Encountering Friction, Understanding Crises: How Do Digital Natives Make Sense of Crisis Maps?

Crisis maps are regarded as crucial tools in crisis communication, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change crises. However, there is limited understanding of how public audiences engage with these maps and extract essential information.

Our study investigates the sensemaking of young, digitally native viewers as they interact with crisis maps. We integrate frameworks from the learning sciences and human-data interaction to explore sensemaking through two empirical studies: a thematic analysis of online comments from a New York Times series on graph comprehension, and interviews with 18 participants from German-speaking regions. Our analysis categorizes sensemaking activities into established clusters: inspecting, engaging with content, and placing, and introduces responding personally to capture the affective dimension. We identify friction points connected to these clusters, including struggles with color concepts, responses to missing context, lack of personal connection, and distrust, offering insights for improving crisis communication to public audiences.