User:Simon/Special Issue 8/drawing visualisations

Drawing (by hand and using vectors) became a large part of the outcomes I produced as part of my research. The drawings often shifted between "hand-drawn" and "computer-drawn", for example, I would use a .svg file made from one of my GPS walks in a vector graphics program, then print it and hand-draw with pencil over the top.

Abstraction became a key interest, and I started to think more about how these different ways of visualising all employed some level of abstraction in order to communicate. This brought me back to the typical idea of displaying network topology, as nodes and straight lines:

The drawings I made while GPS walking employed straight lines between trackpoints. However, this was just an abstraction - there are no straight lines in reality. In fact, the more accurately I would be able to map the network, the less useful it would be as a readily comprehensible visualisation. I also noticed that at points the GPS signal had become confused or obscured - this happened when I went into buildings (such as a cafe to buy a coffee) or when the signal might have been obscured by tall buildings around me. This produced knots, which I saw as analogous to nodes.

When I imported the lines I made by GPS walking into .svg format, I experimented with unraveling some of these knots, and then drew this process.