Trajectories of Search - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 142

Chapter 4
Trajectories of Search

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

In Chap. 3 , we have introduced basic principles of cartography for mapping abstract
structures commonly resulted from our thinking, ranging from concept mapping
based on card sorting, co-word maps derived from word co-occurrence analysis, to
generic structures represented as networks, especially the interesting properties of a
class of gigantic graphs known as small-world networks. We have described typical
dimensionality reduction techniques such as the classic multidimensional scaling
and the latest advances in non-linear multidimensional scaling.

4.1 Footprints in Information Space

Information visualization can be seen as a process of two stages: construction and
use. Now we focus on the use and how to gather information from usage and
feedback to the construction so that the virtual environment becomes responsive.
Following the like-minded people is a widely used strategy by many of us.
Trailblazing is an important concept in Memex, a global and persistent device
envisaged by Bush ( 1945 ) for storing and retrieving information. In Memex, users
are also builders by adding trails of their own into the information space. Such
trails provide valuable navigational cues for other users to find their way through
the enriched information space. The central idea of trailblazing is to preserve such
valuable information and make use of it as an integral part of the information space.
This vision of Bush has inspired several examples of visualizing trails and
intellectual pathways. The notion of intellectual pathways has been explored
in trailblazing scientific literatures (Chen 1999b ; Chen and Carr 1999 ;Small
1986 , 1999 ). Researchers have estimated the degree of relatedness between two