Visualization of Emergency Needs Posted on Social Media by Metaphor Map

Abstract

Thematic analysis based on a social network is one of the effective means in emergency management. To improve users' understanding, the results of the thematic analysis are often displayed through visualization. However, the previous researches on text theme visualization rarely considered the unified representation of theme structure and theme evolution. Cognitive load leads to difficulty, and it happens due to the separate representation of structure and evolution relationship and it still increases because of the characteristics of urgency, uncertainty, etc. Therefore, a metaphor map is introduced in this study to overcome the limits of previous visualization tools in characterizing the structure and evolutionary relationship of emergency. On the one hand, different elements in the metaphor map represent the information of popularity and structure of the demand, respectively. On the other hand, the visual design based on the metaphor map strengthens the representation of the content and evolution states of the demand themes. At the theoretical level, a visualization method for emergency needs based on the metaphor map is proposed in this study, which enriches the theory of emergency information visualization. At the practical level, this study explores the design of a visualization system based on the metaphor map under crisis scenarios, which enhances the interaction between users and crisis information, and provides references for decision-making such as emergency material scheduling and emergency resource coordination.