What do you get when you sort approximately 800,000 published papers into 776 scientific paradigms? If you have an interesting visualization expert working with you on the project then you get this map (or click here for an even larger version). Seed Magazine has more on the details and Brad Paley’s Information Esthetics Web site tells you how you can get your own copy just for paying shipping and handling charges.
This map is just one project of Katy Börner’s cool Places and Spaces: Mapping Science initiative at Indiana University. Check out that site for more goodies.
Brad also has some other intriguing projects, like this calendar (an alternative to what we usually use). One of my favorites, however, remains his TextArc work for alternative ways of visualizing text. For example, check out his representation of Alice in Wonderland.
UPDATE: I’ve been meaning to blog about Jim Moody’s related work as well so I should’ve remembered to include a link to his visualizations, too: co-citation of physical and bio sciences, dynamic visualization of sociology co-authorship network.
{ 3 comments }
J. Ellenberg 03.18.07 at 11:13 pm
I’d like to see a map of the MSC classifications within mathematics, with distances between x and y given by the data of how frequently a paper was classified under both heading x and y. MathSciNet already has all this data, so producing the picture is surely doable.
vivian 03.19.07 at 2:08 am
Wow. A favorite professor used to try to generate a graph like this on the chalkboard back in the day (inspiring to some of us, baffling and dusty to most). I can’t wait to send him this link. So were these people channeling the Buzan brothers, or is this node-plus-sentence-like-tendrils style more common than I realize?
franck 03.19.07 at 1:49 pm
What precisely is “Materials”? Does this mean most of condensed matter physics, or is that in Quantum Physics? The categories seem a little weird.
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