Head Start released

Today, I am happy to announce that Head Start, my overview visualization of Educational Technology has been released on Mendeley Labs. The visualization is intended to give researchers that are new to a field a head start on their literature review (hence the name).

When you fire up the visualization, the main areas in the field are shown, represented by the blue bubbles. Once you click on a bubble, you are presented with the main papers in that area. The dropdown on the right displays the same data in list form. By clicking on one of the papers, you can access all metadata for that paper. If a preview is available, you can retrieve it by clicking on the thumbnail in the metadata panel. By clicking on the white background, you can then zoom out and inspect another area. Go ahead and try it out!

The visualization was created with D3.js. It has been successfully tested with Chrome 22, Firefox 15, and Safari 5.1. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer and Opera are not supported at this point.

Head Start is based on readership co-occurrence. I wrote several blogposts in the past that describe the ideas behind it. You can find them here, here, and here. There is also a paper from the LSNA workshop, which co-authored with Christian Körner, Kris Jack, and Michael Granitzer. I will write another post about the inner workings of the visualization in the near future. Until then, I am looking forward to your comments and feedback!