The Places & Spaces exhibit features interactive data visualizations.
The Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering has announced the newest collection of interactive data visualizations, or macroscopes, selected for inclusion in the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition.
Macroscopes gather vast amounts of information, analyze it, and visualize it to gain clear insights from complex data. To do so, they use powerful algorithms. This collection of macroscopes highlights different methods for harnessing the power of a dataset: network analysis, dimensionality reduction, “scrollytelling,” and natural language processing. Each can be used to create data portals of great power, utility, and beauty.
The new macroscopes are now available online. They are also currently being promoted in conjunction with an exhibition at Dimension Mill, a Bloomington non-profit center for coworking and entrepreneurship. To interact with the macroscopes online, please visit http://scimaps.org/iteration/16.
The new interactive visualizations, which were selected by an international advisory board of leading data visualization experts, include:
- United States Water Crisis (Andrew Levinson): Water is essential to survival, and many regions of the US are experiencing water stress and shortage. Scroll to learn more about the scope of the crisis.
- Watson News Explorer (Steven Ross, Timothy Stutts, Megan Monroe, and Mauro Martino of IBM’s Visual AI Lab): Our view of the world is shaped by the news we consume. Scan today’s headlines coded for prominence and positivity using color and brightness.
- An Alternative Data-Driven Country Map (Nikita Rokotyan, Olya Stukova, and Dasha Kolmakova of Interacta studio): This world map looks different, because countries are placed close together based on how similar they are. Compare countries to reveal some surprising similarities using indicators like government integrity, tax burden, and World Happiness Report score.
- Nature 150 (current and former members of the Barabási Lab at Northeastern University): Many game-changing discoveries have been published in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. Find out how great ideas have built on past research and inspired future breakthroughs.
For additional information about each of these visualizations, please visit scimaps.org.
About the Places & Spaces exhibition: Drawing from across cultures and across scholarly disciplines, Places & Spaces: Mapping Science demonstrates the power of maps to address vital questions about the contours and content of human knowledge. An interdisciplinary and international advisory board chose each one of the works in the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit as an outstanding example of how visualization can bring patterns in scientific data into focus. The exhibit is curated by the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. The exhibit has been on display at over 382 venues in 28 countries on 6 continents. It showcases the work of more than 250 mapmakers that hail from 17 different countries. For further information, please visit our website at scimaps.org.
About the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center (CNS): CNS is a research center at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing in Bloomington, Indiana (http://cns.iu.edu/). For more than 20 years, CNS has played a leading role in the field of data visualization, developing open source tools for the creation of data visualizations, offering online professional development classes in visual analytics, co-organizing international workshops and conferences, and promoting network science and visualization through international initiatives. CNS’s research, teaching, and software development efforts benefit from long-term collaborations with colleagues in academia, government, and industry.