Visual Maps

'Mapping' recalls the immediateness of charts, maps and visualizations as tools through which humans have always attempted to position themselves in the world, get orientations and offer interpretations for events and situations. Investigating global media policy through visual mapping can help trace policy arrangements, debates and controversies, the interconnectedness of concepts that are used in policy discourses, the themes that compose those discourses, as well as networks of interaction among people and themes. The project will therefore use a variety of visualization tools for a multi-faceted analysis of database content.

Although there is increasing use of geographic positioning and cartographic mapping in online environments, other forms of visual representation are less widely applied. Thematic, semantic, network, and other visual maps offer significant potential for tracing the evolution of policy debates and the influence exercised by different actors. Semantic web technologies provide new means of tracing connections across various forms of content in online databases. It is the project's ambition to use the latest mapping technologies, combine them as means for thorough data analysis, and develop frameworks and models for their implementation.

Users will be able to create visual maps on the basis of data inserted in the database. They will be offered three different options:

• in-built tools that allow for an immediate transformation of search results into visual representations of data
• external tools that allow for the production of visual representations of GMP data exported from this database
• links to other webspaces where GMP-relevant data is displayed in visual formats

The project team is currently starting to implement the first set of mapping tools. If you select an "island" (http://www.globalmediapolicy.net/islands) you can create a visual overview and a network map.