Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browser
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Li, Kevin Y.
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Abstract
Understanding existing and related literature in a certain research domain is critical to those trying to understand or contribute to it. “Sensemaking,” or the process by which people develop an organized representation of information to achieve a goal, is a common process scientists and researchers use when breaking into a new area of research. For a researcher, the process may start with them finding an influential paper in the field and slowly branching out from that one paper, reading its citations, and building upon their mental model of how literature in the field is related to each other. As they dig more into the field, the model can change to fit discoveries or previously buried insight. The process of sensemaking has been well-documented and can be effectively bolstered through visualization; however, there is a current lack of tools that effectively allow its users to apply the sensemaking process to the literature review process.
Tools such as Gephi and igraph can help with the sensemaking process through data visualization; however, existing visualization tools often have challenges that negatively impact the tool’s availability, level of interactivity, and level of collaboration. Current tools often require user-imported data and are built as single-user tools that have many system requirements. Applying sensemaking to the process of exploring literature is still a developing field, with new tools such as Connected Papers, which allows its users to view a static graph of a paper and related publications, being developed recently. However, there are no literature-oriented tools that provide dynamic interactivity, widespread availability, and high levels of collaborative feasibility that facilitate highly effective sensemaking.
We introduce Argo Scholar, an open-source in-browser interactive graph visualization tool built upon Argo Lite. Our tool allows users to easily create and build upon their graphs in real- time without having to worry about finding a dataset. Argo Scholar automatically retrieves data from Semantic Scholar’s publication dataset when the user modifies their graph and provides many embedded features that allow users to customize their graph as well as share their graph with others. Argo Scholar also provides graph statistics and algorithms that facilitate sensemaking on a more analytical scale.
With Argo Scholar, we hope to help facilitate and streamline the sensemaking process that many researchers undergo when exploring a new area of knowledge, indirectly helping to expand the knowledge available to researchers one paper at a time.
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Undergraduate Research Option Thesis