Mapping Collaborations: The Geography of Collaborations Across Duke

Abstract

How does proximity influence collaboration? In the 1970's, work by MIT professor Thomas Allen revealed that the frequency of communication between two engineers sharply decreased as the distance between their desks grew. Nowadays, there are more ways than ever for researchers and scholars to communicate and interact. The goal of this visualization was to examine the geographic spread of collaborations represented in the scholars@duke dataset. The goal of the Scholars@Duke Visualization Challenge was to create visualizations that capture the richness and dynamism of Duke research. The datasets were provided by Scholars@Duke (https://schoalrs.duke.edu/) and they describe publications, authorships, and scholarly collaborations from university researchers over the past 5 years.