Mapping Letters through Interaction Design

Many kinds of text documents (e.g. newspapers, reports and letters) provide a potential source of geo-referenced information that is often underutilized. In interaction design, the use of dynamic icons and animation plays an important role in creating a sense of interactivity and feedback with virtual worlds. This paper shall focus on developing an interaction design approach for improving information retrieval from text sources as well as their interpretation. To this end, the Gertrude Mapper prototype is presented as a particle system based on an interaction design approach developed by a designer and a cartographer. The resulting prototype may be contemplated in the context of computer art, but it also has a practical aim: to help historians enhance their intuition through the visual exploration of unstructured text in a set of business letters. These letters were obtained from Simon Ruiz's archive. The prototype is available at http://www.dyncoopnet.eu/gertrude