Abstract
The fiftieth anniversary of EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) offered the opportunity to retrace its history through the digital archives housed by the institute itself. Part of the exhibition Infinity Room 2, the Super-Vision project investigates the practice of academic advising by visualizing 8,000 doctoral theses in a work at the intersection of art, science, and technology.
Inaugurated in September 2019 at EPFL Pavilions, Super-Vision presents a diachronic mapping that uses artificial intelligence to shed light on an institutional dataset that would be unobservable otherwise. To achieve such a goal, 8,000 doctoral theses are analyzed with natural language processing and mapped with techniques of dimensionality reduction, combining language and time within in an interactive visualization accessible to the public.
The project title has a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the educational practice that connects doctoral students to supervisors; on the other hand, it employs information design like a macroscope to grasp complex phenomena from a distant standpoint. The result offers EPFL employees and museum visitors an original perspective to look at the institute with different eyes.
Inaugurated in September 2019 at EPFL Pavilions, Super-Vision presents a diachronic mapping that uses artificial intelligence to shed light on an institutional dataset that would be unobservable otherwise. To achieve such a goal, 8,000 doctoral theses are analyzed with natural language processing and mapped with techniques of dimensionality reduction, combining language and time within in an interactive visualization accessible to the public.
The project title has a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the educational practice that connects doctoral students to supervisors; on the other hand, it employs information design like a macroscope to grasp complex phenomena from a distant standpoint. The result offers EPFL employees and museum visitors an original perspective to look at the institute with different eyes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of Digital History |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Publication status | Published - 3-Jul-2024 |
Keywords
- dimensionality reduction
- information design
- knowledge design
- network visualization
- natural language processing
- timeline