Selecting a projection is a matter of understanding the compromises and consequences of showing a 3-D space in two dimensions. The book presents a clear u...

For decades, cartographers and cognitive scientists have speculated about the influence of map projections on mental representations of the world. The development of Web 2.0 and web mapping services at the beginning of the 21st century—such as Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Baidu Map—led to an enormous spread of cartographic data, which is availab...

Distance Cartograms (DC) distort geographical features so that the measured distance between a single location and any other location on a map indicates absolute travel time. Although studies show that users can efficiently assess travel time with DC, distortion applied in DC may confuse users, and its usefulness "in the wild" is unknown. To unders...

Secular Trends in Nosocomial Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcal Bloodstream Infections Among United States Veterans Affairs Hospitals, Fiscal Years 2004 through 2014 - Volume 38 Issue 9 - Nicholas S. Britt, Emily M. Potter, James A. McKinnell, Nimish Patel, Sarah E. Battersby, Molly E. Steed

A distance cartogram (DC) is a technique that alters distances between a user-specified origin and the other locations in a map with respect to travel time. With DC, users can weigh the relative travel time costs between the origin and potential destinations at a glance because travel times are projected in a linearly interpolated time space from t...

The field of map projections can be described as mathematical, static, and challenging. However, this description is evolving in concert with the development of the Internet. The Internet has enabled new outlets for software applications, learning, and interaction with and about map projections . This chapter examines specific ways in which the Int...

Natural language interfaces for visualizations have emerged as a promising new way of interacting with data and performing analytics. Many of these systems have fundamental limitations. Most return minimally interactive visualizations in response to queries and often require experts to perform modeling for a set of predicted user queries before the...

One method for working with large, dense sets of spatial point data is to aggregate the measure of the data into polygonal containers, such as political boundaries, or into regular spatial bins such as triangles, squares, or hexagons. When mapping these aggregations, the map projection must inevitably distort relationships. This distortion can impa...

Knowledge around geospatial technologies and learning remains sparse, inconsistent, and overly anecdotal. Studies are needed that are better structured; more systematic and replicable; attentive to progress and findings in the cognate fields of science, technology, engineering, and math education; and coordinated for multidisciplinary approaches. A...

Objective To explore potential differences in food shopping behaviors and healthy food availability perceptions between residents living in areas with low and high food access. Design A cross-sectional telephone survey to assess food shopping behaviors and perceptions. Data from an 8-county food environment field census used to define the Centers...

Online interactive maps have become a popular means of communicating with spatial data. In most online mapping systems, Web Mercator has become the dominant projection. While the Mercator projection has a long history of discussion about its inappropriateness for general-purpose mapping, particularly at the global scale, and seems to have been virt...

Several recent US policies target spatial access to healthier food retailers. We evaluated 2 measures of community food access developed by 2 different agencies using a 2009 food environment validation study in South Carolina as a reference. Whereas the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service’s (USDA ERS) measure designated 22.5% of...

In the United States presidential disaster declarations are typically issued after major disaster events to provide assistance (in the form of monies, staff, geospatial data, etc.) to states when the disaster overwhelms the resources of the state. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance and a frequent item noted by Federal agencies in...

Several spatial measures of community food access identifying so called “food deserts” have been developed based on geospatial information and commercially-available, secondary data listings of food retail outlets. It is not known how data inaccuracies influence the designation of Census tracts as areas of low access. This study replicated the U.S....

Background Cross-country differences in dietary behaviours and obesity rates have been previously reported. Consumption of energy-dense snack foods and soft drinks are implicated as contributing to weight gain, however little is known about how the availability of these items within supermarkets varies internationally. This study assessed variation...

A comprehensive survey of GIS/RS uses and spatial data needs for the year 2011 was conducted for all state-level and a large sample of county-level emergency preparedness offices. This survey provides independent (i.e. not administered by a Federal agency) information on the state of GIScience use, particularly remote sensing, in the state-level em...

In October 2013, the Gilbert M. Grosvenor Center for Geographic Education brought together forty scholars from the geography education, social studies, and science fields to discuss a plan to move forward with carrying out recommendations given in the National Science Foundation funded, A Road Map for 21st Century Geography Education. Comprising on...

In disaster response, timely collection and exploitation of remotely sensed imagery is of increasing importance. Image exploitation approaches during the immediate (first few days) aftermath of a disaster are predominantly through visual analysis rather than automated classification methods. While the temporal needs for obtaining the imagery are fa...

The ability to recognize distortions of, for example, areas, angles, and landmass shapes in global-scale map projections, is an important part of critical map reading and use. This study investigates the cues used by individuals when they assess distortion on global-scale map projections. It was hypothesized that landmass shape would be a dominant...

