Pleasantly Perusing the Paper Pile with Pivots

A nice UI for browsing a database of academic papers: Marian Dörk’s PivotPaths. It arranges papers matching a search term along with a sort of linked tag-cloud of authors and other keywords for easy navigation. All the interaction is really nice (try dragging a line between two authors to compare them!). Papers queried from Microsoft Academic Search. Find it interesting how looking at a different database for my standard search terms reveals unfamiliar sets of papers (my vanity queries turned up nothing in the viz, tho they do have hits in Microsoft Academic Search). Would be really cool if you could point it to google scholar also to compare coverage. I like that, even ‘tho it was built at Microsoft Research, it uses open web standards! (SVG, oog). Have we reached the point where the best way to publicize a new data service is to get someone to build a viz with it? Via infosthetics.

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