VisualWiki

Sun has releasted the Java programming language as open source.  It is now Open JDK.  So if you ever wanted to build your own Java compiler, or see how Swing is programmed, now’s your chance.

OpenJDK

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This is an interesting new method of ranking journals using a large markov chain.

methods – eigenfactor.org – ranking and mapping scientific journals

The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal. The Eigenfactor algorithm corresponds to a simple model of research in which readers follow chains of citations as they move from journal to journal. Imagine that a researcher goes to the library and selects a journal article at random. After reading the article, the researcher selects at random one of the citations from the article. She then proceeds to the journal that was cited, reads a random article there, and selects a citation to direct her to her next journal volume. The researcher does this ad infinitum.

The amount of time that the researcher spends with each journal gives us a measure of that journal′s importance within network of academic citations. Moreover, if real researchers find a sizable fraction of the articles that they read by following citation chains, the amount of time that our random researcher spends with each journal gives us an estimate of the amount of time that real researchers spend with each journal. While we cannot carry out this experiment in practice, we can use mathematics to simulate this process.

McCrae et al demonstrated that divergent thinking declines with age. This seems suboptimal. Simonton believes that creating knowledge is done through Darwinian selection of ideas, what he calls the “Change Configuration Theory of creativity.” That is, scientific creativity happens through chance or random combinations of ideations (small bits of ideas). A small fraction of all ideations are selected by an individual scientists to pursue and refine into more polished ideas. These ideas are further selected by peer reviewers and/or the marketplace. Only the strongest combinations of ideations make it to public knowledge.

So as a person ages, obtains deeper knowledge of and more experience with a particular subject, they have a larger pool of ideations from which to draw and make more creative ideas. They also gain better insight into how that subject is related to other areas, as well as a larger network of colleagues to discuss and refine ideas. The potential for new, innovative combinations of ideations increases with age; however the human tendency is to be less divergent. Ideally, we would like the number of new, creative ideas increase with age, as experience and knowledge improve.

The idea that divergent thoughts decline with age seems to contradict Huber, who found that the output of invention (number of patents) is Poisson distributed over an investigators career span, meaning that inventions occur at a constant rate. So investigators continue to generate new ideas, even though there is less divergent thought — there is no decline in inventivity as McCrae might expect. It would seem, then, that investigators continue to generate combinations of ideations, but from a comfortable core set, instead of seeking new divergent combinations of ideations. So, is it possible to look at an inventor or scholars creative outputs throughout their life and quantify their reduction of divergent thought? One metric might be through citation analysis, counting the number of new authors cited over time. If the number of new authors goes down with age, this may indicate less divergent thoughts. Similarly, one might also investigate through graphical methods such as pathfinder scaling of co-citation networks (Chen 2006). If the new publications cite articles that are nearer to the center of the graph, that would indicate declining divergent thought.

Why is divergent thought important for VisualWiki? One of VisualWiki’s goals is to provide a means to keep more ideations in play as a person ages. The tool can help people recall old ideations, and make new creative ideas. We want people to be able to access the breadth and depth of their experiences in order to generate and select as many new combinations of ideas as possible. If we can measure the divergent thought in the create work of scholars, then it will be possible to inform them when they are using less divergent thought, and prompt them to reconsider areas that are outside their core competency. The graphical pathfinder scaling method might be best for VisualWiki, since it is uses graph structure already.

Chen, C. (2006) CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(3), 359-377.

Huber, J. (1998a). Invention and inventivity as a special kind of creativity, with implications for general creativity. Journal of Creative Behavior, 32(1), 58-72.

Huber, J. (1998b). Invention and inventivity is a random, Poisson process: A potential guide to analysis of general creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 11(3,231-241).

McCrae, R., Arenberg, D., & Costa Jr, P. (1987). Declines in divergent thinking with age: cross-sectional, longitudinal, and cross-sequential analyses. Psychol Aging, 2(2), 130-7.

SIMONTON, D. (1997). Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Psychological review, 104(1), 66-89.

Welcome to the new VisualWiki blog!   I will be using this blog to describe the theoretical background, technical implementation, and empirical evaluation of VisualWiki.

VisualWiki is an innovative combination of Concept Maps and Wikis to create an Interactive Digital Map of an knowledge base.   The Interactive Digital Map will lead to increased integration of knowledge and information, in order to improve communication and collaboration between members of multi-disciplinary teams.

Whew…that’s quite a mouthfull.   I’ll be adding more content and details to this site as development continues.   Thanks for visiting.   I look forward to sharing this experience with you!