Why is it important?
Emotions are touchstones of human experience and are a fundamental part of everyday human life. Maps of emotions and sentiments are used to inform a great variety or research. For example...
Disaster response
Maps of emotions can inform rescue operations by identifying areas of high stress or anxiety, which can indicate areas in need of immediate aid or assistance. This information can be used to prioritize resources and aid distribution.
Business Research
Maps of emotions can be used to identify areas where customers may have a positive or negative experience and improve products or services. Or to identify areas where new businesses may be successful.
Public Health
Maps of emotions can be used to target public health interventions, such as mental health services, to areas where they are needed most.
Urban Planning
Placing emotions on maps can help urban planners to make cities safer and more comfortable by including citizen's experiences of the place in the planning process.
Psychologists found that we, humans, have subjective associations between colors and emotions. A mismatch between the emotion associated with a color and the emotion it represents on a map may bias the viewer’s attention, perception, and understanding.
We identified the matching colors and designed a tool to help you pick colors for displaying emotional geographic data. Our algorithm suggests the colors that match the emotions you want to show in a way that is aligned with human associations.
We tested a sample cognitively congruent color palette from our tool against a regular categorical color palette. Turns out, people can complete map tasks faster and with less effort when using a map designed with congruent colors.
If you want to learn about the tool and the research behind it, you can find more details in Andrei's dissertation.
People behind the research
Alberto Giordano
Contributor
Alberto is a Professor at Texas State University and a former President of UCGIS. He is also a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, a network of researchers interested in bringing geographical approaches, and perspectives to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides.
Alexander Savelyev
Contributor
Sasha is a cartographer, research scientist, and consultant with two decades of training and experience. He turns data overload into data insights through a combination of data visualization and automated data processing. He is an active member of the cartographic research community.