Multiple-view strategies for enhanced understanding of dynamic tourist activity through geovisualization at regional and national scales

Abstract

This article is part of research exploring various ways to visualize the complexity of sentient movement in space and time. In this case, visualization focuses on the movement of tourists on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, with some commentary on national tourist activity. Working at the atomistic level of the individual we adopt space, time, and activity (s,t,a) as the three main dimensions of sentient movement, but we emphasize activity as a privileged dimension where visualization is involved. The rationale for this is that when interpreting movements of individuals or crowds, most itineraries either reflect resources in the environment that encourage travel or avoid risk or cause delay, resources ranging from food and water to incoming sunshine or rain. Activity and process is at the heart of most rich movement data-sets, and we suggest that using multiple-view visualization to decode (s,t,a) and environmental patterns opens further avenues for interpreting and communicating dynamic human and animal geographies. To this end, this article focuses on investigating multiple-view geovisualizations through the lens of six groups of multiple views, each of them demonstrating data in a unique way, in order to reveal complex (s,t,a) patterns of rich tourist movement data. An insight-based domain expert user evaluation is discussed at the end of this article.