CiteULike Exhibit visualization

Homegrown visualization is not the only way to quickly navigate CiteULike references. There are other tools that display bibliographies in interesting ways.

One of such tools is Exhibit, one of graduates from SIMILE project. It allows to do a very interactive webpage driven by just HTML+Javascript, with no server-side component required. I really like SIMILE’s tools, even though it feels like development slowed somewhat recently.

There is an example of how to import and display bibtext within Exhibit. It is not difficult, just a couple of steps. It must have been a popular section, as there is now a dedicated new tool for it.

Citeline Exhibit Builder allows to load in bibtext and presents editing interface to customize Exhibit’s presentation of the publications. It looks great and seem to work well. A nice aspect is that it allows to chose which bibtext fields to expose as filter facets. With original tutorial that would require html editing and understanding Exhibit mindset. Citeline nicely hides user from it.

There was a couple of small problems. Apparently, there is a way to login and ‘claim’ your presentation. I couldn’t test that as OpenID authentication failed (something about a nonce). Also, there is jsMath library but, once the generated Exhibit is downloaded, it fails with cross-server issues. Finally, as with most end-to-end solutions, it does not do data preprocessing/normalization to allow me, for example, to combine author/editor fields for sorting purposes.

Citeline is a very promising tool and I am certainly going to keep it in mind for publishing my bibliographies.