All projects: Gel, Jobs, Gootodo, Games, Uncle Mark, Goovite, Blog, Bit Literacy
Interview - Katy Börner, Indiana University
Apr 24, 2006
Katy Börner
Associate Professor of Information Science, Indiana University; also see her current exhibit, Places & Spaces.
(Katy is scheduled to speak at Gel 2006 next week in New York.)
Q - Describe your work.
I'm building a macroscope - not a microscope or a telescope, but a macroscope, which helps you make sense of huge amounts of data.
If you need to understand patterns and trends and outliers in data, or communities within a social network, today we have only limited tools. There are search engines, but it's like living in Flatland; there's no meaningful directory structure, no file structure. Google and Microsoft say, "We can find it for you," and they do find it, if it's facts we're looking for. But if you need an "up" button, or if you need to see how those results relate to each other, there's no such button today.
We'd like to give people back this global view, a top-down view of multiple areas of science. da Vinci and Einstein managed to do this, but today science is very specialized because this is how the reward system is structured. Tenure, promotions, salary,... it all pays to be a specialist in a certain area.
Our brains have very limited size. You can make it very slim, into this expert needle, or wide into a pancake; but try to do both and you typically have nothing. The question is, how can we use our little brains to use what we collectively know, which is hidden in books, publications, Wikipedia?
Some areas of science have thousands of publications per month. No one can read it all, and yet there are no tools to get the information out or interconnect it. Either you have a husband or wife who works in a different area, or you call a friend who has a friend who might know it, or you hire someone who has that expertise. But even those people have little brains. So you need to know a lot of people to patchwork a major area of research, expertise, or whatever you're interested in.
What we really need is tools that help us manage this flood of information, that's what the lab is working on.
Q - Describe the Places & Spaces exhibit, which you helped create, now at the New York Public Library.
It's a science exhibit, not an art exhibit, which tries to tell people about the power of maps for navigating and managing not only geospatial spaces, but also semantic spaces. You might imagine a map of all of nanotechnology, showing how it grew out of different areas of research and how it evolved over time, and how other groups joined.
The exhibit also shows some early maps of our planet; the reason is that the first maps of the planet weren't accurate, and similarly the first maps of the sciences we have today won't be totally accurate.
