EmoGeoCity: Interactive Visual Exploration of City’s Historical and Cultural Evolution Based on Emotional Geography

A city’s history and culture studies involves understanding the literary works and historical events that have shaped the city’s identity. Increased availability of quantitative historical data has provided new opportunities. Taking Nanjing as an example, this paper proposes EmoGeoCity, a visual analytics system to study a city’s cultural and historical evolution, through the use of digital humanities methods and emotional geography. The system incorporates sentiment analysis into historical research to quantify the emotional content of works and synthesize an overall emotion trend within a specific location. A dynamic emotional map, integrating locations, works, and events, enables a macroscopic observation of city emotions over time. An emotional polyline is designed to provide a microscopic interpretation of the emotion trend of a single location. Exploration through the system reveals the evolution of the city from an emotional geographic perspective, which gives insights for humanities researchers studying a city’s history and literature, as well as for the general public interested in gaining knowledge on historical sites. Case and user studies illustrate the effectiveness and usability of our system.