The World of Scientists
Intro: The World of Scientists
It has been quite a few years of me staying in academia. I think it is time to summarize my scientific career—the happiness of success and the frustration of failure often interwind to make academia life challenging but also enjoyable.
STEP 1: Brainstorming
1. Write down a list of keywords about academia (e.g., experiment, publication, reviewer, supervision, etc.).
2. List down geographical features (e.g., rivers, ocean, forests, mountains, lakes, and so on).
3. Pair the keywords with geographical features based on the corresponding properties. Try to avoid double matching or unintuitive matching.
The high-level idea here is that although scientists struggle very much to be productive and contribute to society, the outcome of hardworking pays off. Therefore, the abstract form of the map should look like a flower bloomed in the world.
STEP 2: Designing the Themes
1. Once the flower pattern is defined, layout the landscape so it looks natural.
2. For each continent, define your own theme. For example, the left bottom corner represents the insecurity of the position, and the middle right shows the time-space pressure of project and paper submissions. The top-right corner depicts the necessary dumping in the environment, and so on.
3. The landscape, the themes, and the labels are recommended to create on different layers so that in the later stage, each portion can be altered easily.
4. Place textual label boxes by minimizing the overlaps with the objects on the map.
STEP 3: Revisiting the Themes
One important step is to show the map to your colleagues and ask for comments before finalizing it. Don't be afraid of negative comments since those are opportunities to improve your map.
The left map was the first version, and the right map is the revised version.
Some example comments I got from the colleagues (computer scientists, cartographers, etc.):
1. Some portions contain dense information, but some parts are sparse.
2. The drawing style of vortices is quite different from the others.
3. You may want to add skulls at the Deadline Jungle.
4. The font style should fit the drawing style.
...
STEP 4: Coloring the Map
Use the Apple pencil to color the map.
STEP 5: Printing
Finally, you can print the map as a poster or a canvas print, and then hang it on the wall.
2 Comments
jessyratfink 2 years ago
Hsiang-Yun Wu 2 years ago