Development of a Cartogram Construction Method for Visualizing Japanese Folk Dance Distribution

Abstract

This paper proposes a cartogram construction method to visualize the relevance of the motion-characteristic distribution of Japanese folk dances to the geographic elements of regional communities in which the dances have been passed down. We use motion capture data of the dances to quantitatively extract their motion characteristics. To systematically organize the cartogram construction process, we adopt a hierarchical model representing the relationship among motion capture data, folk dances, and settlements in which the dances have been passed down. Different cartogram types are selected for different levels in the hierarchical model, and, thereby, a hybrid of circle and distance cartograms is provided. We show that an algorithm to locate the constituents of the hierarchical model in the above hybrid cartogram can be obtained by slightly modifying the existing circle cartogram construction algorithm. On the other hand, we develop another new algorithm to locate geographic elements other than the constituents of the hierarchical model in the hybrid cartogram. The results obtained by analyzing the Furyu type folk dances passed down in Akita Prefecture demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.