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List of Influences: Chaomei Chen ​

The second list of influences is by Chaomei Chen. He is an associate professor at Drexel University and the editor-in-chief of the Information Visualization journal. He has also authored or co-authored six books, the most recent of which is Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon. His research interests include the visualization of social networks in general and co-citation networks in scientific publications.

Chaomei sent me not only a list, but also a very interesting introduction and comments on each of the papers. Everything below this paragraph are his words. I have added links to online versions of the papers where possible. Some of the links require access to the ACM digital library or JSTOR. The book links go to Amazon.com.

This is the list of the top 10 books, papers, websites, or objects had the most influence on my work, inspired me, or made me a better person. I have a much longer list, so it is hard to come down to 10. It is even harder to put them in a single order that could adequately reflect their influence. Perhaps the most natural way is to arrange them in chronological order, but if I were forced to rank them, the first group of 5 in essence influenced me on what I would do, and the 2nd group of 5 influenced me on how I would do it.

  • Vannevar Bush, As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108, 1945. Trailblazing in the space of knowledge. Visionary ideas in this article have profoundly influenced my research in modeling and visualizing the dynamic structure of evolving spaces of scientific knowledge and scientific discoveries.
  • Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Competing paradigms, paradigm shift, reflection of paradigm shifts in citations. These concepts and the philosophy of science became cornerstones of my research in mapping scientific frontiers.
  • Derek J. D. Price, Networks of scientific papers, Science, vol. 149, pp. 510-515, 1965. Quantitative studies of science. This article inspired my macroscopic approach to the study of scientific knowledge domains.
  • Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Invisible colleges, knowledge diffusion. This book influences my research interests in tracing knowledge diffusion and tracking the development of invisible colleges, especially in how one can make them visible and traceable over time.
  • Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983. Intriguing analysis of John Snow’s Baker Street cholera case and the Challenger space shuttle disaster case. These exemplar studies influenced the depth and style of my research in visual analysis of scientific revolutions and progressive knowledge domain visualization.
  • Frank G. Halasz, Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems. Communications of the ACM, 31, 836-852. Virtual structures of information, graphical overviews of hyper structures. These ideas provided valuable metaphors for my research in visualizing evolving networks.
  • Kim M. Fairchild, Steven E. Poltrock, and George W. Furnas, SemNet: Three-dimensional graphic representations of large knowledge bases, in Cognitive Science and its Applications for Human-Computer Interaction, R. Guidon (ed.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988, pp. 201-233. Three-dimensional network visualization, simulated annealing, animation. This article profoundly influenced my research in analyzing, modeling, and visualizing dynamic networks.
  • R. W. Schvaneveldt, F. T. Durso, and D. W. Dearholt, Network structures in proximity data. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, vol. 24, pp. 249-284, 1989. Pathfinder network scaling. I was able to generalize the use of this procedure to a wide variety of networks as a means of reducing the complexity of link structures in networks.
  • Howard D. White, and Katherine W. McCain. Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972-1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(4), 327-355, 1998. Author co-citation analysis with multidimensional scaling. This article inspired me to introduce Pathfinder network scaling and VRML-rendered citation landscape models into author co-citation analysis and the later development of knowledge domain visualization.
  • Henry G. Small, A co-citation model of a scientific specialty: A longitudinal study of collagen research, Social Studies of Science, vol. 7, pp. 139-166, 1977. Co-citation clusters revealing the change of research focus. This article drew my attention to document co-citation analysis, which became an integral part of my approach to mapping scientific frontiers.

Posted by Robert Kosara on February 11, 2007. Filed under influences.