Visualization

I'd like to suggest that someone work on a visualization function for Zotero. I'm thinking of something along the lines of EndNote's RefViz, which gives a visual map of clusterings of articles that share keywords. I find this very helpful for trying to get a sense of how articles in area are clustered around sets of keywords and issues; especially when you are unfamiliar with the area, this can give you a 'map' of the discipline.

One things that occurs to me: when Zotero gets to the stage of letting users share libraries, etc., the visualization could be used to get a a sort of collaborative map of how a set of users have tagged an area. I.e., the visualization might be based not on keywords in the article abstracts, but on user tags.
  • If you are so inclined you can already use Zotero with RefViz. All you need to do is export the collection you want to work with in RIS and import it into RefViz. There is a lot of interest and excitement about developing visualization tools ontop of Zotero. You may already be aware of Zotero's integrated SIMILE timeline tool. Over time I am sure we will see a lot more of these ways to visualize your collections crop up.
  • Any updates about this visualization request or other similar tools?

    I'm not a developer, but I'm familiar with the algorithms needed to generate the visualization, so if anyone wants to team up to develop this, I'd be keen.

    Thanks
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