Presentation from the GeoHCI workshop

1. Geography & HCI
Muki Haklay
m.haklay@ucl.ac.uk
@mhaklay
Extreme Citizen Science group
Department of Civil, Environment and Geomatic Engineering, UCL

2. Geographic representations
http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/histhw/tutcarto/english/index-hiwi-karto-en.html http://hyperbolic-crochet.blogspot.com/2010/09/talking-and-writing-about-math.html
Sailing maps/Navigation charts, Western Pacific
(Peabody Museum, Cambridge)
Valcamonica, Italy. Neolithic
Bronze age (6000 BCE)

3. Carved wooden coastal charts carried in
their kayaks by Greenland Inuit (Eskimo)
(n.d.) Courtesy of the Greenland National
Museum & Archives.
http://www.learner.org/courses/amerhistory/interactives/cartographic/1-2.html
• Representations of
geography predate the
development of writing by
at least 2000 years (some
20,000)
• Moreover, they exist in
non-literate societies, and
semi-literate people
routinely participate in
mapping activities

4. Modern digital mapping
• Only few digital technologies failures
require physical intervention

6. Why are GIS hard to use?

7. Why are GIS hard to use?
• As Identified by Traynor and Williams (1995):
– GIS is complex: it is based on knowledge from
Geography, Cartography, Databases, Statistics,
Computer algorithms and data structures…
– Requires users to have or acquire considerable
technical knowledge in order to operate the
system
• Due to the technological challenges,
developers and vendors are focusing on
functionality and not on interaction
Traynor and Williams (1995) ‘Why are Geographic Information Systems hard to use?’

8. Web Mapping
1998

9. "What is a geographer?" asked the little prince. "A geographer is a scholar who
knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts."
"That is very interesting," said the little prince. "Here at last is a man who has a
real profession!" And he cast a look around him at the planet of the geographer.
It was the most magnificent and stately planet that he had ever seen.
"Your planet is very beautiful," he said. "Has it any oceans?"
"I couldn't tell you," said the geographer. …
…the geographer said. "But I am not an explorer. I haven't a single explorer on
my planet.
It is not the geographer who goes out to count the
towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans,
and the deserts. The geographer is much too
important to go loafing about.
He does not leave his desk.”
Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1943 The Little Prince, Chapter 15
Geography

10. Geography
• Physical and Human Geography
• Human geography:
– Writing the Earth (Human-Nature)
– Writing the World (Society-Space)
• ‘geography in the world’ vs.
‘geography in the head’
• Concern with ‘Where-ness’ &
interactions: location, space, place,
travel, scale, distribution …

11. Place / Space
• Core concepts in Geography
• Spatial Science – searching for universal laws, or
treating all locations in the same way
• ‘Place is defined as the site of relations between
attributes. If so, then the argument for any kind of
independent spatial science ... falls away entirely.’ (David
Harvey, 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. p. 263)

12. The relational view of space
‘One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps:
Samarkand is there, the United States of America (finger
outlining a boundary) is here. But, to escape from an
imagination of space as a surface is to abandon also that view
of place. If space is rather simultaneity of stories-so-far,
then places are collections of those stories, articulations
within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character
will be a product of these intersections within that wider
setting, and of what is made of them. And, too,
of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the
relations not established, the exclusions. All this
contributes to the specificity of place.’
Doreen Massey, 2005, ‘For Space’, p. 131

16. Cartography
• Cartography (map-making) is 'the discipline
dealing with the conception, production,
dissemination and study of maps in all
forms'. Another description of cartography is
that it is the 'Art, Science and Technology' of
map making. (British Cartographic Society
website)
• Linked to several disciplines, although
the strongest links are to
geography/geomatic engineering

17. Media, scale, details

19. 2009
2013

21. Paper vs. computer
Tasks Paper map Online map
1. Localisation 47.35 (38.26) 121.35 (71.31)
2. Measurement/scale 44.75 (17.18) 69.95 (71.98)
3. Decode on map 49.50 (23.52) 15.00 (67.08)
4. Decode on legend 17.25 (9.64) 11.75 (38.94)
5. Route planning 286.05 (113.07) 388.85 (210.83)

22. Google Earth Tours

24. Jerome Lewis, ExCiteS
Forest monitoring

25. ExCiteS

26. ExCiteS

27. Further reading
• See ucl.ac.uk/excites
• Blog: povesham.wordpress.com
uclexcites.wordpress.com
• Academic Publications:
povesham.wordpress.com/publications/
• M.haklay@ucl.ac.uk / @mhaklay