ACADEMICS
AND THEIR BOOKS
Roberta Sinatra
Data Visualization
My research is about understanding the difference between performance and success. Performance is what a person does: it is a paper or a movie for a director. Instead, success is how society perceives what you do, so how society perceives your paper, your movie, etc. Performance and success seem to be linked but they are not necessarily the same thing; with data, we can measure success easily because we can just collect the fingerprints that humans leave around us; instead, we cannot easily measure performance - when we read a paper we cannot say, oh, this is a performance 3.2 but we can say that the scientific community cited this paper 100 times, so it says something about the success of the paper although it does not say much about the quality of the paper. So through data analysis, we aim at uncovering the mathematical laws of success. Also we want to give a visual idea to people what it means to have an impact on the community.
Interview by Ana Lolua
Photography by Damian Aleksiev
December 13, 2017
Roberta Sinatra is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Network Science and at the Department of Mathematics at the Central European University​.
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We talked about data visualization, a network puzzle, and a set of colored pencils.
You see our visualization on the cover of the journal Nature Physics. I am a physicist by training and the data visualization that I am showing you demonstrates the impact of the physics papers in the last ten years. You can notice that there are ups and downs of the impact throughout time, so the visualization wants to convey what we, the physics community, are doing and what impact we have. There are mixed feelings and mixed reactions because some people think that impact does not necessarily capture the merit of a discovery, and it is true but still we want to see what big splashes there have been in the community during the last ten years. Why am I attached to this visualization? Because it is representative of an entire line of research, which is emerging right now. I also love that everyone can see it, everyone can connect to it: when we had a big poster of the cover on the wall, people were going there and reading the titles of the papers, trying to extrapolate the patterns.
We visualized success not only in Science but also in art - the other visualization you saw on the laptop tells you how the art world is shaped. There are about 4000 galleries and museums in that visualization from all around the world and we see how many people exhibited in these places. A node is an artistic institution, a gallery or a museum, and a link between two nodes shows that artists have been exhibiting at these institutions. There are many clusters: basically artists travel locally through the museums and galleries of their own countries and this represents the majority of the network. But there is also a big cluster with the key players of the art world, located everywhere on the planet, but still tightly connected by links, representing lot of artists who co-exhibited in them. In the big cluster there are the usual suspects, like MOMA, Reina Sofia, or Gagosian. Again, the visualization provides a way to have a view of the entire art world and the idea is that people can see how many artists, for example, went from MOMA to other places.
The Network Puzzle
The puzzle is a way to play with the subject, with the networks and data. OK, let’s say you have data - great! …but then data itself is pretty aseptic, dry, it does not have life, right? You have to create models to explain how the data came to be. It is like a world, you can study the world, but then you need to have models that tell you how the world we see came to be. In that puzzle we see a model of how networks can come to be, how networks grow, like with the network of the art world that we saw, we did not start immediately with one thousand entries, probably we started having one single museum, one single gallery, and then it grew and grew… this puzzle exactly tells you how a network can grow. And something that I like doing with this thing is: I remove the clip, shuffle the pages and play to reconstruct how the network came to be - so it is like playing a puzzle.
The Colored Pencils
This is actually a gift from a friend and a colleague of mine, another scientist, she is a woman and together with these pencils she gave me a book that I don’t have with me right now. The book is entitled: “Strong is the New Pretty” and it pictures women who are not necessarily beautiful, but strong: you see a swimmer there who just came out of the water, very tired but you see that it conveys strength. We are both researchers in a male dominated world and it is not sufficient that you are pretty, that you are nice with your colleagues, that you do a good work but you really need to be strong. So, the two gifts were together, the book and the pencils, and the idea behind giving pencils is to make your days more colorful when you don’t feel strong enough. You can be stronger, you can even picture your own strength. A typical thing that happens is the so-called “mansplaining”: Sometimes men interrupt you to explain to you things that you know already – because you are also a scientist. This is a common phenomenon in science which can really turn you in a bad mood. You can also feel down because your work is not appreciated enough, so I go to the colored pencils, to the book and think, OK, I am not alone in this, there are other people like me and we can make the scientific world less male dominated, change the stereotype that scientists are not only male!
