Data Cartography: using maps to navigate knowledge networks

ABSTRACT: As De Solla Price noted in 1965, the scholarly literature forms a vast network -- where the nodes are the millions of papers published in scholarly journals and the links are the hundreds of millions of citations connecting these papers. These kinds of knowledge networks are not unique to the scholarly literature. One finds them in the patent literature, the world wide web, law documents, social media, and wikipedia. New approaches to clustering and visualizing these kinds of networks make it possible to explore these systems similarly to the way we explore new cities geographically with google maps. In this presentation, I will talk about these methods for mapping and mining knowledge networks and provide examples on how these maps can be used to identify innovative and influential ideas, people and institutions.

BIO: Jevin West is an Assistant Professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, co-founder of the DataLab and a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute. He received his Ph. D. in biology at the University of Washington and continued with a postdoc at the Department of Physics at Umea University in Sweden. Jevin co-founded Eigenfactor.org¿ a research project that maps large scale citation networks in order to better understand, navigate, and evaluate the scientific literature.