GeoAuthor: Linking Text and Visualization for Geographic Article Authoring

Abstract

Articles containing geographic information are widely distributed and commonly used in daily life, frequently incorporating geographic visualizations as illustrations. However, the creation of such articles remains cumbersome, necessitating authors to switch between authoring text and illustrations, thereby disrupting immersive writing. Our interviews corroborated this observation and revealed the primary challenge in the traditional process stems from the low synchronization frequency between text and geographic visualizations during creation, coupled with weak visual links, forcing users to mentally maintain this synchronization and thereby increasing their cognitive burden. In response, we developed GeoAuthor, which facilitates the interactive creation of geographic articles by automatically synchronizing text creation with geographic visualizations with rich visual links. This bidirectional approach ensures that the written content and visual representations remain consistent and mutually informative throughout the creation process. Our evaluation demonstrated the efficacy of GeoAuthor, indicating its capacity to streamline the process of creating geographic articles.