Muse is an interactive visualization of scientific publications to explore the collaborations between institutions.
See Interactive Exploration of Geospatial Network Visualization for the updated version.
Muse displays the affiliations, as well as the relations between them on a large interactive tabletop surface, enabling multiple users to explore their personal networks, as well as emerging patterns in shared networks within a public setting.
As indicators for institutional collaboration, data on co-authorship is utilized, as these signify an existing level of collaboration. The affiliations of authors are geo-located, and shown on a map, resulting in relations not only among institutions, but also between regions and countries. For the prototype we used the publication data of the EC-TEL conference, from the years 2005-2010.
Users were able to use their fingers to zoom and pan the map in order to select geographical areas they are interested in. They can tap on single affiliations to display its title as well as their connections to related institutions. By tapping anywhere on a country, some basic statistics on publications are displayed in two adjacent infoboxes, thus allowing users to compare two countries.
Nagel, T., Duval, E.: Muse: Visualizing the origins and connections of institutions based on co-authorship of publications. Science2.0 for TEL workshop at EC-TEL 2010, Barcelona, Spain (paper, slides)
Multitouch tabletop used at EC-TEL 2010 kindly provided by Bram Vandeputte.