Using geographic information systems (GIS), spatial data, and web mapping tools to enrich teaching and learning in geography courses is an effective way to integrate critical thinking and spatial analysis into the classroom (or virtual classroom). This lesson describes mapping song lyrics through ArcGIS Online. It explores how students analyze and…

Students in the early republic commonly stitched, drew, and painted maps of their states, nation, and world as part of their educations. Map drawing and geography were regarded as particularly appropriate subjects for girls, both as a pathway to literacy and as a means of demonstrating accomplishment. Many young girls exposed to map work in their…

We have developed a metabolic pathways visualization skill test (MPVST) to gain greater insight into our students' abilities to comprehend the visual information presented in metabolic pathways diagrams. The test is able to discriminate students' visualization ability with respect to six specific visualization skills that we identified as key to…

This article describes the release of the second edition of "The National Atlas of Korea" (Choe 2015), published in December 2014 by the National Geographic Information Institute (NGII) of South Korea (the Republic of Korea) in both Korean- and English-language versions. This second edition is a major update and improvement over its 2009…

Advances in the Google Earth virtual globe and the concomitant Keyhole Markup Language (KML) are providing educators with a convenient platform to cultivate and assess one's place location knowledge (PLK). This article presents a general framework and associated implementation methods for the online testing of PLK using Google Earth. The proposed…

Tracy Logan and Tom Lowrie argue that while little attention is given to visual imagery and spatial reasoning within the Australian Curriculum, a significant proportion of National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tasks require high levels of visuospatial reasoning. This article includes teaching ideas to promote visuospatial…

Drawing on cartography, urban design and visual data modelling, we consider how people navigate, or fail to navigate, the mental, physical and social spaces of knowledge communities. Cartographically inspired critical thinking offers opportunities to re-examine the assumptions and formal maps of post-secondary institutions, visualizing…

Business students need to develop skills in the intelligent use of information, especially spatial information, for decision-making. Geographic Information System (GIS) is a viable tool for that purpose. Yet the few GIS courses in the Information Systems curriculum offered in various business schools tend to focus on different concepts and skills.…

Virtual Globe software has become extremely popular both inside and outside of educational settings. This software allows users to explore the Earth in three dimensions while streaming satellite imagery, elevation, and other data from the Internet. Virtual Globes, such as Google Earth, NASA World Wind, and ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer can be effectively…

Describes the contributions of Charles Joseph Minard to statistical graphics, noting the time course of his work and providing background on his famous effort, the flow-map depiction of Napoleon's march on Moscow. Explores some modern re-visions of this famous graphic from an information visualization perspective. (SLD)

Structures of multiple education and knowledge systems can be recreated in maps, in a social cartography where the space of the social map reflects effects of social changes in real space. Such maps allow social research to escape from modernism's positivist restraints, improve comparative educators' understanding of the social milieu, and open…

Discusses problems in creating indices and thesauri for digital libraries of geo-spatial multimedia content and proposes a scalable method to automatically generate visual thesauri of large collections of geo-spatial media using fuzzy, unsupervised machine-learning techniques. Uses satellite photographs as examples and discusses texture-based…

Focuses on developing a map display for information retrieval. Through an examination of relationships among visual displays, information retrieval, and browsing, advantages of visual displays for information retrieval are characterized. Examples of the map displays show that they can be used as overview tools and access/exploration tools, and…

Describes the design and implementation of a prototype visualization system, AuthorLink, to enhance author searching. AuthorLink is based on author co-citation analysis and visualization mapping algorithms. AuthorLink produces interactive author maps in real time from a database of 1.26 million records supplied by the Institute for Scientific…

Presents abstracts that discuss using data visualization for information retrieval and data mining, including immersive information space and spatial metaphors; spatial data using multi-dimensional matrices with maps; TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) experiments; users' information needs in cartographic information retrieval; and users' relevance…