Multi-Touch Visualization


The Max Planck Institute is one of Germany’s most successful research organizations, having produced about 17 Nobel laureates and 13,000 yearly academic publications since its foundation in 1948. The Max Planck Research Networks [max-planck-research-networks.net] visualization application in turn is showing off the institution’s international collaborations with other organizations in the world.

Developed by Moritz Stefaner and Christopher Warnow, the application runs on a semi-public multi-touch screen, which displays a network graph of the relationships between all relevant organizations, an accompanying world map, plus various bar graphs that reveal other facts and important statistics. The data is gathered from analyzing the co-authorship connections detected in the 94,000 publications that were produced over the last 10 years.

For the network graph, the relative size of an institute’s icon represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines reflects the number of jointly published papers between 2 separate institutes.