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UniStuttgart-VISUS / damast

Code for the DH project "Dhimmis & Muslims – Analysing Multireligious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World" (VolkswagenFoundation)
MIT License
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Map glyphs "not encoding data points" #78

Closed tutebatti closed 2 years ago

tutebatti commented 2 years ago

In the info text of the Map, the following sentences are not clear to me:

Furthermore, in Clustered mode, the scaling of the map glyphs does not encode number of data points. The glyphs are only scaled such that they occupy the same space regardless of number of circles. The fixed radius is an artifact of the non-overlapping property.

mfranke93 commented 2 years ago

I gather this is from the "what the map does not show" section.

The map glyphs image have different perceived size, because some have one circle, some have 2, 3, or 4. In many visualizations, area or radius of markers is used to encode quantitative information. Here, it is not: The size of the marker does not say anything about the number of evidences represented by that glyph. The individual circles all are the same size.

mfranke93 commented 2 years ago

The glyphs are only scaled such that they occupy the same space regardless of number of circles. The fixed radius is an artifact of the non-overlapping property.

This might be too much technical detail for casual visitors. What I mean is that technically, each glyph has the same radius, indicated here: image

This ensures that they never overlap. Visually, however, if the glyph only has one circle, it seems like it is smaller. In previous versions, glyphs with only one circle had that circle be larger to fill the "blue" circle. However, that looked even more like these places were more important, so we changed it.

tutebatti commented 2 years ago

Thanks. This helps a lot. Interestingly, I would not have "read" them as being larger; to me, the idea of multiple circles showing "more" data or anything like that would not have occurred. At any rate, I can rephrase these explanations now.

tutebatti commented 2 years ago

The glyphs are scaled [..., see comments above]

This refers not only to the glyphs as such but also to their clustering, right? Maybe we can delete that altogether? (Originally, I understood that you only think "The fixed radius is an artifact of the non-overlapping property." is too technical.)

mfranke93 commented 2 years ago

Yes, I think so too. But then, the first sentence by itself does not make much sense either. Maybe just something along the lines of

In Clustered mode, the number of circles in a glyph does not directly correlate with the number of religions or number of evidence represented by the glyph.

(see also #77 about that)