lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

On 14 March, on the American television show 60 Minutes there was a story about COVID-19 mutants. Now, scientists understand mutations, so there was nothing surprising, scientifically, in the story. But the shock for me came when the scientist showed the journalist a large visualization of the data about mutations of the virus. Okay, maybe the journalist was just a bit lead-handed about the question; but the answer was completely unsatisfying for a scientist of information who has spent decades helping to visualize science.

The point of the chart, of course, was the visualization—the ability to “see” the mutations as they arise and spread.

Today the leading scientists of information with regard to visualization are Katy Börner of Indiana University (see her atlases of science [2010] and knowledge [2015]) and my colleague Andrea Scharnhorst (DANS [Data Archiving and Networked Services, Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences]) (see for example her team’s visualization of the whole of Wikipedia [Salah et al. 2011] http://scimaps.org/mapdetail/design_vs_emergence__127 ). Most recently we have been working to map the knowledge organization structures that exist hidden within the LOD Cloud (our book Linking Knowledge will appear later this year).

KO experts have used visualization as a key tool both for data analysis (e.g., co-word analysis or author co-citation analysis or network analysis) and for expressing abstract ideas (e.g., ontological maps or reference models such as the CIDOC cultural heritage Conceptual Reference Model http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ or its sibling the IFLA Library Reference Model https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11412 ).

Like the 60 minutes example:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-variants-infectious-strains-60-minutes-2021-03-14/

whose map shows both the proximity of variants to the viruses from which they mutated and the distance among the distinct variants and the rate of mutation over time; showing all on the same map helps scientists visualize both the particulars and the full picture.

CBS News made it impossible to grab a real visual from their video so you will have to look for yourself—and warning, you cannot even pause the video to look at the visualization—but here is what I was able to capture:

We can see striations of different color, and along them we can see nodes that represent instantiations of the virus; the striations apparently represent mutations. We can see how the lines thicken and grow together over time as the virus and its mutations gain ground (and efficacy at transmission). This simple capture shows the importance of visualization. The knowledge of the degrees of mutation and of transmissibility is useful, but the visualization makes it all the more clear what sort of battle lies ahead for epidemiology, which is the science of controlling pandemics.

Research in knowledge organization is replete with visualizations. From my own work I can recommend three examples:

“Universes, Dimensions, Domains, Intensions and Extensions: Knowledge Organization for the 21st Century.” In A. Neelameghan and K.S. Raghavan eds. Categories, Contexts, and Relations in Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the Twelfth International ISKO Conference, 6-9 August 2012, Mysore, India. Advances in Knowledge Organization 13. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2012, 1-7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287850076_Universes_dimensions_domains_intensions_and_extensions_Knowledge_organization_for_the_21st_century

“Prologomena to a New Order: A Domain-Analytical Review of the Influence of S.R. Ranganathan on Knowledge Organization.” In Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, Bangalore Golden Jubliee. SRELS Journal of Information Management (2013): 709-19. http://www.i-scholar.in/index.php/sjim/article/view/43812

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2018. “The Evolution of the Concept: A Case Study from American Documentation.” Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 42: 113-34. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/717390/pdf

Currently in IKOS (The Institute for Knowledge Organization and Structure, Inc. https://knoworg.org ) we are working on a study of home care nursing in the pandemic. To guide our research we continually analyze our data even as the data store grows, mirroring the work of the medical researchers in the 60 Minutes report above. For example, after a simple analysis of video transcripts of home care nurses being interviewed in the press we were able to return a visualization of frequently occurring themes.

This visualization helps us guide our further research by showing clear facets in the nurses’ experiences. We see especially the important core of PPE and the frequent mention of the “front lines” in the “home_care” facet. This gives us important clues to the emotional component of the profession of home care nursing at the moment. Stay tuned for publications from our work in the near future.

It is important that scientists of visualization in the KO community speak up and make their work known, preferably in popular venues, such as the Economist, so that the world will understand the role we play in solving the great riddles of science. KO is vital to science.

References

Börner, Katy. 2010. Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Börner, Katy. 2015. Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone Can Map. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Salah, Alkim Almila Akdag, Cheng Gao, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Krzysztof Suchecki. 2011. Design vs. Emergence: Visualisation of Knowledge Orders. Courtesy of The Knowledge Space Lab, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Places & Spaces: Mapping Science VII.5 http://scimaps.org/mapdetail/design_vs_emergence__127

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2012. “Universes, Dimensions, Domains, Intensions and Extensions: Knowledge Organization for the 21st Century.” In Categories, Contexts, and Relations in Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the Twelfth International ISKO Conference, 6-9 August 2012, Mysore, India, ed. A. Neelameghan and K.S. Raghavan. Advances in Knowledge Organization 13. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 1-7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287850076_Universes_dimensions_domains_intensions_and_extensions_Knowledge_organization_for_the_21st_century

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2013. “Prologomena to a New Order: A Domain-Analytical Review of the Influence of S.R. Ranganathan on Knowledge Organization.” In Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, Bangalore Golden Jubliee. SRELS Journal of Information Management (2013): 709-19. http://www.i-scholar.in/index.php/sjim/article/view/43812

Smiraglia, Richard P. 2018. “The Evolution of the Concept: A Case Study from American Documentation.” Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 42: 113-34. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/717390/pdf

Smiraglia, Richard P. and Andrea Scharnhorst, eds. 2021. Linking Knowledge: Linked Open Data for Knowledge Organization. Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag. Forthcoming.