based collection of businesses and other locations. We scraped all landmarks from Yelp, which is a fairly comprehensive U.S. Our first step was to seed our database of landmarks with a large set of landmarks across the U.S. We designed a pipeline to scrape and combine geo data from different online sources. Luckily, the web contains several publicly accessible sources of landmark data. We wanted our tools to use both forms of familiarity in order to find the right analogy. For example, the Space Needle is a landmark that is widely recognized as a symbol of the city of Seattle. Landmarks can also be generally or culturally significant to many people. Other landmarks, like the Space Needle, are familiar to many (right). Your local Starbucks may be familiar to you (left). As a result, studies have shown that people are able to more accurately estimate distances around places they are in regularly like their home or workplace. In other words, people’s mental maps tend to be more detailed near where they spend time. However, research indicates that one piece of information - a person’s proximity to a location - can predict how likely it is that the location will be a part of their personal cognitive map. We might expect personal familiarity to be difficult to predict or even define in a general way, since it involves personal experiences, values, and habits. One reason is because a person interacts with the landmark on a regular basis : for example, the Starbucks in your neighborhood that you drop by every day. Ī landmark can become personally significant to a person in a few different ways. Landmarks are important because we rely on them for orienting and navigating in space. This work indicates that landmarks are especially memorable locations in a person’s mental map. What kind of object works best in an analogy? We consulted research on the psychology of space, also known as cognitive cartography: the study of how we experience and build mental models of spatial information. To design Atlas of Me, we needed to understand what makes a spatial analogy useful. Building Atlas of Me How people experience space The area of France is reexpressed in terms of the area of the user’s state. We wondered, could we automatically generate measurement analogies, so that a larger number of readers could benefit?Īn area analogy of France for a user in California. Instead, you are likely to be helped more by an analogy related to your location, because our experience of space is individualized.Ĭreating human generated spatial analogies customized for readers in different locations is beyond the capability of most news organizations. But, if you are from another location, say, Detroit, you may not arrive at a good sense of how long 4.3 miles is from the New York analogy. If you live in New York and have experience driving or walking by these landmarks on a daily basis, then you are likely to find the analogy helpful. For example, to give readers a sense of how far the distance 4.3 miles is, a journalist for a New York City based paper might say it is about the distance between the Empire state building and the Brooklyn Bridge. “We frequently encounter spatial measurements online, in the news, and in everyday life, but rarely have a clear idea of the quantity that the measurement expresses.”ĭesigners and journalists create spatial analogies to address problems in understanding: re-expressions of an unfamiliar measurement in terms of the measurements of one or more located objects that are more familiar. You want to tell a close relative in another state about fire, but will they understand how close it is, and how large it is, well enough to grasp the danger? Or, imagine that the forest fires described in the article are in your state, and are just 4.3 miles from the edge of your city. The fire sounds close to the city, and destructive, but how close, and how much destruction? Can you really relate to these statistics? The reporter informs you that the fires have already consumed 5,000 acres of land. How often do you encounter measurements while reading online news articles or other text documents? Imagine that today you encounter an article that describes forest fires breaking out in Spain just 4.3 miles from a well-known city. Distance analogies for a user in New York City, Berkeley CA, and Detroit MI.
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