Academic Training Lectures | Representing Scientific Communities by Data Visualization | 14-15 March

Please note that the next series of Academic Training Lectures will take place from 14 to 15 March 2016 and will be given by Dario Rodighiero (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland).
 

Representing Scientific Communities by Data Visualisation (1/2)​
Monday, 14 March 2016 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
https://indico.cern.ch/event/465533/

Representing Scientific Communities by Data Visualisation (2/2)​
Tuesday, 15 March 2016 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
https://indico.cern.ch/event/465534/

at CERN, IT Amphitheatre (31-3-004) 

Description: These lectures present research that investigates the representation of communities, and the way to foster their understanding by different audiences. Communities are complex multidimensional entities intrinsically difficult to represent synthetically. The way to represent them is likely to differ depending on the audience considered: governing entities trying to make decision for the future of the community, the general public trying to understand the nature of the community and the members of the community themselves. This work considers two types of communities as example: a scientific organisation and an arising domain: the EPFL institutional community composed of faculty members and researchers and, at a worldwide level, the emerging community of digital humanities researchers. For both cases, the research is organised as a process going from graphical research to actual materialisation as physical artefacts (posters, maps, etc.), possibly extended using digital devices (augmented-reality applications). Through iterative cycles of design and experimentation, the research explores theoretically (representation theory, studies about networks, cartography, etc.) and experimentally (development of methods to assess the relevance of each representation depending on the target audiences) how to create effective community mapping. Its global ambition is to inform a theory of design helping us to understand how certain community representations can lead to actual cognitive shifts in the way a community is understood.