Applying and Enhancing Data Visualization Methods for Interactive Maps

When news agencies or statisticians use maps to display the data (voting polls, demographics), they do not take into account that the landscape of a map may be guiding the readers to a wrong bias. Switzerland offers a fascinating landscape, where mountain regions do have a very low population, while covering the big area. Population-rich cantons (e.g. Geneva) influence a voting far more than sparsely populated cantons. Hence, using heat maps to show the results may give more attention to population-poor cantons because they dominate the visualizations by its sheer size (e.g. Canton of Grisons). The thesis deals with the problem of visualizing data without risking an increase in visual complexity to understand demographic information in geographical space. It is not clear what are ideal ways to create visualizations that work best to interpret demographic data. Researchers often explore such data to find patterns to derive hypotheses. The possibility of translating research findings in the area of cartography and general visualizations to create a new form of data visualization has been analysed....