3D Cartography of COVID-19 Research

Deep Space 8K Presentation at the Ars Electronica Festival

The preparation of “COVID-19 Insights: Mapping Diversity and Community” by Ars Electronica Solutions and Garamantis Interactive Technologies for Deep Space 8K is an opportunity to bring an extremely sensitive topic to a wider audience.

The outbreak of the Corona pandemic in 2019 not only had an impact on society worldwide, but also on the research environment in which scientists and scholars work. To date, more than 600,000 scientific articles have been published on the virus, with the majority written since January 2020. Research is conducted by countless individuals whose impact is impressively visualized in this installation.

To capture the volume of scientific publications and show the invisible work behind them, as well as the network of scientists, an interactive, three-dimensional data visualization was created using artificial intelligence. All published research results on the topic of the corona virus are represented here as glowing spheres. These spheres are ordered in space by similarity: The more they have in common, the closer they are. Rotate the data visualization and a timeline appears showing the explosion of scientific literature related to the pandemic. Together with Garamantis Interactive Technologies, Ars Electronica Solutions developed the interactive 3D application.

Project Credits:
Dario Rodighiero (IT), Elian Carsenat (FR), Eveline Wandl-Vogt (AT), Garamantis (DE), Ars Electronica Solutions (AT), Ars Electronica Research Institute knowledge for humanity / k4h+ (AT), exploration space / Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT), Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) (EU), The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) (CH), metalab (at) Harvard (US), Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (US), Harvard University (US), NamSor (FR)

The project has been possible through the funding of DARIAH Theme Call in Arts, Humanities, and COVID-19.

Foto Credits:
My Trinh Müller-Gardiner