Research activities

The JMCoE’s research activities aim to facilitate an intuitive, yet insightful interface that depicts the EU studies ‘universe’ from from multiple perspectives.

VisuALEU Knowledge Maps

The primary objective of this activity is to research and document the EU studies stock of knowledge. Human judgement in conjunction with big-data and data science techniques will be used throughout in order to fine tune the research and outputs. The underlying research question is “What is the extent of the EU-studies stock of knowledge and how is it organised?”

The secondary objective is to provide a single point of access to this stock of knowledge and, further, to make is as intuitive as possible for anyone, to access the resources. It responds to the research question: “In what ways can a stock of knowledge like this become more accessible to its audience?” Overall the two objectives lead to a web-based application that allows a visitor to browse EU studies knowledge resources from various providers, and retrieve the resource if readily available (or visit the resource provider to do so, as appropriate).

VisuALEU Knowledge Networks

This activity follows up from the Knowledge Maps and responds to the question: “How interconnected are the works in the EU-studies?” Further, “What underlying patterns, if any, are prominent or significant?
It leads to a web-based application that allows a visitor to browse metrics and assorted visualizations depicting the underlying structure of the EU studies stock of knowledge resources,

VisuALEU Policy Analytics

The aim of this activity is to shed light on EU current affairs from an analytical standpoint, complementing and referencing the knowledge maps and knowledge networks outputs. The activity contrasts as well as complements Research Activity ‘VisuALEU Insights’ to provide popularised renditions of expert insight on EU current affairs.
While the activity builds on rigorous analysis and is expected to lead to a range of academic publications (see methodology below) its most visible output will be a series of web-based depictions of such analyses, panelled under the general title “EU’s state of affairs”.

These depictions will capture the gist of the corresponding analysis as an aggregate visualization of the key results, metrics or similar outputs. Well-known depiction ‘formats’ include:

  • Dashboards’; a collection of metrics and data graphs about the subject matter;
  • Infographics’; a static visualization summarizing key ideas and or statistics; often leading to a poster print.
  • Scrolly-telling’; an animated web-entry or ‘narrative visualization’ as it is also called; it may combine animated text, videos, images, etc. and unfolds progressively, as the reader ‘scrolls’ down, hence the name.

Each depiction will be themed according to the underlying EU topic and be based on analysing quantitative or qualitative data from data providers like Eurostat for example. For example cluster analysis for EU integration, emission reductions, job / education mobility network analysis, etc.

Thus the depictions will be periodically updated to synchronise with EU’s current affairs, but also utilise and direct reference to the ‘knowledge’ outputs from the other activities.

VisuALEU Insights

The aim of this activity is to elicit expert views about EU current affairs and to rendition them in a succinct way. The objective is to ensure that these succinct renditions come from people ‘in the know’, are captured via multiple media, and proliferate as well as popularize EU studies in an unprecedented way.

The activity contrasts as well as complements Research activity ‘VisuALEU Policy Analytics’ providing analytical renditions of EU current affairs. The main difference is that the expert is ‘challenged’ to abstract their know-how on the particular topic so that it fits in the confined ‘time-and-space’ of an insight. The outputs of this activity will also reference and thus complement the knowledge maps and knowledge networks outputs.

The insights’ outputs are expected to cover a range of forms (e.g. Q&A, short video or audio, scroll-telling, etc.) depending on the preference of the expert and the specific circumstances applicable at the time of producing the insight (e.g. in person, by email, at a conference, chance opportunity, etc.).