Carina's Blog

Why Image Maps?

As we can see in the examples posted below, image maps are mainly used for topics and issues related to space within Online Journalism. They are therefore important additional tools for relating information to the audience – we have already learnt that people read and perceive information and texts on the screen differently from print.

In details, that means:

- They read slower
-They have a reduced attention span
- Reduced loyalty

Thus, Online Journalists have to offer information that is organized in a way that is appropriate for an online audience – make the text scannable, shorter and more concise, and add visual interactivity and more choices to the text in order to make most use of the online medium and to attract audiences using their websites.

One of these tools are Image Maps – they clarify locations, distances and processes related to time or space whilst providing additional textual information and offering the recipient individual choices about what to click/chose next. By this, they enable the recipient of information to not simply be a “recipient”, but a “user” – to put his or her own focus on the information obtained, which is a general characteristic of the internet that has often also been claimed as its advantage: freedom of choice and user-control.

In conclusion, Image Maps are a means to live up to the expected freedom to individual choice propagated within the spheres of the internet, as they offer users to actually “use” them and determine which information to access. Additionally of course, they work as a tool to illustrate information more efficiently on screen and help the user to grasp any issues more easily and memorably than by just reading a text online – which, as we have learnt, is more difficult to understand online than in print format.

For example, this map of How the Bird Flu has spread not only allows the user to only view some of the spatial information (depending on whether you tick “Bird Flu Outbreaks”, “Human Cases” or “Bird migration zones”) in relation to the temporal information (time-line from Jan 2004 to Jan 2006), but also helps to understand the impact of the issue more efficiently than by just a text explaining the same.
Since one aspect, especially with the Bird Flu, is always how a topic relates to the users themselves, it illustrates the impact and closeness of the disease better than a text talking about an outbreak in Thailand then and then. Users are also able to immediately work with this visual information and it is therefore easier to understand than a coherent text.

posted by Carina @ 1:53 pm