Visual Exploration and Analysis of Historic Hotel Visits

Abstract

Understanding the spatial and temporal characteristics of individual and group behavior in social networks is a critical component of visual tools for intelligence analysis, emergency management, consumer analysis, and human geography. Identification and analysis of patterns of recurring events is an essential feature of such tools. In this paper, we describe an interactive visual tool for exploring the visitation patterns of guests at two hotels in central Pennsylvania from 1894 to 1900. The centerpiece of the tool is a wrapping spreadsheet technique, called reruns, that reveals regular and irregular periodic patterns of events in multiple overlapping artificial and natural calendars. Implemented as a coordinated multiple view visualization in Improvise, the tool is in ongoing development through an iterative process of data collection, transcription, hypothesis, design, discovery, analysis, and evaluation in close collaboration with historical geographers. Numerous discoveries have driven additional data collection from archival newspaper and census sources, as well as plans to enhance analysis of spatial patterns using historic weather records and railroad schedules. Distributed online evaluations of usability and usefulness have resulted in feature and design recommendations that are being incorporated into the tool.

Keywords

Geovisual analytics exploratory visualization historical geography coordinated multiple views social behavior analysis serial periodic data

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