Reflection - Visualization

Challenge

I am a student at master’s program devoted to the policy making in the public sector and private sector  in regard to the development of science, technology and innovations. One of my assignments was to  analyze the information about joint research centers (laboratories) – a scientific units which involve  different actors like scientists, industry workers, government representatives, civil society actors, etc. to  cooperate in the process of research and development. Such centers have various specializations of  their research like trending technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence, 5G networks, social sciences and  humanities, cognitive sciences and so on.

For my task I collected more than 50 documents with data about joint research centers’ specializations  like reports from centres’ official sites, scientific articles devoted to the performance of these units,  news from media outlets regarding activities of this centers, etc. My main goal was to systematize the  data about different laboratories’ specializations and to point out different streams of research  specialties to divide them into several thematic groups.

Selection

For this task I decided to implement visualization tool introduced to course listeners by Angela Myer, an  experienced designer. Broadly speaking, visualization is everything concerned with visual thinking and  graphic representation of information via usage of symbols, colors, shapes, schemes, images, videos,  photos, etc. I suppose that this visualization tool will be especially beneficial for me in the process of  collected data analysis allowing to find connections between different elements (specializations of  laboratories) and map some connections between these areas of research in order to eventually group  them visually and provide a systemic overview of various specializations of research laboratories in my  country.

Application

In order to systematize all of the information I firstly decided to use whiteboard and stickers on which I  wrote each laboratory’s specialization. Then I decided to group them by their area of research. I decided  to rearrange stickers and group them into different clusters on the white board. Then I tried to create a  single chart in which all of the laboratories were divided into several groups according to their research  specialization. After rearranging different stickers I found out that the process was rather time  consuming and not as efficient as I wanted because I had to constantly rearrange different stickers and  also think about their place on the white board, some of them constantly peeled off, sometimes it was  hard to find necessary sticker due to the abundance of information on the board.

Later I decide to switch to digital format and make digital copy of my visualization with different clusters  and arrange them in a more structured way. Firstly, I used standard toolbox included in Microsoft Word  application but after some research I found a special software called XMind Zen geared towards  creation of such types of visualizations.

Insight

The tool employed in my project helped me to categorize all of the documents and divide laboratories  specializations into 7 different groups like information and communications technologies; laboratories  specializing in so-called trending technologies, like 5G networks, AR/VR technologies, blockchain;  centers devoted to the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning; electronics and  computer sciences laboratories; data science laboratories; social sciences centers and cognitive sciences  centers; laboratories devoted to the research on different materials.

With the help of the visualization tool I also found several patterns, for example, the majority of  laboratories were concentrated on very knowledge and technology intensive areas of research like  artificial intelligence or blockchain technologies. The categories themselves can be grouped together  and divided into specializations concerned with high-technologies and information, laboratories devoted  to non-technical social fields of research and laboratories that are more focused on manufacturing  industry (research on different materials).

Approach

By applying visualization tool to my research project I came to conclusion that for me it is more  convenient and efficient to use software instead of whiteboard and stickers in order to create necessary  graphs and maps in order to systematize data and find patterns and connections between different  elements. The reason for that is that I can quickly adjust my graph and rearrange several elements.

Overall, visualization tool was very effective in the data analysis of collected information and I will try to  implement it in my further research projects. For my next research project I will continue to use Xmind  Zen visualization software due to its user-friendly interface and great functionality.

