Homegrown Governments: Visualizing Regional Governance in the United States

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization method for comparing Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs) and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the US, improving understanding of their boundaries and overlaps.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization approach that effectively displays RIGOs and MSAs and their overlaps, leveraging human perception without increasing cognitive load.

Findings

The new visualization outperforms existing methods in clarity and effectiveness.

Users can better identify overlaps between RIGOs and MSAs.

The approach reduces cognitive effort in interpreting complex regional data.

Abstract

Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs) are constituted by the local governments within their respective regions and are supported by the active engagement of the regions community and citizens. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), on the other hand, are classified by the federal government based on commuting and commerce patterns. They do not adhere to any local government. The Graduate School of Policy and International Affairs Center for Metropolitan Studies (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh have been researching the boundaries of RIGOs and the characteristics defining them. In this paper, we propose, design, and implement an approach to enhance the current visualization by visualizing two categorical data: RIGOs and MSAs and the overlapping between them. We attempted to use a combination of visual attributes that leverage human perception system and do not impose cognitive and mental effort. The overall result of the evaluation shows that our work proved to be more effective than the current visualization.