Quoka Atlas of Scholarly Knowledge Production: An Interactive Sensemaking Tool for Exploring the Outputs of Research Institutions
This tool helps researchers and institutions understand and compare knowledge production, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data for sensemaking tasks.
The authors tackled the problem of obscuring individual institutional contributions in research by developing Quoka, an interactive atlas that uses an information retrieval model to rank institutions based on keyword queries, enabling exploration of scholarly outputs by geography and time.
The vast amount of research produced at institutions world-wide is extremely diverse, and coarse-grained quantitative measures of impact often obscure the individual contributions of these institutions to specific research fields and topics. We show that by applying an information retrieval model to index research articles which are faceted by institution and time, we can develop tools to rank institutions given a keyword query. We present an interactive atlas, Quoka, designed to enable a user to explore these rankings contextually by geography and over time. Through a set of use cases we demonstrate that the atlas can be used to perform sensemaking tasks to learn and collect information about the relationships between institutions and scholarly knowledge production.