The Endless Gallery: Visualizing Authors Citation Images in the Humanities

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The Endless Gallery Visualizing Authors
Citation Images in the Humanities

• Howard D. White
• Xia Lin
• Jan Buzydlowski
• College of Information Science and Technology
• Drexel University
• Philadelphia, PA 19104

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Authors names have a double sense

• They can designate
• Persons (Living or Dead)
• Oeuvres
• Persons or oeuvres can be mapped if they can be
  related with some metric.
• Data gathered on persons can be linked to oeuvres
  and vice-versa.

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What are author maps good for?

• Provide intellectual overviews of specialties.
• Assist in retrieval of documents.
• Suggest networks for sociometric analysis.

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Inputs to author maps

• Multiple-author input
• Use author names from book or other publication
• White McCain used 120 information scientists
  who were top-cited across 12 journals
• Could use names in one of Randall Collinss
  diagrams
• Use judgment sample (own knowledge, advisors,
  nominations, etc.)
• Hinda Greenbergs sample of 88 literary theorists
• Single-author input
• AuthorLink Topic of todays presentation

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Collins, Randall. 1998. The sociology of
philosophies
A global theory of intellectual change.
Belknap Harvard.
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Hinda Greenbergs 88 literary theorists as PFNET
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Single Author Maps

• Can map an authors
• Co-authors (those with whom she writes)
• Citees (those she cites)
• Co-citing authors (those who cite her with
  others)
• Co-cited authors (those others with whom she is
  cited)

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Citation Image and Citation Identity

• Both terms introduced in Howard D. Whites recent
  articles on personalized bibliometrics.
• Citation Identity All authors an author cites.
• Citation Image All authors with whom an author
  is co-cited.

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Co-Citation Analysis

• Lin, Xia. 1997. Map Displays for Information
  Retrieval. Journal of the American Society for
  Information Science 48 40-54.
• Chen, Chaomei. 1998. Bridging the Gap The Use
  of Pathfinder Networks in Visual Navigation.
  Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 9
  267-286.
• Document co-citation counts times two papers are
  cited together.
• Author co-citation counts times two authors,
  e.g., Lin and Chen, are cited together.
• Journal co-citation counts times two journals are
  cited together.

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Co-Citation Analysis

• Data on co-citation are readily obtainable from
  databases of the Institute for Scientific
  Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, PA
• Scisearch (Science Citation Index)
• Social Scisearch (Social Sciences Citation Index)
• Arts Humanities Search (Arts Humanities
  Citation Index)
• These databases are searchable online through,
  e.g., the Dialog Corporation.

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Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA)

• Detects patterns in the frequency with which any
  works by any two authors are jointly cited in
  later works. Could be called analysis of
  co-cited oeuvres.
• Only recurrent co-citation is significant the
  more times authors are cited together, the more
  strongly related they are in the eyes of citers.

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Author Co-Citation Analysis

• If Ben Shneiderman and Shakespeare are cited
  together in one article, it probably means
  little.
• If Ben Shneiderman and Stuart Card are cited
  together in more than 200 articles, it means a
  lot their names have come to symbolize something
  like interactive interfaces for digital
  libraries.
• In a cited-author (CA) search on Dialog,
• SELECT CASHNEIDERMAN B AND CACARD SK
• would retrieve the 200 citing articles.

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AuthorLink

• AuthorLink maps the top-ranked names in an
  authors citation image.
• Produces co-cited author maps in real time (a few
  seconds) on a Web site.

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AuthorLink

• User merely has to enter name of a single author
  of interest as a seed.
• E.g., Dickinson-E for Emily Dickinson
• System responds with the top authors co-cited
  with that seed24 other names ranked by frequency
  of co-occurrence.
• System then pairs every name with every other in
  a 25x25 square symmetric matrix.

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Advantages of Maps

• Ranked list of top 25 co-cited authors often
  contains names not previously known to user.
• Both Kohonen maps and PFNETs show
  interconnections of the 25 authors not apparent
  in the one-dimensional ranking of a simple list.
  
• Maps automatically pair authors with their
  biographers, editors, commentators, and critics.

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Map could be published in a review of Wilde
studies, 1988-97
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Architecture of AuthorLink

• Front tier .. Middle tier ..
  Back tier

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Interpretation of Maps

• Kohonen maps show high co-citation counts of
  authors by placing them closer in space.
• PFNETs show highest co-citation counts of authors
  directly, as links between nodes bearing authors
  names.

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Norman Mailer
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Limitations on the Maps

• AuthorLink maps are pictures of 10 years of
  scholarship as reflected in AHCI.
• They simplify and highlight certain relationships
  in humanistic studies.
• They do not capture all relationships in the
  data, nor do they do they present superior
  truths.
• Prickly humanists may object to presence of some
  links and absence of others in PFNETs.

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Domain Literacy Needed!

• Cant interpret maps without expertise in field
  they represent.
• Cant recognize conflated names unless
  domain-literate.
• A Einstein Physicist or Music Historian?
• T Childers LIS guy or Expert on Nazi Party?
• Not likely to interest naïve end-users.
• Good for informing partial experts.

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Interface Design Considerations

• Link interface to valuable digital libraries (ISI
  citation databases and the journal literatures
  they lead to).
• Focus on intellectual content meaningful labels,
  meaningfully presented.
• Stress quick and flexible presentations over
  long-term displays.

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Bad Design PFNET of Plato made with VRML
software
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Better Design PFNET of Plato made with Pajek
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3 Main Shapes Found in AuthorLink PFNET Displays

• Dendrite
• E.g., for Virginia Woolf
• Cycle
• E.g., for Herbert A. Simon
• Star
• E.g., for Noam Chomsky

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PFNETs

• Are algorithmically connected graphs. based on
  finding minimum-cost path between any two
  nodes.
• In ACA, this is generally the highest single
  co-citation count between author pairs (all pairs
  are examined).
• Results in useful simplification of graph.
• Use spring embedder algorithm to produce layout.

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Vincent van Gogh
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Einstein-A and Mozart
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Einstein-A and Bohr
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It is an endless gallery

• whitehd_at_drexel.edu
• xlin_at_drexel.edu
• janb_at_drexel.edu