Understanding the causes, effects and geographic patterns of local hazards is important for helping individuals make educated decisions about how to respond to their threat. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find comprehensive sources of information about local hazards. In this paper, we discuss the development of an online hazards atlas for...

Animated choropleth maps enable cartographers to visualize time-series data in a way that congruently depicts change over time. However, users have difficulty apprehending information encoded within these displays, and often fail to detect important changes between adjacent scenes. Failures of visual experience, such as change blindness, threaten t...

Efforts to stem the diabetes epidemic in the United States and other countries must take into account a complex array of individual, social, economic, and built environmental factors. Increasingly, scientists use information visualization tools to "make sense" of large multivariate data sets. Recently, ring map visualization has been explored as a...

Please click here to download the map associated with this article.Epidemiological research often involves the visual exploration of numerous attributes to help discern patterns between health and characteristics of the physical, socioeconomic, or built environment. Unfortunately, many of the multivariate mapping techniques discussed throughout the...

Maps provide a means for visual communication of spatial informa-tion. The success of this communication process largely rests on the design and symbolization choices made by the cartographer. For static mapmaking we have seen substantial research in how our design deci-sions can influence the legibility of the map's message, however, we have limit...

One primary utility of animated maps is their ability to depict change over time and space; unfortunately, recent research suggests that humans frequently fail to perceive changes within dynamic graphics. However, different types of dynamic graphics include different manifestations of change. For example, an animated proportional-symbol map possess...

For global-scale geographic information, there are relatively few sources that can be used to form or structure a cognitive map. One of the most common sources for this information is maps, the only reference that permits an individual a comprehensive view of the world without having to integrate information from multiple views (e.g., stitching tog...

The acquisition and conceptualization of spatial knowledge are important topics in human spatial cognition. At the global scale, maps are our primary graphic source of information; however, they distort the size and shape of geographic features. If a distorted reference is used and the reader assumes it to be accurate, it may inappropriately influe...

In this article we investigate whether a geospatial task-based framework can be conceptualized and developed to assist in structuring (in a grade-related context) a conceptual framework that could help build a vocabulary and scope and sequence structure for the geospatial thinking that makes the world and its activities legible to us. Our argument...

In this paper, we assume that learning to comprehend the geospatial environment would be significantly facilitated by developing a multi-level task ontology that identifies various levels and complexities of geospatial concepts. We suggest that, apart from four spatial 'primitives' - identity, location, magnitude, and space-time - all geospatial co...

As geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly implemented in K–12 classrooms, the risk becomes one of teaching “buttonlogy” or simply how to point and click to complete certain functions. Through the development of a geospatial concept lexicon and corresponding geospatial task ontology along with simple concept-based tasks completed by s...

This report contains estimates of the cost to California’s public schools of meeting the state’s achievement standards. In the aggregate, the cost is about 40 percent greater than the expenditures of California schools in 2003-04. The bulk of these additional costs are for resources needed to boost achievement in schools primarily serving students...

We advance an industrial-organization-style measure of the competitiveness of urban public school districts. We find that a majority of the American urban population can choose among at least four school districts. Tiebout choice is a realistic option for most Americans. However, there is substantial variation in the extent of this choice. The most...

In this paper, we evaluate map overlay, a concept central to geospatial thinking, to determine how it is naively and technically understood, as well as to identify when it is learned innately. The evaluation is supported by results from studies at three grade levels to show the progression of incidentally learned geospatial knowledge as students ma...

While Shannon's work was based on quantification of potential rate of communication, study of information theory is not limited to this area. In this paper, we examine the Coordinate Digit Density (CDD) function as a method for applying principles of information theory to explore the effects of line generalization on geographic datasets. This analy...

There are many systematic methods for encoding spatial coordinates, but there do not seem to be equivalent analytic methods for quantifying the difference in information content of these encoded data. We propose the analysis of map information content using the Coordinate Digit Density Function as a useful device for examining and comparing informa...

This paper addresses issues related to the development of an online version of the South Carolina Atlas of Environmental Risks and Hazards. The Atlas reviews fifteen types of environmental hazards that threaten the state of South Carolina, such as hurricanes and tornadoes. For each of the hazards, the Atlas documents general information about the h...

Is cognition of geographic space affected by the source from which the knowledge is acquired (i.e., map, navigation, verbal description, etc.)? Studies have shown that it is and that these effects may be the result of the source, source content, or sensory mode, amongst other potential causes. If cognition of geographic space is affected by the sou...

There are many systematic methods for encoding spatial coordinates, but there do not seem to be equivalent analytic methods for quantifying the difference in information content of these encoded data. In this paper the Coordinate Digit Density Function, an algorithm for quantification of information in spatial data, is investigated for calculation...