Kolloquium Geoinformatik Maps Telling Stories

Spatial information inherits properties, in particular structural properties, from space. Most prominent Tobler's law claims that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. After a short discussion of such structures of spatial information, I will contrast the structure of the map and text media in order to understand their differing affordances of representing spatial information. Maps are, for example, good in representing spatial relations, while texts and other media is known to be far better in telling stories, which is a major reason behind the embedding of multimedia and text elements in multimedia maps. Based on this comparison of the map and text media, a new paradigm of map use is proposed to improve the ability to tell stories happening in space and time by using “conventional” maps (and not multimedia maps).