Constellation

Constellation

• Best viewed stand-alone by clicking “Open in a new window”
• A tool for exploring part of arXiv scientific preprint database.
• I had to choose a well-connected subset of papers, and high energy physicists reference enough people that it looks good.
• The app runs very slow when too many papers are loaded, and I need to changed the d3.force() behavior and rewrite some algorithms for efficiency.
• While the arXiv API has citation data from the current paper going back in time, it does not provide a way to programmatically find future articles that use the current paper as their reference.
• I had to implement a scraper and parse the limited reference data available from arXiv’s partner sites, which only load while on the arXiv website.
• The functionality of this prototype is limited and buggy, but it’s fun!
• The project will probably be renamed when it’s ready for production since every programmer with a similar idea already used the name Constellation.

What About Relativity’s Reach?

• I stopped development on Constellation in October 2014 and left it up on my Group’s site, admixcollective.org/constellation.html.
• The Office for Creative Research (OCR) released Relativity’s Reach with Scientific American in August 2015.
• Their awesome interactive visualization was created to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
• While Constellation is dwarfed by their project in scope and depth, it does have it’s charms and I will continue working on it.