NordGIScience – Day 3 | What's Sound?

Day three started a bit later at 0900, as opposed to the not so reasonable 08:30.

First out was Gennady Andrienko, who was going further on with their work on visualization and visual analytics. In short the session was mostly a demonstration of some visual analytics work in a tool developed by his research group. The spatial data in question was spatial movement data, i.e. for instance GPS data and similar. Two demonstration of this were shown. One for traffic situation in Milano and one consisting of GPS data for one persons movement in a car for one whole year. The idea was then to cluster and explore the data in a visual way, allowing the human actor to discover patterns of importance. In essence the idea is fairly good. Clustering together similar data is quite useful to discover patterns, and is very useful for visualizations. For instance to find, and predict what the traffic situation is/will be on certain road segments on certain times of the day. The tool used is developed through research, and is thus only available partly (I haven’t tested it).

After the fairly quick session it was time for lunch break. As far as I remember a regular buffet of some sort.

After lunch it was time for my supervisor, Terje Midtbø‘s, session on web usability and web based research. Midtbø started off with a short introduction on the visual variables then on the dynamic variables, worryingly, very few of the participants had heard about the visual variables, and even fewer had heard about the dynamic variables. The examples shown for illustrating the different variables, I thought, were not that good. Some more practical, and real life illustrations could have been used, perhaps with more success.

Then the session went over to focus on map animations. A few animations were shown, mostly old animations from earlier research projects. Hence not that “audience capturing”.

After the demonstrations a short tutorial on how to make map animations for use in research were given. In essence it was a very quick tutorial on the use of flash/PHP/MySQL. Probably to short to be of use for participants not already familiar with the tools.

In relation to the session’s title one part of the session was dedicated to methodology in web based research. Here Midtbø gave quite a few interesting tips / guidelines for elements to consider and pay extra attention to while designing and performing a web based experiment. This was probably the best part of the session and could successfully have filled the whole session (from my point of view).

After the two sessions it was time for a buffet (yet again) and an informal gathering preceding the ICA workshop which started next day.

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