Institute For The Future

Collaborative mapping

One of our examples in our Perspective on transdisciplinarity is AuthorMap, a project by the Visualization and Information Retrieval at Drexel. Their java servlet scans 1.26 million records of arts and humanities articles looking for co-citations of a given author, then builds a map of the 25 authors most co-cited, with the connections between those 25: "The assumption is that if two authors are often cited together by many other authors, these two authors likely have common intellectual interest in their research and writing."

 

I think that exploring connections graphically could make a big difference in the way we learn and teach. Another approach I am exploring is collaborative mapping, analogous to the wiki for text. The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has developed CmapTools for groups to create concept maps both synchronously and asynchoronously. Here's a concept map explanation of what you can do with Cmap.