I’m still trying to figure out what all I can do with the [Saffron][] browser/visualizer. It claims to analyze the research communities of natural language processing, information retrieval, and the semantic web through “text mining and linked data principles.”
The list of research domains is rather short and under-explained for the uninitiated:
I clicked on [ANLP][], which is *applied natural language processing, and you get both a list of hot topics:
As well as a taxonomy network/tree that offers labels when you hover over nodes, which are themselves clickable links:
Clicking on one of the “hot topics,” in this case [natural language text][], gives you a bar chart of the frequency of the topic in documents for the past thirty years:
A list of similar topics:
A list of experts:
And a list of publications:
Like a lot of browsers, this kind of static presentation of the results impoverishes the exploration that it encourages. I also haven’t explored what are its inputs: I wonder how full/complete its historical record is.
[Saffron]: http://saffron.deri.ie
[ANLP]: http://saffron.deri.ie/acl_anlp
[natural language text]: http://saffron.deri.ie/acl_anlp/topic/natural_language_text/