ICTlogy

As it has been recently mentioned, this website has an ICT4D Bibliography with 1797 works and 1436 authors more or less related with the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, the Information Society, Development, etc.

Sometimes authors share the authorship of a work, and thus one can jump from an author to another one by clicking on the links of the aforementioned authors, always listed besides their shared works. But especially for the most prolific authors, the result ends up being a long list crowded with links (to authors, to works, to source journals) that becomes quite messy.

To solve that, I’ve applied Daniel McLaren (Asterisq) Constellation Roamer (free version here) to visualize the relationships that one author has with other authors according to the works they have in common.

The goal of the tool is twofold: (1) to glimpse the social ecosystem of the author (within the boundaries of this ICT4D Bibliography, of course) and (2) to (re)discover other authors and, with them, their works. Let us see an example.

A visit to Richard Heeks‘ page in the ICT4D Bibliography will first of all provide us with his ecosystem of co-authors:

We can see that he has four shared works listed in this bibliography with a total of five more authors. By clicking (also just putting our mouse over it) the work he has in common with Charles Kenny — which appears to be The Economics of ICTs and Global Inequality: Convergence or Divergence for Developing Countries? — Charles Kenny’s shared works have their co-authors appear too:

With yet another click now on Charles Kenny, we see now all the authors and their shared works related to him. Thus, starting from Richard Heeks, we easily (re)discover that Charles Kenny is related to Robert Schware and Christine Qiang, who, in their turn, also share works with other people, which allows us to keep on browsing.

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