Visualization of scientific co-authorship in Spanish universities: from regionalization to internationalization

Purpose – To visualize the inter-university and international collaboration networks generated by Spanish universities based on the co-authorship of scientific articles. Design/methodology/approach - Formulation based on a bibliometric analysis of Spanish university production from 2000 to 2004 as contained in Web of Science databases, applying social network visualization techniques. The co-authorship data used were extracted with the total counting method from a database containing 100,710 papers. Findings – Spanish inter-university collaboration patterns appear to be influenced by both geographic proximity and administrative and political affiliation. Inter-regional co-authorship encompasses regional sub-networks whose spatial scope conforms rather closely to Spanish geopolitical divisions. Papers involving international collaboration are written primarily with European Union and North and Latin American researchers. Greater visibility is attained with international co-authorship than any other type of collaboration studied. Research limitations/implications - Impact was measured in terms of journals rather than each individual article. The co-authorship data were taken from the Web of Knowledge and were not compared to data from other databases. Practical implications - The data obtained may provide guidance for public policy makers seeking to enhance and intensify the internationalization of scientific production in Spanish universities. Originality – The Spanish university system is in the midst of profound structural change. This is the first article to describe Spanish university collaboration networks using social network visualization techniques, covering an area not previously addressed.Publicad

Geovisualization of knowledge diffusion: Visualization of bibliographic data 1995-2009

Bibliometrics are an important research area within information and library science, which provides valuable insights about relationships between authors, publications, and knowledge domains. This study examined the geographic aspects of literature involving the visualization of bibliographic data published by authors residing in the contiguous United States. It determined where visualization of bibliometric research occurred and explored the spatial relationships among its contributors via institutional affiliation. The study involved five aspects: (1) cited publications, (2) citing publications, (3) cited-citing publication networks, (4) co-author networks and distances, and (5) hypothesis testing of average co-author distances over time. Using 102 publications identified from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science in the field of visualization of bibliographic data, it demonstrated that spatial aspects of bibliographic data can be represented in ArcGIS as both points (institutions) and networks (cited-citing pairs). The study examined clustering of the bibliographic data based institutional affiliation (i.e., ZIP code) using a nearest neighbor analysis. A Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) script was used to create polylines for cited-citing publication and co-author networks. The networks were mapped using small multiples and animation. Average co-author distances were calculated for the co-author networks and temporal changes were explored formally using a nonparametric hypothesis test. The average nearest neighbor analysis found that both cited and citing publications involving visualization of bibliographic data were clustered. Visual inspection of the thematic maps showed clustering of both cited and citing maps concentrated in the following cities: Philadelphia, PA, Bloomington, IN, Sandia, NM, Stillwater, OK, and Tucson, AZ. Despite a statistically significant increase in the number co-authored publications on visualization of bibliographic data, there was no change in the average co-author distances from 2001-2009

Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.Comment: Forthcoming article in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learnin

High-cadence, High-resolution Spectroscopic Observations of Herbig Stars HD 98922 and V1295 Aquila

Recent observational work has indicated that mechanisms for accretion and outflow in Herbig Ae/Be star-disk systems may differ from magnetospheric accretion (MA) as it is thought to occur in T Tauri star-disk systems. In this work, we assess the temporal evolution of spectral lines probing accretion and mass loss in Herbig Ae/Be systems and test for consistency with the MA paradigm. For two Herbig Ae/Be stars, HD 98922 (B9e) and V1295 Aql (A2e), we have gathered multi-epoch (~years) and high-cadence (~minutes) high-resolution optical spectra to probe a wide range of kinematic processes. Employing a line equivalent width evolution correlation metric introduced here, we identify species co-evolving (indicative of common line origin) via novel visualization. We interferometrically constrain often problematically degenerate parameters, inclination and inner disk radius, allowing us to focus on the structure of the wind, magnetosphere, and inner gaseous disk in radiative transfer models. Over all timescales sampled, the strongest variability occurs within the blueshifted absorption components of the Balmer series lines; the strength of variability increases with the cadence of the observations. Finally, high-resolution spectra allow us to probe substructure within the Balmer series' blueshifted absorption components: we observe static, low-velocity features and time-evolving features at higher velocities. Overall, we find the observed line morphologies and variability are inconsistent with a scaled-up T Tauri MA scenario. We suggest that as magnetic field structure and strength change dramatically with increasing stellar mass from T Tauri to Herbig Ae/Be stars, so too may accretion and outflow processes.Comment: 34 pages, 52 figures, published in the Ap

Envisioning Futures of Design Education: An Exploratory Workshop with Design Educator

The demand for innovation in the creative economy has seen the adoption and adaptation of design thinking and design methods into domains outside design, such as business management, education, healthcare, and engineering. Design thinking and methodologies are now considered useful for identifying, framing and solving complex, often wicked social, technological, economic and public policy problems. As the practice of design undergoes change, design education is also expected to adjust to prepare future designers to have dramatically different demands made upon their general abilities and bases of knowledge than have design career paths from years past. Future designers will have to develop skills and be able to construct and utilize knowledge that allows them to make meaningful contributions to collaborative efforts involving experts from disciplines outside design. Exactly how future designers should be prepared to do this has sparked a good deal of conjecture and debate in the professional and academic design communities. This report proposes that the process of creating future scenarios that more broadly explore and expand the role, or roles, for design and designers in the world’s increasingly interwoven and interdependent societies can help uncover core needs and envision framework(s) for design education. This approach informed the creation of a workshop held at the Design Research Society conference in Brighton, UK in June of 2016, where six design educators shared four future scenarios that served as catalysts for conversations about the future of design education. Each scenario presented a specific future design education context. One scenario described the progression of design education as a core component of K-12 curricula; another scenario situated design at the core of a network of globally-linked local Universities; the third scenario highlighted the expanding role of designers over time; and the final scenario described a distance design education context that made learning relevant and “close” to an individual learner’s areas of interest. Forty participants in teams of up to six were asked to collaboratively visualize a possible future vision of design education based on one of these four scenarios and supported by a toolkit consisting of a set of trigger cards (with images and text), along with markers, glue and flipcharts. The collaborative visions that were jointly created as posters using the toolkit and then presented by the teams to all the workshop participants and facilitators are offered here as a case study. Although inspired by different scenarios, their collectively envisioned futures of what design education should facilitate displayed some key similarities. Some of those were: Future design education curricula will focus on developing collaborative approaches within which faculty and students are co-learners; These curricula will bring together ways of learning and knowing that stem from multiple disciplines; and Learning in and about the natural environment will be a key goal (the specifics of how that would be accomplished were not elaborated upon.) In addition, the need for transdisciplinarity was expressed across the collaborative visions created by each of the teams, but the manner that participants chose to express their ideas about this varied. Some envisioned that design would evolve by drawing on other disciplinary knowledge, and others envisioned that design would gradually integrate with other disciplines

Animating the development of Social Networks over time using a dynamic extension of multidimensional scaling

The animation of network visualizations poses technical and theoretical challenges. Rather stable patterns are required before the mental map enables a user to make inferences over time. In order to enhance stability, we developed an extension of stress-minimization with developments over time. This dynamic layouter is no longer based on linear interpolation between independent static visualizations, but change over time is used as a parameter in the optimization. Because of our focus on structural change versus stability the attention is shifted from the relational graph to the latent eigenvectors of matrices. The approach is illustrated with animations for the journal citation environments of Social Networks, the (co-)author networks in the carrying community of this journal, and the topical development using relations among its title words. Our results are also compared with animations based on PajekToSVGAnim and SoNIA