Scholars@Cornell: Visualizing the scholarly record

As stewards of the scholarly record, Cornell University Library is developing a data and visualization service known as Scholars@Cornell with the goal of improving the visibility of Cornell research and enabling discovery of explicit and latent patterns of scholarly collaboration. We provide aggregate views of data where dynamic visualizations become the entry points into a rich graph of knowledge that can be explored interactively to answer questions such as: Who are the experts in what areas? Which departments collaborate with each other? What are patterns of interdisciplinary research? And more. Key components of the system are Symplectic Elements to provide automated citation feeds from external sources such as Web of Science, the Scholars "Feed Machine" that performs automated data curation tasks, and the VIVO semantic linked data store. The new "VIZ-VIVO" component bridges the chasm between the back-end of semantically rich data with a front-end user experience that takes advantage of new developments in the world of dynamic web visualizations. We will demonstrate a set of D3 visualizations that leverage relationships between people (e.g., faculty), their affiliations (e.g., academic departments), and published research outputs (e.g., journal articles by subject area). We will discuss our results with two of the initial pilot partners at Cornell University, the School of Engineering and the Johnson School of Management.