Sarah Schöttler

Sarah Schöttler, standing outside in front of a tree.

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 | 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...)
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