Caroline Goulard—Outlier 2021—Mapping the Covid19 research landscape

Mapping the Covid19 research landscape: the power of dataviz over black boxes Discoverability issues, in the landscape of scientific publications, have never been more current than they are now: researchers are drowned in research papers and miss out on already published results that could have saved them precious time. It’s the “dark knowledge” problem: knowledge that cannot be found or cannot be understood. The Knowl project was born from this observation, during the Covid crisis during spring 2020. It aims to map all the scientific publications around the Covid, and takes up the challenge that data-visualization can compensate for the weaknesses of classic search engines, like Google Scholar, which work like black boxes. But, in front of Google algorithms efficiency and performance, it’s not easy to prove that the visual display of information really brings something. At Dataveyes we are deeply convinced of it, but that remains to be proven. Since this summer, we have been prototyping, testing, prototyping again, and observing how researchers, doctors, and the general public are taking control of new types of research interfaces, and how new uses may or may not emerge. With this talk, we want to share our experiments, our results, but also our doubts and surprises. We invite everyone to share our thoughts on what data visualization can and cannot achieve in the field of information research.