Computers and art combine to create the maps of the Places and Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit on display at the Monroe County Public Library through May 2007.

Large-scale maps of science help viewers navigate and understand the world, just as sea charts once aided exploration and discovery of unknown lands. The maps are generated from terabytes of scholarly data such as publications, patents, and grants using diverse data integration, mining, network science, and visualization algorithms.  With visualizations created by people around the world and by IU’s own, Places & Spaces provides a glimpse of how science looks from above. 

The exhibit has been previously featured at the New York Public Library, the New York Hall of Science, and the American Chemical Society Exposition in Chicago. For more information, visit http://scimaps.org/.

The exhibit is sponsored by National Science Foundation awards IIS-0238261 and CHE 0524661; Cyberinfastructure for Network Science Center, and School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University. Most of the data used in the exhibit is from Thomson Scientific. 

Curators Julie Smith and Dr. Katy Börner, director of IU’s Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center/Information Visualization Lab within the School of Library and Information Science at IU, thank the Monroe County Public Library and University Information Technology Services for their support.