Maps are a common tool for illustrating the where of an issue: They can situate events in space and visualise the spatial distributions of variables of interest. Thereby, maps construct knowledge about spaces and their relations with a mapped topic. The Covid-19 pandemic was accompanied by a surge in maps designed for public use. Maps with current case and death statistics, or that otherwise positioned the virus in space, were routinely distributed by authorities, in the news and on social media. Little is known however about the extent to which Covid-19 maps were present in the news, the nature of such maps, and how people engaged with them. This thesis seeks to contribute to an understanding of the relationships between public-facing thematic maps and their users in the context of Covid-19. It asks what contributions the Covid-19 pandemic offers towards the study of map engagement from a user-centric perspective. It approaches this topic from three perspectives. First, conceptualisations of map use in the literature are reviewed, looking both at discourse around Covid-19 mapping (reviewing 18 publications on Covid-19 mapping) and empirical map user studies more broadly (reviewing 306 map use studies). We find that assumptions about map engagement in Covid-19 related publications tend to characterise map engagement as unidirectional information transfer from mapmaker to a passive map user. Empirical map engagement studies were found to be dominated by performance and user experience studies that implicitly constrained map engagement to the intentions of the map’s creator. There were also a gap concerning engagement with news and social media maps, and several indications of methodological diversity available for studying a broader range of map engagement processes. Second, to better understand Covid-19 maps’ communicative potentials, a large-scale framing analysis on 4,398 maps investigates the representation of the virus in UK news maps. We find a strong reliance on framing the disease as a national-level and datafied problem, although these are both often overshadowed by a sense of threat. A range of semiotic resources was used to invoke these frames. Third, engagement with disease maps is studied as dependent on the map user’s understanding of the world using a multiple sorting task (n = 23) and a study comprising a series of short survey-based experiments on the relationship between place identification and map engagement (n = 363). Findings from the sorting study suggest that users were concerned with being informed by a map and that this expectation was multifaceted and subjective. A further thematic analysis of the think-aloud data from the same study indicated that users drew on beliefs about the mapped topic, places, and people when engaging with the Covid-19 maps. They pointed among others to the multiple meanings of space as political and social categories. Findings from the study on the relationship between place identification and map engagement found that the influence of place identification on map engagement may depend on the purpose of map use and on the spatial scale of identification. Overall, results point to an overall concern with Covid-19 maps as reliable sources of information. This concern was visible in the rhetoric of the maps themselves, in users’ expectations towards them, and in academic discourse around maps and map use. Yet users’ engagement was also tied to their beliefs about the processes behind the existence of a given map and to their preconceptions about the mapped topic, places, and the people within these places. This research presents a case for studying map engagement as located in users’ perceptions and for renewed attention to ‘everyday’ maps beyond their design characteristics. It further opens up important ethical questions around the mapping of rapidly evolving and value-laden issues like emergent infectious diseases.
- Covid-19
- Thematic maps
- Covid-19 maps
- Mixed-methods
- Map use
Exploring relationships between maps and their users through Covid-19 mapping: (Alternative Format Thesis)
Meyer, J. (Author). 26 Jun 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › PhD