The various ways of interacting with social media, web collaboration tools, co-authorship and citation networks for scientific and research purposes remain distinct. In this paper, we propose a solution to align such information. We particularly developed an exploratory visualization of research networks. The result is a scholar centered, multi-perspective view of conferences and people based on their collaborations and online interactions. We measured the relevance and user acceptance of this type of interactive visualization. Preliminary results indicate a high precision both for recognized people and conferences. The majority in a group of test-users responded positively to a set of statements about the acceptance.

1. Visualizing Collaborations and Online Social Interactions
at Scientific Conferences for Scholarly Networking
Laurens De Vocht
Selver Softic, Ruben Verborgh, Erik Mannens, Martin Ebner, Rik Van de Walle

3. Prototype
Visualizes the snapshot of the network of a researcher
Detects relevant conference hashtags for tracking
Distance
Number of collaborations (co-authored publications)
Size
Recent frequency of interaction (mentions)
Color
Indicate cases when mentioned or collaborated
together but not in network yet (following) or not

4. Early Results
Balanced

5. Early Results
Not enough conference related tweets

6. Early Results
Too much noise (conference unrelated tweets)

7. laurens_d_v
laurens.devocht@ugent.be
http://www.resxplorer.org
http://semweb.mmlab.be/
Contact