Mapping my academic outputs. A few years ago I came across Mathew Kiang’s blog, and I really liked the way he wrote and applied his skills to passion projects. That was one of the few kinds of writing that got me playing on this website, which is how I ended up with a force-directed graph experiment back in 2020. He does a good job of mapping his collaboration network, and I thought it would be fun to take that idea and bring the force-directed vibe back for a throwback. I started by pulling my peer-reviewed pubs, then scraping my CV TeX file for other outputs, and then realized I could visualize my CV alongside this collab network — that’s where we start. Hover and click to see how I’ve spent my time so far.

Next, I tried to organize my research into themes, first automatically using keywords from my publications, but that ended up not matching what I actually cared about, so I collapsed those keywords into major categories. I think Mathew was one of the first people to frame his work as “I’m interested in ABC methods and I apply them to XYZ topics,” and that felt like an elegant way to think about my work — it stuck with me. I tag specific methods and apply them to specific domains; those tags show up below.

For the collab network, I could have colored nodes by institutional affiliation or run automated community detection (thanks Scott Duxbury), but for my own interests it felt simpler to assign communities by the era when I first collaborated with each person.

I struggle with picking the right journal given how wide my interests are, so I wanted to see if I had publication trends. Filtering on domains and methods should help me drill into where I’ve historically published, and if I expand this later, I’ll have an easier time remembering what I was advised to do in the past. It may make it harder to break old habits, but oh well.

This took effort, but it isn’t fun unless other people can use it too — this isn’t a personal flex, but a learning exercise for me. I wanted free ways to plug in people and get a mini version of this page. The table below ties everything together and links out to relevant writing.