Encountering Friction, Understanding Crises: How Do Digital Natives Make Sense of Crisis Maps?

TL;DR

The paper investigates how public audiences, particularly Digital Natives, make sense of crisis maps and the frictions that arise during interpretation. It combines a thematic analysis of New York Times Learning Network comments with semi-structured interviews (n=18) to develop a data-centric sensemaking framework consisting of four activity clusters: Inspecting, Engaging, Placing, and Responding personally, plus four friction points: color encoding, missing context, lack of connection, and distrust. The study integrates learning-sciences theory (Bloom's Taxonomy and Threshold Concepts) with human-data interaction to explain cognitive and affective dimensions of sensemaking. Findings yield design guidance for crisis maps, emphasizing color semantics, contextual annotations, relevance and locality, and transparent data provenance to improve comprehension and trust in crisis communication.

Abstract

Crisis maps are regarded as crucial tools in crisis communication, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change crises. However, there is limited understanding of how public audiences engage with these maps and extract essential information. Our study investigates the sensemaking of young, digitally native viewers as they interact with crisis maps. We integrate frameworks from the learning sciences and human-data interaction to explore sensemaking through two empirical studies: a thematic analysis of online comments from a New York Times series on graph comprehension, and interviews with 18 participants from German-speaking regions. Our analysis categorizes sensemaking activities into established clusters: inspecting, engaging with content, and placing, and introduces responding personally to capture the affective dimension. We identify friction points connected to these clusters, including struggles with color concepts, responses to missing context, lack of personal connection, and distrust, offering insights for improving crisis communication to public audiences.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Subfigures 1a-1c depict representations of crisis maps tested in our interview study drawn from a New York Times series on graph comprehension. Original map rights belong to the NYT. The sketches were created by us for illustration purposes.
• Figure 2: Overview on crisis map sensemaking broken down into sensemaking activity clusters. Each cluster consists of activity patterns which were derived from the thematic analysis of our comment and interview data. A zoomed-in version, where the sensemaking activities are listed for each pattern, follows below (see \ref{['fig:overview-zoomed-in']}).
• Figure 3: The distribution of theme mentions in the interview study is shown across 10 themes, each represented as a bar chart. Bars indicate the number of mentions (out of 18 participants) for a tested crisis map. Theme descriptions and IDs (1–10) are detailed in Section \ref{['results-study1']}. A table version is available in Table S3 of the supplementary material.
• Figure 4: Overview of crisis map sensemaking, including friction points and detailed sensemaking activities. Activities derived from both studies are grouped into overarching patterns or friction points, which are connected to broader activity clusters. A table version is available as Table S4 in the supplementary material.