Some inter­est­ing work from the Bergstrom Lab at the depart­ment of Biol­ogy(!), Uni­ver­sity of Washington.

(PDF ver­sion here, more info here)

Based on cita­tion pat­terns, they cal­cu­lated an infor­ma­tion flow model of how sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines are influ­enc­ing each other. While I can­not fol­low all the tech­ni­cal details, I really appre­ci­ate the well-designed dia­grams. Quite inter­est­ing to see an “a pos­te­ri­ori” order of sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines based on the actual flow of information!

An expla­na­tion of the dia­grams from the eigenfactor.org:

Orange cir­cles rep­re­sent fields, with larger, darker cir­cles indi­cat­ing larger field size as mea­sured by eigen­fac­tor. Blue arrows rep­re­sent cita­tion flow between fields. An arrow from field A to field B indi­cates cita­tion traf­fic from A to B, with larger, darker arrows indi­cat­ing higher cita­tion vol­ume. The map was cre­at­ing using our infor­ma­tion flow method for map­ping large net­works. Using data from Thom­son Scientific’s 2004 Jour­nal Cita­tion Reports (JCR), we par­ti­tioned 6128 jour­nals con­nected by 6,434,916 cita­tions into 88 mod­ules. For visual sim­pl­city, we show only the most impor­tant links, namely those that a ran­dom surfer tra­verses at least once in 5000 steps, and the mod­ules that are con­nected by these links.

There is also an inter­ac­tive ver­sion online based on my good old Rela­tion Browser. But hon­estly, I think the dia­grams work much better.

Over­all a great exam­ple of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research, where pre­sen­ta­tion and infor­ma­tion design play together nicely with interesting+relevant analy­sis – exemplary!

I am cur­rently using my baby-time-off-my-university-job to get my options sorted out for fur­ther research. The MACE project is run­ning for another year, so the big deci­sion is, if+how to pur­sue a PhD. At my home base FHP, for­mally, I can­not do a PhD. So, at least, I have to find a good Ph.D. super­vi­sor at a “real” university.

For this pur­pose, I started to map all insti­tu­tions and peo­ple that could be can­di­dates or help­ful or inter­est­ing to meet on Google maps.

I am not 100% clear about both the mode and the scope of the the­sis. But I think it is safe to say I would love to advance design research in visu­al­iza­tion of the social web.

If you — pro­sumer you are — have any addi­tional ideas of who I could get in touch with, or could even imag­ine super­vis­ing my the­sis, I would be very happy about addi­tional spots on the map or a lit­tle com­ment here. Thanks!