This project facilitates a unique collaboration among artists and scientists with the goal to develop, implement, and validate novel metaphors and approaches to access, manage, and communicate scholarly datasets. The results are expected to have transformative power in terms of the organization, analysis, and visualization of large-scale scholarly datasets. A sequence of three artists will work with scientists at the Information Visualization Laboratory and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University.
The artists will work with database experts on parsing, structuring, and loading new datasets into a multi-terabyte database of scholarly data. The artists will play with a multitude of data analysis and visualization algorithms. They will participate in brainstorming, technical, and design sessions. Most importantly, the artists will be fully immersed as equal partners in different projects. Ethnographic studies will be conducted to capture, optimize, and communicate this unique collaboration. This is exploratory work as we cannot predict what will happen when artists are immersed in the Lab and are asked to rethink and reinvent the way in which research is conducted, the tools being used and designed by the researchers, and the means of communicating results.
The broader impact of this research will be facilitated by three workshops that bring together artists and scientists with synergistic expertise in (2) the communication of science dynamics, (2) novel devices and interactivity techniques, and (3) dramatization of information. These workshops bring together scholars and artist that normally do not meet in a scholarly setting.
