This is one reason that Johan Bollen and his crue at LANL did this work:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090309/full/458135a.html
I am not positive but I think the distance metric being used in this
work must be based on citations. It is fundamental to the process of
publication, especially something as strongly scrutinized as one's PhD
thesis, that one cites seminal works close to one's field.
Bollen, et al.s work was based on records of *usage*, read-wear on the
Journal space, if you will. Citation maps reflect the biases of
conservatism in publication while Usage maps have a chance of reflecting
a more progressive, more exploratory view of the relationship among
disciplines.
What I'm more interested in, is the run up to breakouts of one
sub-discipline from it's parent's or the convergence of disparate
disciplines.
The Visualization tool here is promising... I am a big fan of various
forms of Bubble-Trees and of force-directed layouts/visualization...
especially with time axes...
I contend that if you want to see higher-dimensional relationships, you
need to invoke higher-dimensional encodings... and to keep track of
those, they need to be highly motivated/apt encodings... which calls for
a more elaborate systematization of making such mappings...
Layered Metaphor Complexes, or Complex Layered Metaphors... yet to be
written down/up... <sighh...>
Visual display of the relationship of dissertation topics at Stanford.
Note the narrowness of those coming out of "Communications." Doesn't
seem to be much cross-pollination from other perspectives/disciplines.
[No surprise, that.] But I wonder how one could measure/rank the
degrees of association and dis-association of all the departments
pictured here? -tj
*Quotes:*
Dissertation Browser | Stanford
<http://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/dissertations/browser.html>
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
