The Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge

2005, Illustration: The Synapse Revealed
Credit: Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media

The American National Science Foundation (NSF) arranges since 2003 an annual, international Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge that accepts entries in five different categories: Photography, Illustration, Informational Graphics, Interactive Media and Non-Interactive Media. The winners are introduced on the challenge web page and some of them are interesting from the medical perspective, too. This years winners will be announced on 26th September.

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Map of science

Seed magazine printed a Map of science that opened the 2006 Gallery in Nature. The map was made in collaboration by Kevin Boyack, Dick Klavans and Information Esthetics (i|e) founder W. Bradford Paley, and it is now sold out but you can still find the pdf file on i|e. In Nature there was written:

“We begin with all of science all at once, in this conceptual map of 800,000 published papers. The red circles are nodes of papers that cite one another. They are named with a string of phrases that relate to their fields, and are connected with lines of various heaviness and length, depending on the cross-linkages. Pure chemistry is at the end of the right-hand peninsula. Medicine is located roughly at the lower left, and physics is at the top.”

The colour scheme was altered in the second-generation map that is still to be found on i|e (as shown above).

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On learning and data visualization

The classical way of taking notes at lectures is to fill the A4 with linear, continuous text, preferably in black and white. It is awful, so you should forget all about it at once. To illustrate the possibilities of data visualization I will direct you to a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods that effectively summarizes the methods used at the time being.

And when you take notes, you should consider using one of the programmes reviewed at Mind-mapping.org. It is a heaven for anyone interested in mindmapping, concept mapping and other types of information organisation, and you will be directed to pages where you can download software of all types (shareware, open-source…) suitable for all the different operating systems. (If someone wonders why I don’t mention Tony Buzan in the same sentence as mindmapping, then I will inform that the train left the station a long time ago and there are people all over the world giving their input to the method.)

Colour, different font (size), shape, and pictures are an important of the learning process and using mindmapping is efficient, gives you a fast clue to what parts of the subject you should emphasize more, and in general takes the learning experience to a whole new level.

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