"Mapping What I Feel": Understanding Affective Geovisualization Design Through the Lens of People-Place Relationships

2025-07-15

AI Summary

The field of affective geovisualization lacks a fine-grained theoretical and practical framework. Method: This study proposes a systematic design methodology grounded in human–environment relational theory, conducting content analysis of representative affective geovisualizations based on the geographical Person–Process–Place (PPP) model, and establishing the first design taxonomy explicitly oriented toward emotional communication. It identifies four high-level design paradigms—computational, anthropomorphic, among others—that tightly couple affective frameworks with geographic specificity. Contribution/Results: The work fills a critical interdisciplinary theoretical gap in affective geovisualization, delivering an extensible design taxonomy and domain-specific design principles. These advances significantly enhance geovisualization’s capacity for emotional evocation and meaning construction, bridging geography, visualization science, and affective computing.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Computer Vision: Remote Sensing / Geospatial AI

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Explainable and interpretable methods for personalization

Abstract

Affective visualization design is an emerging research direction focused on communicating and influencing emotion through visualization. However, as revealed by previous research, this area is highly interdisciplinary and involves theories and practices from diverse fields and disciplines, thus awaiting analysis from more fine-grained angles. To address this need, this work focuses on a pioneering and relatively mature sub-area, affective geovisualization design, to further the research in this direction and provide more domain-specific insights. Through an analysis of a curated corpus of affective geovisualization designs using the Person-Process-Place (PPP) model from geographic theory, we derived a design taxonomy that characterizes a variety of methods for eliciting and enhancing emotions through geographic visualization. We also identified four underlying high-level design paradigms of affective geovisualization design (e.g., computational, anthropomorphic) that guide distinct approaches to linking geographic information with human experience. By extending existing affective visualization design frameworks with geographic specificity, we provide additional design examples, domain-specific analyses, and insights to guide future research and practices in this underexplored yet highly innovative domain.

Problem

• Understanding emotion communication through affective geovisualization design
• Analyzing affective geovisualization using the Person-Process-Place model
• Identifying design paradigms linking geographic data with human emotions

Innovation

• Using PPP model for affective geovisualization design
• Identifying four high-level design paradigms
• Extending frameworks with geographic specificity