ABSTRACT
How can different aspects of geographic dynamics be visualized and
understood?
Geographic dynamics is complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-scalar.
Understanding geographic dynamics, consequently, demands comprehensive
approaches to address histories, behaviors, consequences, relationships,
interactions, and evolution in space and time. Methods have been and are
being developed for understanding geographic dynamics. Some methods may
be categorized as “storytelling” with emphases on replaying activities, events, and processes. Animation and exploratory visualization techniques fall in this
category. Other methods center on “analytics” with aims to understand what, how, and why dynamics manifests itself in geographic domains. While both
storytelling and analytics-based approaches are important to geographic
dynamics understanding, a storytelling approach that animates images and
time sequential GIS data layers in order to illustrate how geographic
dynamics develops appears more popular because of simplicity and ease of
creation and use. Meanwhile, many methods and tools for visual analytics
have been developed to support exploratory data analysis (Gahegan et al.
