Visualizing world flows: a challenge between efficacy, accuracy and aesthetics

This paper is benefited from the support of the working groupe fmr (flux, matrices, réseaux) (http://groupefmr.hypotheses.org/). We observed since a decade a rising interest concerning world networks visualization. More and more options, often interactive, are now available in order to explore, to visualize and to depict world flows. Nevertheless, many of them do not take into account spatial constraints which can disturb some geographers. So we propose to investigate different methodological solutions to represent these phenomena. The case study we choose to work on is 2012 world flight patterns between airports (and cities) (http://openflights.org/data.html). Open flight data. World matrices