A Critical Review of COVID-19 Mapping Trends

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic has raised the necessity of more effective visualization of vast data with expanded spatiotemporal dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to review the COVID-19 mapping trends and to suggest alternatives of mapping techniques that represent the spatiotemporal dimensions of the epidemic. To this end, this paper has reviewed studies that include discussions regarding mapping or geovisualization of COVID-19. The most commonly used technique for providing COVID-19 information is dashboard, which has limitations that they can’t reflect the dynamic of the epidemic as static map. To make up for these limitations, there have been various attempts to reflect temporal dimensions on the map, including the utilization of graphs as map symbols, and animations. Based on the review of prior study, this paper applied temporal strips and the Dorling catogram algorithm to suggest an alternative geovisualization techniques that can help map readers intuitively recognizes spatial patterns and temporal trends of phenomena on maps. This paper has cartographic significance in that it identified the possibility of map-making with expanded spatiotemporal dimensions in the Pandemic era.