Data Visualization is Beautiful as a Wall Decoration

05/21/2015

Citeology is an interactive tool for visualizing relationships across research papers created by Justin Matejka, Tovi Grossman and George Fitzmaurice of the UI Group. Selecting any one of the 11,000 plus publications from CHI and UIST will show you its geneology; its parents (papers that it cites) and its children (papers that site it).

Beyond being helpful to the user interface community these graphs are beautiful. We have a wall size version of one graph in the Toronto Autodesk office.

The layout of the information is simple and effective. Across the horizontal axis is a listing of all the papers by year. As time progresses more papers have been published, much like our growing human population. Parent, or past papers are connected by blue lines while children, or future papers, are connected by red lines.

The lines drawn between papers are semi-transparent add build up to show multiple connections.

Similar to a word cloud, all the titles are displayed with the connected papers being shown in darker colors to stand out.

The complete tool shows some additional information and controls for refining your search results including:

shortest path between papers
number of children and parents to show
details about the active paper

Citeology uses research papers and it's interesting to think about what other kinds of relationships a tool like this could help to visualize:

Building on geneology, things like family trees, band memberships, and sports teams are likely candidates
Historical figures and events along with their triggers
Connections and dependencies between things in the Internet of Things