In ancient maps of the world, expanses of unknown territory might hold a warning to would-be explorers: Here there be monsters. For today’s explorers seeking to navigate and understand the world of science, the monsters are the untamed collections of data that inhabit a largely uncharted landscape.
The April 6, 2004, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) features nearly 20 articles by some of tomorrow’s mapmakers. Representing the computer, information and cognitive sciences, mathematics, geography, psychology and other fields, these researchers present attempts to create maps of science from the ever-growing and constantly evolving ocean of digital data.
“Science is specializing at high speed, which leads to increasing fragmentation and reinvention,” said Katy Brner of Indiana University. “Maps of publication databases or other data sources can help show how scientists and scientific results are interconnected.”
College students might use such maps to see how well a syllabus covers a field’s major topics, while companies could map out plans for targeting their investments. Funding agencies could keep an eye on research frontiers or forecast how funding decisions might affect a discipline. An online version could provide an effective interface to major databases.
“Ultimately, I’d like to see a map of science in schools, as common as the political world map,” Brner said. “‘Continents’ would represent the diverse areas of science, and closely related areas would reside on the same continent. Teachers might say, ‘Let’s look at the new research frontier in sector F5.’
A map of the top 50 “hot” words in the most highly cited PNAS articles from 1982-2001. Words appearing more often have larger circles, while the circle color and ring color identify when the word first appeared and when its popularity peaked, respectively. (Credit: Ketan Mane and Katy Borner, Indiana University.)
