GEL 2006 - Katy Borner

Katy Borner gave a tour of the Places & Spaces exhibit at the NY Public Library as part of the first day of activities at GEL 2006. Her talk on the second day covered the same topic, how to visually present data. She had several examples to show via the big screen on what scientific data looks like when mapped in a variety of ways. The best analogy for what she is doing bloggers may be familiar with: creating a tag map. A map of the frequency of tag words as published in the blogosphere. The science example she showed (sample for purchase here) depicted A map of the top 50 "hot" words in the most highly cited PNAS articles from 1982-2001. Words appearing more often have larger circles, while the circle color and ring color identify when the word first appeared and when its popularity peaked, respectively. This visualization demonstrates the utilization of Kleinberg's burst detection algorithm, co-word occurrence analysis, and graph layout techniques to generate maps that support the identification of major research topics and trends. Click on the image to view it in the larger size and you'll be able to view the topic bubbles and how the connections are made between topics. This methodology is capable of making sense of tremendous amounts of data. Reading the details is still going to take time. Technorati Tags : GEL2006, maps, good+experience, potential