Back from Easter holidays I discussed with Patrick this cumulative map representation. The goal is to make visible the part of the map that attracted more of the user’s attention or time. For this reason I was trying to count the number of items that fall into a sub-area of the map; how many of these items were read by the users and how many selected by the users.

One of the possible visualization strategy that we discussed is the idea of using ‘heatmaps‘ a kind of bi-dimensional gradient that can highlight hot spots on the map (they are particularly used in cognitive science to represent eye tracking).

Another idea that we discussed briefly is that of showing the sequence of action on the map. In this way will be eventually possible to detect if there are common pattern of usage among the users (i.e., how many moved from square 1 to square 2?, and so on).

For the moment I am stuck with a minor visualization bug …

Tags: clustering, information visualization, map algorithms, maps, spatial clustering, statistics