The Utility of Beautiful Visualizations

Geovisualizations provide a means to inspect large complex multivariate datasets for information that would not otherwise be available with a tabular view or summary statistics alone. Aesthetically appealing visualizations can elicit prolonged exploration and encourage discovery. Creating data geovisualizations that are effective and beautiful is an important yet difficult challenge. Here we present a tool for rendering geovisualizations of continuous spatial data using impressionist painterly techniques. The techniques, which have been tested in controlled studies, vary the visual properties (e.g., hue, size, and tilt) of brush strokes to represent multiple data attributes simultaneously in each location. To demonstrate this technique, we render two examples: 1) weather data attributes (e.g., temperature, windspeed, atmospheric pressure) from the NOAA Global Forecast System and 2) fragile state indices as assessed by the Foreign Policy Magazine. These examples demonstrate how open source geospatial visualizations can harness aesthetics to enhance visual communication and viewer engagement. ∗Corresponding author Email address: lgtateos@ncsu.edu (Laura Tateosian) Submitted to FOSS4G 2017 Conference Proceedings, Boston, USA. September 20, 2017 FOSS4G 2017 Arademic Program The Utility of Beautiful Visualizations Figure 1: Painterly geovisualization of atmospheric data.