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Fostering Collaboration in Science: Designing an Exploratory Time Travel Visualization

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ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation (ArtsIT 2023)

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Abstract

Finding important research papers according to a topic in the midst of an exponential growth of scientific publications is a significant challenge for researchers. Digital science libraries interfaces offer inadequate support for effective navigation and exploration, and fail to assist researchers in accurately articulating their queries with their specific interests, by typically offering a massive list of results as visual output. This problem arises not only in terms of interface design, but also in the domains of user experience and information visualization.

Collaboration is a key driver of science, and the collaborative behavior of sharing papers that is based on an individual curation process grounded on researchers’ reading experience, can act as powerful social filtering system to find important papers. We present an exploratory visualization structure designed with the aim of mapping and supporting through a temporal perspective a curatorial behavior that already happens in social networks but without a visual communication logic. This article describes the design and implementation process of a temporal visualization structure in D3.js, and which combines a timeline, a node-link diagram, and a force-directed beeswarm algorithm. The findings present preliminary results and set the stage for further investigation into a “time travel” exploratory visualization. The article concludes with a reference to the visualization code, which can be accessed through the provided link.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://whitney.org/exhibitions/idea-line.

  2. 2.

    http://wbradfordpaley.com/live/#.

  3. 3.

    http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen/projects/sdss/images/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlnxM-ld4BU.

  5. 5.

    https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-03165-4/reftree-home.html.

  6. 6.

    https://searchingcovid19.com.

  7. 7.

    https://muzlink.witify.io/#/artist/1923.

  8. 8.

    https://d3js.org/d3-force.

  9. 9.

    https://observablehq.com/@harrystevens/force-directed-beeswarm.

  10. 10.

    https://leonardocolor.io/#.

  11. 11.

    https://coolors.co.

  12. 12.

    https://observablehq.com/@notanaccent/timeline.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro ALGORITMI, Universidade do Minho - engageLab, Guimarães, Portugal

    Bruno Azevedo, Francisco Cunha & Pedro Branco

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  1. Bruno Azevedo
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  2. Francisco Cunha
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  3. Pedro Branco
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bruno Azevedo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Anthony L. Brooks

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Azevedo, B., Cunha, F., Branco, P. (2024). Fostering Collaboration in Science: Designing an Exploratory Time Travel Visualization. In: Brooks, A.L. (eds) ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. ArtsIT 2023. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 565. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_4

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-55311-0

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