UCSB Geography team members Yingjie Hu, Grant McKenzie, and Song Gao are among the top five contenders for the AAG’s Robert Raskin Mashup Mapping competition. Public voting for the number one spot ends April 5, so check out the public voting page and give our grads a vote of confidence!
According to its web site, the goal of the Mashup Mapping Competition is to promote research and awareness of web-based GIS and Mashup applications, to encourage spatial thinking and the development of geospatial cyberinfrastructure in colleges and universities in the United States, and to inspire curiosity about geographic patterns and web map representation for students and the broader public. Prizes include $200 for the most popular mashup mapping entry (public voting), $700 and a certificate for the first prize entry (AAG judges), and an invitation to the top five entries to give an oral presentation at the AAG Annual Meeting (plus $100 per person for travel funding).
The UCSB Geography entry is titled “Citation Map: Visualizing the Spread of Scientific Ideas Through Space and Time,” and, according to the group’s blog, Citation Map allows one to search publications and their corresponding citations through keywords or author names, to geolocate publications using the first author’s institution, to map citation information all over the world and in different years, to discover the top 10 authors who have cited a publication most frequently, and to share publication and citation information through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
Song Gao goes on to state: “This web mapping application is a novel approach to visualizing research topics, authors, and publications, as well as their citation relations, on a world map. By displaying the geographic distribution of research paper citations, this dynamic web map shows how a scientific idea spreads through space and time (i.e., how a scientific publication is accepted and cited by researchers in different countries over the years). Citation Map also shows the researchers who have cited your papers most frequently, and where these researchers are.
Multiple data sources have been integrated into Citation Map. The basemap data come from OpenStreetMap, styled by Cloudmade and served through the Leaflet Javascript Framework, while the information about publications, authors, and citations are sourced through Microsoft’s Academic Search. The publication data are dynamically accessed and “mashed” with the basemap on the fly instead of storing the data locally. While one paper may have several co-authors, the institution of the first author has been employed as the location of the publication.
To view the citations of a single paper, users can first enter some keywords or author names and a list of candidate publications will be displayed. Users can click on one of the presented publications, and watch the map automatically zoom to the location of the first author’s institution” (click here for more).
