Connections

Click on this extraordinary map to see how the major disciplines of man relate to one another courtesy of PLOS One, the open source repository that's changing how science & medicine does business. The article, Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science used the following criteria to show how the sciences and the humanities interact with each other on the web.

"Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting reference data set covers a significant part of world-wide use of scholarly web portals in 2006, and provides a balanced coverage of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A journal clickstream model, i.e. a first-order Markov chain, was extracted from the sequences of user interactions in the logs. The clickstream model was validated by comparing it to the Getty Research Institute's Architecture and Art Thesaurus. The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."

Click on the image above to view the slide show accompanying this amazing article. In seeing how the sciences and humanities interact as a system for the first time, the start point to solving society's most complex problems becomes possible.

“I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then” - Lewis Carroll