This may be of interest to some of us.... Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation announced<http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122509&org=NSF>a new system to help researchers make sense of stores of scientific papers, and potentially find the “next big thing.”
The Action Science Explorer <http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/ase/>, or ASE, developed jointly by University of Michigan and University of Maryland faculty, takes a difficult cognitive task -- backtracking through paper citations to identify a breakthrough -- and “offloads” it to the much easier task of perceiving density in network visualizations. In other words, it takes mounds of difficult to digest research, and uses social network analysis techniques and graphing to make the information immediately recognizable. http://www.mentalmunition.com/2011/12/breakthrough-in-data-visualization-what.html -tj
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