Dario Rodighiero is an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Groningen, where he serves the multidisciplinary Campus Fryslân faculty.
    There, Dario coordinates the Data Wise minor for introducing students to applied data science in real-world problems, while also teaching data and visual literacy within the Bachelor’s program in Data Science and Society.
Maintaining affiliations with Harvard University, he is a principal at metaLAB, and holds a position as a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
    Dario relies on design, data, and humanities to map digital archives to understand the nature of cultural and scientific dynamics. His approach bridges gaps between diverse fields, acting as a mediator for interdisciplinary initiatives.
With Metis Press, he authored “Mapping Affinities: Democratizing Data Visualization,” offering a fresh take on the way we visualize and interpret organizational charts.
    EPFL awarded him a Ph.D. in Science. Over the years, he has held positions at MIT, Sciences Po, and the European Commission, has lectured at CERN and Ars Electronica, and has exhibited at MAXXI and Harvard Art Museums.



Journal of Digital History
2024

Super-Vision: Tracing EPFL History Through 8,000 Doctoral Theses

Rodighiero, Dario, Philippe Rivière, and Sarah Kenderdine

https://doi.org/10.1515/JDH-2023-0004
The fiftieth anniversary of EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) offered the opportunity to retrace its history through the digital archives housed by the institute itself. Part of the exhibition Infinity Room 2, the Super-Vision project investigates the practice of academic advising by visualizing 8,000 doctoral theses in a work at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Inaugurated in September 2019 at EPFL Pavilions, Super-Vision presents a diachronic mapping that uses artificial intelligence to shed light on an institutional dataset that would be unobservable otherwise. To achieve such a goal, 8,000 doctoral theses are analysed with natural language processing and mapped with techniques of dimensionality reduction, combining language and time within in an interactive visualization accessible to the public. The project title has a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the educational practice that connects doctoral students to supervisors; on the other hand, it employs information design like a macroscope to grasp complex phenomena from a distant standpoint. The result offers EPFL employees and museum visitors an original perspective to look at the institute with different eyes.

Visual Communication
2024

In Praise of Visual Representation: An Inquiry into Text Analysis and Network Visualization for Charting Scientific Communities

Rodighiero, Dario

https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572241248408
This article provides a visual investigation into scientific communities through the lens of language. Inspired by actor-network theory, the study examines how individuals establish connections through shared vocabularies and, consequently, how communities organize themselves into linguistic groups. Using scientific texts to map the lexical dimension, the premise posits that research communities can be visually represented by their members and the words they employ, favouring the comprehension of social structures. The research draws from a decade-long personal experimentation with language-based visual models, to explore how research communities appear according to their lexicon, in which each individual is intricately intertwined. Employing cutting-edge techniques of text analysis and network visualization, the study analyses, organizes and maps scientific communities, clustering individuals into thematic groups based on their language use. The findings are presented through a series of projects that delve into the analytical power of images and unveil novel visual methods to better understand the spatial dynamics of language and communities.

Umanistica Digitale
2023

Advanced Interface Design for IIIF: A Digital Tool to Explore Image Collections at Different Scales

Rodighiero, Dario, Alberto Romele, José Higuera Rubio, Celeste Pedro, Matteo Azzi, and Giorgio Uboldi

https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.2532-8816/17230
This article introduces a proposal for an experimental interface design that uses the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to facilitate the exploration of image collections through the navigation of relational models created by the scholarly practice of annotation. Within the project From Data To Wisdom, an innovative digital tool was designed by harnessing IIIF resources and leveraging close and distant reading on three levels of detail: micro, meso, and macro. The proposed tool integrates annotation features that enable scholars to analyze individual images and interpret broader connections and patterns across image sets. This article outlines the experimental interface’s theoretical framework, design principles, and significant advantages, highlighting the potential to support interdisciplinary research and advancements in digital art.