Map of Science

Tomorrow I leave for my 10-week summer internship in Newport, RI at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. I’ll be working on Human-Systems Integration, which seems to be a military-specific term for human factors engineering. However, Human-Systems Integration is more than just human factors. It takes into account selection of personnel, training, and both physical and psychological factors of users of systems. It brings together a lot of research and reminds me of how interconnected science is.

A little over a year ago, the Information Esthetics group published what is effectively a map of science, of Relationships among Scientific Paradigms. It’s continually fascinating to see the links between all kinds of different fields. Click the image for a full-size version of the image.

A description from Seed Magazine:

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.