Storytelling with Geographic Data

Dear Colleagues,

Dynamic, interactive web maps, and online visual geoanalytics dashboards have become pervasive in all aspects of the mobile information society. They are interfaces to big data and support open data developments in science, government, and society at large. Rapid advances in digital, data-driven journalism and respective mass media communication on the Web 2.0, aimed at an increasingly technologically savvy general public, have brought about online storytelling displays that dynamically and interactively combine text, photos, maps, and graphs. Such geovisual stories, not only inform people about political, economic, and social phenomena and processes, but are also designed to support space–time inference and decision making, to persuade, to reframe thinking, and possibly also to change human behavior.

What are the best practices of online geovisual storytelling, a rapidly expanding domain of geographic information visualization and geovisual analytics? What are the sound design guidelines for the development and deployment of expressive, perceptually salient, and cognitively supportive online geographic information stories? What kinds of stories can be extracted from big geodata cockpits and dashboards, developed to summarize and communicate large amounts of big space–time datasets? What are proven metaphors or process designs supporting visual storytelling for different users and applications areas? How efficiently and effectively do uncovered data stories communicate statistical relationships to a broad and diverse set of non-expert users? What kinds of empirical methods need to be employed or need to be developed to empirically evaluate online geographic storytelling approaches?

We invite you to contribute to this Special Issue of the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information to explore the frontier in geographic data driven story telling on the Web 2.0. We encourage submissions from all relevant disciplines (e.g., Geography, GIScience, Cartography, Computer Science, Information Visualization, Journalism, Mass Media Communication, Psychology, etc.) and from a diverse set of scientific practices (e.g., qualitative, quantitative approaches, etc.) aimed to further advance this transdisciplinary research field. We are especially looking for empirical contributions that evaluate new forms of online communication of geographic information for a broad range of issues, users, and respective user engagements.

Prof. Sara Irina Fabrikant
Prof. Susanne Bleisch
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Related References

1. Gershon, N.; Page, W. What storytelling can do for information visualization. Commun. ACM Vol. 2001, 44, 31–37.

2. Cartwright, W. Extending the Map Metaphor Using Web Delivered Multimedia. Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci. 1999, 13, 335–353.

3. Eccles, R.; Kapler, T.; Harper, R.; Wright, W. Stories in GeoTime. In Porceedins of IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST 2007), Sacramento, CA, USA, 30 October–1 November 2007.

4. Hullmann, J.; Diakopoulos, N. Visualization rhetoric: Framing effects in narrative visualization. IEEE Tran. Vis. Com. Gr. 2011, 17, 2231–2240.

5. Roth, R.E.; Ross, K.S.; MacEachren, A.M. User-centered design for interactive maps: A case study in crime analysis. IJGI 2015, doi:10.3390/ijgi4010262.