Calling all mappers!

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I briefly looked into maps as a visualization technique, and there’s a problem with them. What do you guys use as data for the dimensions/axis? Diagrams are a visualization instrument to make data comparable, but maps rely on the spacial positioning to make data navigatable. Looks like you use Kumu that uses a spring-based approach, which is the default fallback if you don’t have the axis/dimensions bound or no data available, at which point everything is a mess and of little help, because the positioning is more or less random and doesn’t help with navigating, which is the main purpose to have a map in the first place. Maps are a tool for spacial measurement, so how would you reflect unmeasurable positions with this tool? Sure, it looks pretty, as a nice picture, but it could as well be a list with the items in random order. Furthermore, Kumu is proprietary software.