|
2014 conference recap
Upcoming hackathon at Cornell in October
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/VIVO/Hackathon+October+2014+at+Cornell
Registration: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9L5ZN3M
Duraspace Wiki Accounts - now able to create accounts by completing forms
https://wiki.duraspace.org/signup.action
Data Visualization discussion - Michael Bales from Weill Cornell Medical College
Follow at https://twitter.com/bale0019
Michael Bales’s presentation on visualizations
Slides - http://goo.gl/X3aE4D
Survey of what’s available
2011 review – 43 sites
8 no longer publicly available
Most had no analytic or visualization elements
9 of 43 had at least one analytic or visualization element
Sites reviewed in 2011:
BibApp
BioCrowd
BiomedExperts
Research Expertise at UT Arlington
Community Academic Profiles - CAP
Digital|Vita
Epernicus Solutions & Epernicus Network
Expertise @ Maryland
Faculty Profile System
Faculty Research Interests Database
GENIUS
Google Scholar
iamResearcher
iAMscientist
INDURE
LabRoots
labslink
LatticeGrid
Loki
Mendeley
myExperiment
MyNetResearch
MySDScience
Nanopaprika
Nature Network
OpenWetWare
Pivot
Profiles Research Networking Software
Research Crossroads
Research in View
ResearcherID
ResearchGate
RKBExplorer
Science Stage
SciTable
SciVal Experts
sequilab
The Research Cooperative
VIVO
Columbia University Scientific Profiles
Yaffle
Sites with the most extensive analytic and visualization content:
Harvard Catalyst Profiles
LatticeGrid
Other sites with some analytic and/or visualization content:
BibApp
Google Scholar
INDURE
myExperiment
ResearcherID
VIVO
The good
Clean interfaces; visually appealing
Well indexed – what interactive elements are available on the site?
Provide sufficient explanatory detail
Good visual organization
Size, color, visual arrangement used to convey hierarchy (e.g., ranking or popularity)
Adherence to cognitive model of what users want to accomplish
The bad
Visualizations only available for selected profiles
Visual chaos
Difficult navigation; e.g., >20 infographic choices displayed on one screen
Broken links; error messages
To do
Review research on what users have said they want
Inspiration from visualization and analytics beyond researcher profiling systems
Consider how to incorporate “latest and greatest” in analytics and visualization
Prototype, evaluate, refine
For discussion
Other visualization paradigms of interest?
Topics, collaboration, metrics – other ways of categorizing? (Grants could be an additional category; metrics could apply to individuals, departments, organizations)
What sites have I missed – review of vendor offerings?
Questions asked
Don: do we have Jira tickets or space to track use cases? A: No, but we can get started.
Chris: Data journalism… Mike Bostock (creator of D3? Don: “centered visualizations on the DOM lending itself more to styling”)... NYT and WSJ information graphics good examples (http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graphics/dp/0393347281)... Miles used D3 for his work on VIVO Dashboard
Chris: where do geographic visualizations fit? where do grads come from? where are funding offices based? A: think about the what and the how as 2 different things…
Chris: how did you get started down this path? A: researching NLP, …, social network analysis, team science -- interest in viz for a long time… looking forward to hackathon, getting hands dirty with data, using D3
Chris: would be interesting to visualize the scope/coverage/other of VIVO data itself (?)
Alexandre: thanks to new query API, viz should be an application outside of VIVO. A: Chris we agree -- pulls out JSON. The trick is getting Don, Paul, others to put up public SPARQL endpoints ;) Don: you have to open up the linked data. Alex: could viz help administrators make informed decisions to support opening up their institutions’ data? Michael: when you put data out in support of “metrics” it can become sensitive.
PUBLIC DATA sameas PUBLIC DATA => bumper sticker?
Jim: There’s a line there that can be walked… don’t want to require the heavy duty programming required by the first round (NIH grant era) of VIVO visualizations… thinks that loosely coupled paths are available now. API and AJAX services… Michael: observation that when an ontology defines relationships in a well defined way… the VIVO data are curated separately at each institution… so there might be missing/mismatched data… only a problem to extent that people are encouraged to fill in the data…
Chris: better way to visualize the VIVO-ISF ontology… Don: how to keep D3 viz decoupled from ontology details and SPARQL/Solr expertise… Shahim (via chat): “yes, and as part of the future ISF work, these issues will be addressed as much as possible“... Chris: increase VIVO value prop by reducing cost to building viz
Paul: viz of search results would be great improvement over default search result usability
Alex: How to approach functional and usability testing of visualizations?
How do you know if the visualization is functioning properly (or how to “debug”)? Michael: not sure of a set of heuristics for that… PaulF: LatticeGrid… tests that data is in correct format, and that the page renders… expect that the viz library is functioning… currently porting to work with VIVO instead of relational DB
How to test a visualizations usability/UX? Michael: usability testing with video recording, screen/click capture and “think aloud” technique
Alex: I like how the Profiles RNS viz includes “Why?” explanations...
Alexandre: having some competitions to stimulate contributors (including students) to develop open source viz… Chris: discussing these types of ideas with DuraSpace, e.g. mini-grants
Notes
Known “issues” described of overview:
haven’t updated list of scientific social networking sites that have emerged since 2011
haven’t covered VIVO visualizations yet, or related (VIVO Dashboard, etc)
Two sites with most comprehensive visualizations: Harvard Profiles and LatticeGrid
Most popular visual element was the tag cloud
People like to see faces in visualizations
Harvard Profiles: force-directed node layout
Northwestern has a wheel graph which is an alternative to Harvard’s
Chord diagram: good for sharing collaboration among a group
Harvard study: looked at the effect of co-location on the success of a publication
Harvard Profiles: collaboration timeline shows how collaborations have changed over time; concept timelines also does this
Have you looked at the interactive capability map viz at Find an Expert (http://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/)? For example, network viz on the term “disaster” -- http://115.146.84.177/search/#disaster%7C20%7C1
Collaboration systems: how do you find people who have researched similar topics but have not yet co-authored
Harvard Profiles: has similarity scores of people
Pros
providing sufficient explanatory detail, but the level of details depends on the audience and how in depth they want to go
using size and color to indicate hierarchy
What do people say they want with visualization and analytic elements?