is it just me

wondering what’s up in my world…

Ever tried to visualize a workshop?

| 6 Comments

flattr this!

Yesterday I attended the Science 2.0 workshop at the EC-TEL 2009 where we had some really interesting talks about future research tasks in the field of Science 2.0. As I like visual representations of content a lot, I wondered if there is a simple way of visualizing the content of a paper and the different research themes of a workshop. I used Wordle to create a very simple visualization of the content of Martin’s and my paper about Twitter in conferences and one of all papers accepted for the workshop:

Wordle of my own paper

This is the wordle of my own paper.

Wordle of all Science 2.0 workshop papers

This is the wordle of all Science 2.0 workshop papers.

Maybe we can implement some kind of such visualizations in conferences such that BEFORE a conference you can visually browse what will be discussed in workshops and thus select where you go. I also would prefer to have these automatic tag clouds for all papers so I easily figure out the main topics of it.

Sure these simple tag clouds cannot be the final step because there is no interactivity, so you cannot click on a keyword and see its occurrences in the paper or all workshop papers – but hey it’s just an idea so far… Tell me what you think.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Author: Wolfgang Reinhardt

I'm a continuous learner in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning, Twitter addict, CEO of UMITS Limited and father of two boys. Recently I received a PhD from OUNL for my thesis "Awareness Support for Knowledge Workers in Research Networks". I'm asking myself many questions why things are like they are and seek for answers.

6 Comments

  1. Thanks for visualizing yesterday’s workshop! Since I’m also busy visualizing lots of stuff in scince I think it would be a great idea to visualize workshops and other seesions before a conf to be able to better pick out what I’m actually interesed in. But like you mention, interactivity would be the next step to provide added-value to simple tag clouds. Mapping with other themes like reserachers, conferences, further reading and arvchives etc is what comes to my mind. We saw a bunch of interesting stuff yesterday and I hope the momentum will let us all work together and help bundle our expertise to create useful and innovative science 2.o tools :-)

  2. Cool! I think it’s a great idea (and we might borrow it for an upcoming conference). We were just discussing the other day about how hard it is to decide which sessions to attend, only to discover -way too late- that the one you chose was not about what you thought it was, or the level was too high/too low, etc.

    I might even use this for my class! ;)

  3. I’m glad you like it. Maybe this approach can really help in choosing the right session. Graham Attwell just wrote something similar from the ECER conference in Vienna http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/09/reality-check-in-vienna/ – so maybe we should join forces to create something really helpful and sustainable (especially for TEL conferences…)

  4. Pingback: is it just me » EC-TEL 2009 - Some thoughts

  5. Pingback: is it just me » Visualizing the RecSysTEL workshop

  6. Pingback: Visualizing the RecSysTEL workshop | Wolfgang Reinhardt

Leave a Reply

Required fields are marked *.

*