Sarah Schöttler
Hi, I'm Sarah! (she/her)
I'm a PhD candidate supervised by Benjamin Bach and Uta Hinrichs in the
Visual+Interactive Data group at the University of
Edinburgh, researching responsive geographic visualization—how to make maps, cartograms and
other geographic visualizations work across devices and screen sizes. Prior to this, I
completed an MSc in Design Informatics (2019) at the University of Edinburgh, and a BSc in
Technology and Liberal Arts & Sciences (2017) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
I design and develop interactive maps and visualizations for my
research and occasionally for clients. I also teach workshops and short courses on
programming, visualization, and other digital skills as a
CDCS Training Fellow.
News
Publications
Sarah Schöttler, Uta Hinrichs, and Benjamin Bach.
Practices and Strategies in Responsive Thematic Map Design: A Report from Design Workshops with
Experts. Forthcoming in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (VIS 2024).
Companion Website
Sarah Schöttler, Jason Dykes, Jo Wood, Uta Hinrichs, and Benjamin Bach.
Constraint-Based Breakpoints for Responsive Visualization Design and Development. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2024).
Demo Website
Wenchao Li, Sarah Schöttler, James Scott-Brown, Yun Wang, Siming Chen, Huamin Qu, and
Benjamin Bach.
NetworkNarratives: Data Tours for Visual Network Exploration and Analysis. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Demo Website
Sarah Schöttler, Yalong Yang, Hanspeter Pfister, and Benjamin Bach.
Visualizing and Interacting with Geospatial Networks: A Survey and Design Space. Computer Graphics Forum, 40: 5-33 (2021).
Project website
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Conference Talk (EuroVis 2021)
Arran Ridley, Sarah Schöttler, Aba-Sah Dadzie, and Benjamin Bach.
The VisTools Marketplace: An Activity to Understand the Landscape of Visualisation Tools. Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE VIS Workshop on Data Vis Activities to Facilitate Learning,
Reflecting, Discussing, and Designing
(2020).
Sarah Schöttler, Tobias Kauer, and Benjamin Bach.
Geographic Network Visualization Techniques: A Work-In-Progress Taxonomy. Poster at Graph Drawing (2019).
Project website
Projects
An overview of my map and visualization design and development work.
Responsive Thematic Mapping Cheat Sheet
July 2023–July 2024 Based on interviews and design workshops with visualization and thematic mapping practitioners, I developed a cheat sheet showing common challenges in responsive thematic mapping, and possible design strategies for addressing them.
VIEW READ MORE Constraint-Based Breakpoints Demo & Toolkit
July 2021–July 2024 We developed the concept of constraint-based breakpoints, a new technique that makes responsive visualizations more reliable, flexible, and resilient to changes in the underlying data. Our demo website shows interactively resizable example visualizations, created with our toolkit, which includes a prototype library, the view landscape diagram, and suggested workflows for visualization developers.
VIEW READ MORE Conflict Map: Ukraine
March 2022–February 2023 I worked with researchers at
PeaceRep at the University of Edinburgh to develop an interactive map bringing together various datasets that document different aspects of the war in Ukraine.
VIEW Visualizing Real-Time Opinion Data
August–November 2020 I developed a sequence of mobile-focused prototype visualizations for
Say As You Go, a startup aiming to show people's perceptions and opinions in real-time.
VIEW Visualizing Air Quality
October 2019–February 2020 In a student group project, we collected air quality data in Münster, Germany. We then created a website discussing uncertainty in this data, as well as an AR application visualizing different levels of air quality in your environment. I designed and implemented the scrollytelling website, and developed two out of the three maps shown on the page.
VIEW PaxVis: Visualizing Peace Agreements
February–May 2019 I created an interactive interface for the
PA-X database, which contains data on over 1500 peace agreements.
VIEW READ MORE Inequality in NHS Health and Care Experience
November–December 2018 In a group project for my MSc in Design Informatics, we created a visualization of inequalities in Scottish healthcare experiences, based on survey data published by the Scottish government.
VIEW Dot Map Generalization (BSc Project)
April–June 2017 For my Bachelor project, I developed an algorithm to generalize dot maps with the goal of making web-based marker maps more readable.
VIEW ATLAS Semester Abroad Database
February–July 2017
A D3-based web application for viewing the ATLAS Semester Abroad Database, a collection of students' experiences at universities abroad. (Not publicly accessible)
Solar System Simulation
July 2016 A simulation of the Earth's orbit around the sun, based on (extremely simplified) physics. Tinker with the variables and the Earth will fly into the sun (or outer space...)
VIEW