Papers Over Time

Animation created for Professor Raymond Yeung to track research papers published over his career for the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) Claude E. Shannon Lecture. As requested, the animation is built on Keynote for easy editing and integration. The publishes are sorted under information theory topics and revealed one after another.

(Created with Keynote)

Animation Iterations:

This animated version of the chart is intended to be spoken over during the lecture. An alternative representation (shown below) was to plot the data points over time as shown. Even though the information reveal was from left to right, the data points were revealed more like a vertical columns of dots that travelled further away from the y-axis with every succession. This made it difficult to register what topic the publish was under and would require the viewer to counterintuitively look back from right to left to find out.

I decided to reveal the data by row so the paper topic is more explicitly represented as the data is plotted over time. This also allows for live commentary about how research in that particular topic area progressed. Below explores whether it is necessary to show and fix a permanent connection line between each publish (symbol). For clarity, I decided to use a solid line that remains on screen so that the final resultant still image is easier to read.

Symbol Iterations:

Because each symbol represents x number of papers, I experimented with different shapes to visually represent the numerical increase so that the symbols themselves can convey some of the meaning explained in the chart key. However, I decided against this idea after all because it introduced unnecessary ambiguity. For the modular symbols, in order to keep the size of the symbols consistent, the first symbol (“unit”) was almost always larger than those that appeared in the subsequent symbols; I felt that this looked as if the symbols for 2 and 3 were made of parts of lesser than that of symbol 1. Yet, there was also a limit to how differently sized each symbol could be to fit on the grid as well as be considered as of the same importance. In then end, I opted for a circle (1), square (2) and triangle (3) for a cleaner look that also differentiates the symbols from one another.