Cartographic Design of Cultural Maps

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach to designing cultural maps that reveal socio-cultural patterns in city street names, engaging citizens and enhancing historical awareness through cartographic storytelling.

Contribution

It introduces a dataset of 5,000 streets across four major cities and demonstrates how cultural maps can uncover gender bias, professional diversity, and cultural integration.

Findings

Cultural maps reveal gender biases in city street names.

They highlight professional diversity and cultural influences.

Maps effectively engage users in exploring socio-cultural patterns.

Abstract

Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture through its commemorative practices. Therefore, cultural maps that unveil socio-cultural characteristics encoded in street names could potentially raise citizens' historical awareness. But designing effective cultural maps is challenging, not only due to data scarcity but also due to the lack of effective approaches to engage citizens with data exploration. To address these challenges, we collected a dataset of 5,000 streets across the cities of Paris, Vienna, London, and New York, and built their cultural maps grounded on cartographic storytelling techniques. Through data exploration scenarios, we demonstrated how cultural maps engage users and allow them to discover distinct patterns in the ways these cities are gender-biased, celebrate various professions, and embrace foreign cultures.