VISUALIZE THIS

摘要

Three students hunch over their computers, each doing research for a paper on nanotechnology.They all began their assignment with a simple Google search, only to learn that there are "2,500,000 English pages for nanotechnology." Their problem is not simply the number of pages available on the topic but also their very different interests: one is working on an assignment for biology class, one is studying engineering, and the third is studying business. Google's success—and its challenge—is that it is an extremely efficient word finder; it builds indexes of the words on web pages. But words can be tricky things when it conies to conveying meaning. And a simple list of web pages containing those words doesn't provide us with much insight. Visualization software is designed to help users get a "picture" of the meaning behind the words. Its underlying premise is that information retrieval benefits from smart organization of content. With visualization software, our three students could see their search results clustered to represent the different aspects of nanotechnology.They can then iteratively drill down in the appropriate cluster, all the while narrowing their search and learning more about their specific topic. As a result, those 2.5 million Google results become a gateway to discovery as well as to meaningful answers.