The computer age triggered a seemingly endless stream of scientific data, but such incoming mountains of information come at a cost. The more data you amass, the tougher it is to comprehend what you're dealing with.
In a push for better perspective, a group of information scientists in 2005 created a decade-long competitive art exhibit called Places & Spaces: Mapping Science. From artistic pop-culture plots to illustrations of the state of scientific collaboration (above), the founders hope winning entries inspire researchers to present their troves of data in clever and digestible ways.
"Good science maps give you a holistic understanding of how the data is structured," said information scientist Katy Börner of Indiana University, a founder and curator of the exhibit. She is also author of theAtlas of Science, a collection of the maps gathered over the years. "You don't just have to use maps to find your way home. They can be ways to get global overviews on topics."
The exhibit's advisory board follows a theme and some core criteria to pick 10 winners each year. This year's winning entries for the theme "science maps as visual interfaces to digital libraries" were announced this week. Exhibit-ready versions of the maps are scheduled for display in mid-June.
We showcase some of our favorite winners here, in addition to a few that didn't make the final cut. Some maps are too small to properly appreciate here, but we include links to high-resolution versions for each of them.
Scientific Collaboration
Inspired by a map of 500 million Facebook friends published in December 2010, research analyst Olivier H. Beauchesne created this winning visualization of international collaboration that occurred from 2005 through 2009.
Each arc represents a collaboration between scientists in different cities mined from studies, books and trade journals found in Elsevier's Scopus database. Dense nodes of science emerge in the Americas, Europe and Japan.
Science's Genealogy
About 39,000,000 papers were published in scientific journals between 1817 and 2010. To map the explosion of research, technology analyst M'hamed el Aisati graphed unique publications based on information in Elsevier’s Scopus database.
Although the map was not a winner, it’s among our favorites. Aisati hopes to show journal pedigrees, as well as the rise and fall of specific scientific fields, in future iterations.
Tree of Life
Another of our non-winning favorites, this map shows a sample of 76,425 recognized species — just a fraction of the 5 to 100 million estimated life forms in existence.
The data was pulled from the Tree of Life project, an effort to document the lineage of Earth's organisms through time. Life's origin and humans, aka Homo sapiens, are labeled in red.
Wikipedia vs. the Universal Decimal Classification
The structural differences between public categories in Wikipedia and academic ones in the Universal Decimal Classification, a formal library system, stand out sharply in this map.
"We would like to scrutinize the question of how do knowledge maps differ when they are created socially (i.e. Wikipedia) as opposed to when they are created formally (UDC) using classification theory," the authors wrote in their exhibit-winning entry.
Internet in a Desk
Paul Otlet, a Belgian visionary who lived from 1868 to 1944, is often credited with anticipating an internet for the spread of knowledge. To create an internet-like learning environment before computers existed, he designed a one-person productivity station called the Mondothèque.
It was to harbor drawers brimming with reference books, microfilm and bibliographic cards. He also imagined radio, television and camera equipment at arm's length on the desk.
This winning entry depicts Otlet's vision.
Metadata for Architectural Exploration
To make all of Europe's architectural data easier to access, a community of users created the winning classification tree above, titled Metadata for Architectural Content in Europe.
The interactive version on the project's website allows users to search through a web of architectural vocabulary. Once a phrase is selected, relevant websites appear below to guide productive exploration.
A Universe of Standards
Picking a standard is crucial to amassing a well-curated pile of data, but more than 100 widely used rule sets exist.
To visualize how and when to use a particular metadata standard, library scientists in Idaho and North Carolina created this map, which was among the winners.
Data Mining the Bible
Using a customized Java program, a duo of information scientists extracted as much data as they could from the Bible to create this winning entry.
The graphic above depicts a "social network" made of 2,619 people and places mentioned in the book. Below, the cross-references (colored arcs) are mapped to verses in chapters (gray bars).
30 Years of Airline Travel
Airline-passenger flow in the Northern Hemisphere is shown in these annual snapshots created usingTulip software.
This visualization didn't win, but we are looking forward to a video the authors plan to release that will show the booms and busts of airline travel throughout the past 30 years.
The History of Science Fiction
This winning chronology of science fiction drawn by Ward Shelley is an artistic and surprisingly informative picture of the genre's evolution.
From the advent of fear and wonder itself to the emergence of new space opera, Shelley covers hundreds of the most loved sci-fi works in print, film and television.
