Publication: Cartography and Geographic Information Science
Publication Date: 01-APR-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Edsall, Robert
Article Excerpt
Introduction
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village, referring to his prediction that electronic media will serve to homogenize experiences across cultures and create a unified society--of which he did not necessarily approve--of cultural compatibility (McLuhan 1967). However, the global village would also serve to blur diversity by ignoring individual cultural identities. His prescience was revealed by the ubiquitous and standard ways that technology is presented to worldwide users, in particular the ways humans interact with computers. Users of computers vary widely worldwide in terms of language, values, traditions, and other dimensions of culture, however, much of the software that allows us to interact with computers (and by extension, the Internet, and, by extension, virtual communities, and, by extension, each other) was designed by and for Westerners in the U.S. or Western Europe. To what extent do these designs limit the use of, and insight from, computer systems for members of the global village who, because of their culture, may not interact with the computer in ways that the designers expect or intend?
This paper suggests that culture should play a larger role in the design of representations and interfaces used in geovisualization. This concept informs a larger research priority of user-centered representation design; the ubiquity of maps and other representations of space on the Internet and in digital formats requires that attention is paid to the relative effectiveness of various representation strategies. A research framework that is rich with testable and important hypotheses concerns the influence of the cultural background of the target user(s) for geo-representations. This paper reviews literature that might inform such an emergent framework. In this essay, my focus is on effective communication of ideas through digital representations and effective provision of interactivity through interfaces mediated by cultural dimensions. While I do not specifically address methods for providing technology to (and subsequently empowering) diverse users, the ideas herein may serve to open communication between cultural groups that would lead to empowerment. I review the literature concerning the significance of cultural differences on both user interface design (primarily from the discipline of human-computer interaction) and GIS and spatial representations (developed by geographers and psychologists).
Cultural Dimensions of Interactive Computing: Research from Human-Computer Interaction
Culture: Components and Scales
With the rapid and global spread of computer use and the Internet, the human-computer interaction (HCI) community is very interested in the influence of cultural differences on interface design. Of course, to discuss cultural differences, one must first define what "culture" is in this context, and at what scale cultural differences should be considered. In human-computer interaction, the focus of "culture" is finding the commonalities and differences in the way humans communicate with one another and, in turn, with a computer (Yeo 1996; Callahan 2005). There is a broad spectrum of definitions of the term "culture" in the literature, most of them seeking to describe or classify human activity, including elements of society such as beliefs, knowledge, morals, art, and traditions (Hoult 1969; Ciborowski 1979; Hofstede 2001). One way of differentiating cultures is through their symbols, including material, religious, and customary (Cohen 1985), and for communication among a group, cultural symbols make ideas intelligible to others. Using this definition of culture as a system of symbols through which a group communicates and interacts, the implications for the human activities of using maps, computer interfaces, and visualization environments, with their highly schematized and symbolic languages, are obvious.
Of course, defining and differentiating groups of people is a difficult and controversial task. To simplify matters, national boundaries are often chosen to discuss cultural factors in human-computer interaction (Sukaviriya and Moran 1990; del Galdo 1990; Shen et al. 2006). These studies, describing the differences, for example, in the interpretation of interface icons and metaphors from country to country, typically acknowledge the methodological shortcomings of this generalization--clearly national boundaries are an oversimplification of culture, with much within-nation heterogeneity and between-nation commonality. "Internationalization" often is discussed as a way of making web applications accessible and understandable for international markets (Fernandes 1995; Luong et al. 1995), and in a marketing context nationality (and by extension, official language and currency) may be an appropriate cultural scale. However, decision making with maps and graphics may depend more on education, values, and cognitive schemata--all aspects of culture apart from specific nationality--of the decision makers themselves (Edsall and Larson 2006; Rhoads 2006). In most applications of geovisualization, then, culture should be seen as a shared schematic experience that transcends national boundaries, influencing communication between humans (and between human and computer) though learned constructs.
Cultural Adaptation and Computer Interfaces
In part because of methodological complexities such as defining "culture" in terms of its manifestations and its scale there is no consensus regarding the level to which interactive computer applications should be altered and adapted for users from diverse backgrounds and cultures. There is little doubt, however, that interfaces should be sensitive to culture at least at an "objective" level, that is, the visible and tangible dimensions of culture that could influence the usability of computer systems. Translation of interface elements into appropriate languages, use of correct date and...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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