As the culmination of a Summer’s work, below can be found my MSc research project dissertation. The project was challenging for the scope of both the literature review and the web application produced (more on the latter in a later blog post) was wide. After many long nights and much support from my supervisors Dr Maurizio Gibin and Birkbeck and Dr Claire Ellul at UCL (thanks very much to both) I completed the project this September and am now in the process of looking for a job!
Below is the abstract of the work and then the full report itself …
The use of the map as a narrative, with its origins in archaeological discoveries from the Toltec era, on through the work of Literary Geographers, Critical and Qualitative GIS and most recently ‘geomedia’, has developed significantly, although there remains significant scope for improvement in its representation. Moreover, the pairing of the expression of qualitative narrative data with the effective depiction and control of time within geovisualisations is a key research area for GIScience.
The progressive democratisation of both the internet and GIS meanwhile heralds a call for more freely accessible and usable interfaces for such geovisual articulation. Of which animated maps and the corresponding conjoining of cartography and video, form a key part. As such, the absence of a free, scalable and re-usable animated web-map App which geovisualises dynamic linear and non-linear time flow and, facilitates Aarseth and Montfort’s ‘ergodic’-narrative construction through the addition of the user’s own overlays, affords great potential for the GIScience and Neogeography disciplines.
