Olivier H. Beauchesne created these amazing visualizations of scientific collaborations all around the world. These intense images enlighten us to how information is shared and the extent to which we need to communicate.
Beauchesne works for a bibliometric consulting firm, Science-Metrix - that engineers ways to measure the impact and growth of scientific discovery (and publications) in the world. To accomplish this, they license data from scientific journal aggregators:
‘From this data, I extracted and aggregated scientific collaboration between cities all over the world. For example, if a UCLA researcher published a paper with a colleague at the University of Tokyo, this would create an instance of collaboration between Los Angeles and Tokyo. The result of this process is a very long list of city pairs, like Los Angeles-Tokyo, and the number of instances of scientific collaboration between them. Following that, I used the geoname.org database to convert the cities’ names to geographical coordinates.
The next steps were then similar to those of the Facebook friendship map. I used a Mercator projection to project the geographical coordinates onto the map and used the Great Circle algorithm to trace the lines of collaboration between cities. The brightness of the lines is a function of the logarithm of the number of collaborations between a pair of cities and the logarithm of the distance between those same two cities.’
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