Polichart Analysis of Global Issues in Human and Social Dynamics

Abstract

Conventional cartography for visualizing geographically distributed information (e.g., thematic maps or historical atlases of, say, poverty, conflict, economic development, or other social data with spatio- temporal variation) is limited by several longstanding problems, including arbitrary projections, information cluttering, territorial distortions, and other noise. Misconceptions and inferential errors are common results from such noise and biases. ‘Polichart’ visualization — a new computational methodology inspired by social cartography and computational tools — solves some of these problems by improving the topology of the base grid onto which data are plotted and by adopting a set of simple albeit graphically efficient conventions. The resulting visualizations maintain several geospatial features (N-S-E-W orientation, territorial contiguities) while eliminating some of the worse problems with conventional thematic maps. This paper describes this new approach in support of computational analysis of global issues and provides some examples. Extensions to smaller geographic units (e.g., county or provincial data) and risk analysis (e.g., visualization of hazard rates from event history analysis) are also discussed.