The article by MacEachren and Kraak’s is a great article to read because not only did they highlight important challenges in geovisualization but also attend to overarching issues and what kind of actions are needed to address them (which I particularly enjoyed). I strongly agree with the authors when they point out that if we are to meet these challenges, there needs to be an increased emphasis on collaboration between disciplines and countries. Further, researchers themselves must appreciate other perspectives and make a real effort to understand how other disciplines understand the issue by keeping up with “complementary research” and getting involved with collaborative work.
The article by MacEachren and Kraak’s is a great article to read because not only did they highlight important challenges in geovisualization but also attend to overarching issues and what kind of actions are needed to address them (which I particularly enjoyed). I strongly agree with the authors when they point out that if we are to meet these challenges, there needs to be an increased emphasis on collaboration between disciplines and countries. Further, researchers themselves must appreciate other perspectives and make a real effort to understand how other disciplines understand the issue by keeping up with “complementary research” and getting involved with collaborative work.
One area of research related to geovisualization that sparked my interest is the potentials of virtual environments. The tension between the need for abstraction or realism in visualization is intriguing to me and would be something I am interested in to explore in more depth. Although abstraction is appropriate/useful for certain problems, the experiential qualities VE offers could be very beneficial for geographic decision-making and alternative thinking, especially since the scales of some geographic problems are very large (climate change) and thus more difficult to envision. Further, a realistic geovisualization of our environment with dynamic access to the information on the Internet could prove to be extremely valuable for educating students.
-Ally_Nash
Tags: Geovisualization