Cartographic Design of Cultural Maps
This work addresses the problem of raising citizens' historical awareness through cultural maps, but it is incremental as it applies existing cartographic techniques to a new dataset.
The paper tackled the challenge of designing effective cultural maps to reveal socio-cultural characteristics from street names, by collecting a dataset of 5,000 streets across four cities and building maps using cartographic storytelling techniques, demonstrating how these maps engage users and allow discovery of patterns in gender bias, profession celebration, and foreign culture embrace.
Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture through its commemorative practices. Therefore, cultural maps that unveil socio-cultural characteristics encoded in street names could potentially raise citizens' historical awareness. But designing effective cultural maps is challenging, not only due to data scarcity but also due to the lack of effective approaches to engage citizens with data exploration. To address these challenges, we collected a dataset of 5,000 streets across the cities of Paris, Vienna, London, and New York, and built their cultural maps grounded on cartographic storytelling techniques. Through data exploration scenarios, we demonstrated how cultural maps engage users and allow them to discover distinct patterns in the ways these cities are gender-biased, celebrate various professions, and embrace foreign cultures.