Representing Scientific Communities by Data Visualization (1/2)

<!--HTML--><p><span style="font-size:14px">These lectures present a research that investigates the representation of communities, and the way to foster their understanding by different audiences. Communities are complex multidimensional entities intrinsically difficult to represent synthetically. The way to represent them is likely to differ depending on the audience considered: governing entities trying to make decision for the future of the community, general public trying to understand the nature of the community and the members of the community themselves. This work considers two types of communities as example: a scientific organization and an arising domain: the EPFL institutional community composed of faculty members and researchers and, at a world wide level, the emerging community of Digital Humanities researchers. For both cases, the research is organised as a process going from graphical research to actual materialization as physical artefacts (posters, maps, etc.), possibly extended using digital devices (augmented reality applications). Through iterative cycles of design and experimentation, the research explores theoretically (representation theory, studies about networks, cartography, etc.) and experimentally (development of methods to assess the relevance of each representation depending on the target audiences) how to create effective community mapping. Its global ambition is to inform a theory of design helping to understand how certain community representations can lead to actual cognitive shifts in the way a community is understood.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:14px">First Day - Design Creation</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:14px">The lecture proposes a new way to look at scientific communities. Dealing with a very complex situation, where literacy production is enormous and decisions are made using metrics that are judged obsolete by all, we propose a visual way to understand the community organization. How do scholars work together? What is the intermediary object which makes scientific researchers work together? This first session transforms the current situation into a visual object, a design artefact that embodies the elemental in the creation of maps to understand and evaluate scientific communities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:14px">Lecturer&#39;s bio</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-family:garamond">Dario Rodighiero is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of EPFL, attending the Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the Cities. He is designer at the College of Humanities, in the </span><a href="http://dhlab.epfl.ch/"><u>DHLAB</u></a><span style="font-family:garamond">, where his supervisor, Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric Kaplan, is director.</span><br /> <span style="font-family:garamond">Previously Dario joined the </span><a href="http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/"><u>M&eacute;dialab</u></a><span style="font-family:garamond"> of Science Po in Paris, working with Bruno Latour at ERC project </span><a href="http://modesofexistence.org/"><u>AIME</u></a><span style="font-family:garamond">&mdash;An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Furthermore, he has been employed for four years at European Commission </span><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/"><u>JRC</u></a><span style="font-family:garamond">, working on an information retrieval system for the scientific library.</span><br /> <span style="font-family:garamond">Dario conceives the design for scientific conferences. He created the brand image for the&nbsp;the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Paris - </span><a href="http://chi2013.acm.org/"><u>CHI2013</u></a><span style="font-family:garamond"> and for the </span><span style="font-family:garamond">Digital Humanities conference in Lausanne </span><a href="http://dh2014.org/"><u>DH2014</u></a><span style="font-family:garamond">.</span></span></p> <p>Contact the lecturer: dario.rodighiero at epfl.ch</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>