IBM Research innovations : Visualizing Social Community
Happened upon some research out of the IBM China on visualising social communities. Nothing spectacular in the fact that there was visualisation work around social networks, as sit’s something we’ve seen elsewhere before from IBM at Hursley (in fact I think it may well be referred to on one of the Hursley developer blogs). What was of particular interest in this instance was the data being mapped. For this example the lead developer had chosen Academic Publications, Journals and Conferences.
The system on show provided different ways of slicing and dicing the research output metrics, but it was the instant appeal of looking at the marked differences in co-author networks that struck home. Nothing more complex than looking at big fat author icons with very few connections and tiny collaborators (mainly PIs with direct report postgrads) versus even bigger, fatter icons with lots of connections of similar sizes (potentially more collegiate and co-operative researchers).
A different view showed the importance of papers as reference sources for citation and derivative works, mapped across the source of publication. A further twist is provided with the addition of a timeline sldier so you can animate the progress of a piece of work over time :).
Great tool - pity it isn’t a product (yet), as I can see a market potential in proving performance metrics in Research. All credit to Wang Tian-Shu for a great piece of work.
Two other pieces of work of note that I’ve walked through today are Many Eyes (presented by Fernanda Viegas), and LiveBook (Real-Time Collaboration and Editing for the Web). More on that later
Tags: academic_publications, performance_metrics, research_output, social_networks, visualisation