Noteworthy: July 2005 Archives

I've just updated five of my subject guides, which provide a quick overview of available resources in the disciplines I'm responsible for. Take a look.

Classics: The Basics
Islamic Studies: The Basics
Jewish Studies: The Basics
Philosophy: The Basics
Religion: The Basics.

Here is the complete list of our subject guides.

I added information on how to use WorldCat for interlibrary loans, both regular books as well as theses and dissertations. I also added the online encyclopedias we recently purchased (see Exciting New Online Encyclopedias!).

--Fred Rowland

Information visualization is an effective means of communicating information on large quantities of data. It allows the user to quickly identify patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain buried in long stretches of sequential alphanumeric data. The financial services industry uses this method to make sense of reams of data on companies and markets. Information scientists also use this method to make sense of citation patterns among scholars. Take a look at this document posted on Drexel University's web site. It shows multiple visuals of "co-citation networks".

Now a company named Groxis has brought its information visualization software, Grokker, to the free web through an agreement reached with Yahoo. There's also a more advanced version for a fee. Grokker provides "A New Way to Look at Search". The principle behind Grokker is that the sequential lists of web sites that search engines provide are ineffective for complicated, multi-faceted searches because relevant web sites are often buried on the 9th, 23rd, or 64th page of results and few have the time or patience to scroll away the day. Instead, Grokker provides a visual "lay of the land", an overview in pictures that helps you to understand the different angles of your topic. Once you get an initial results screen, you can drill down on the areas that you're most interested in. It functions a bit like a table of contents in a book.

So take a look and play around with Grokker. This product will probably be followed by many more like it because information visualization has the potential for making web searching more intelligible and efficient.