One way to grasp EPFL is to draw it. This visualization illustrates the institution’s history by using 8,000 theses that have been defended over fifty years. An automatic textual analysis was run over all of them to extract the terms that describe each specific work with respect to the whole collection, which is maintained by the EPFL Library. The theses were then placed in a circular space, that recalls a cell-culture dish. Their position depends on a lexical measure that designs a space based on similarities. The closer that two theses are, the stronger their scientific terminology is. This arrangement unfolds over time, making visible the development of scientific production. Currently, EPFL publishes more than one thesis a day, which means that at least one scholar a day is introduced into the scientific community. By looking at the visualization, it is possible to understand the interdisciplinary connections that exist despite the division of disciplines in science. As bacteriologists use a Petri dish to study cell culture, likewise visitors are invited to observe the academic evolution of EPFL in an interactive visual instrument. Dario Rodighiero (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Philippe Rivière (Visionscarto). In collaboration with Nicolas Dubois (EPFL), Boris Beaude and Ogier Maitre (UNIL) and the EPFL Library.

{"references": ["Bostock, Michael, Vadim Ogievetsky, and Jeffrey Heer. 2011. \"D3: Data-Driven Documents.\" IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17 (12): 2301\u20139. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2011.185", "McInnes, Leland, John Healy, and James Melville. 2018. \"UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction.\" arXiv.org", "\u0158eh\u016f\u0159ek, Radim, and Petr Sojka. 2010. \"Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora.\" In Proceedings of the LREC Workshop on New Challenges for NLP Frameworks, 45\u201350. Valletta. doi:10.13140/2.1.2393.1847", "Rodighiero, Dario. 2018. \"Mapping Affinities: Visualizing Academic Practice Through Collaboration.\" Edited by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Kaplan and Boris Beaude. Lausanne: EPFL. doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-8242", "Rodighiero, Dario, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Kaplan, and Boris Beaude. 2018. \"Mapping Affinities in Academic Organizations.\" Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics 3 (February). Frontiers: 185. doi:10.3389/frma.2018.00004"]}

Infinity Room 2 13.09.1029 - 26.01.2020 EPFL ArtLab © Leutenegger Photography