CRISPy charms

At a recent conference, I had a chance to see some fun stuff that NIH is planning (I know, how often do you get to say that?)

CRISP is going to add in a new visualization format: grants are organized based on their abstracts, and then displayed in a webby network, with each grant as a point, and lines connecting them together. The distance between grant-points reflects the verbal similarity of their abstracts.

It was total fucking nerd joy. You could search it as you would normally search CRISP, and then see which grants "resembled" your target result. Or you could just zoom in on one major topic area, and then browse around to see what was in the mainstream (abstract-wise, at least) and what was out on a limb.

It was as though you had a bird's-eye view of all American biomedical science. And it was clickable.

There was even a color scheme associated with it, which if I recall rightly corresponded to the different granting institutes (although, as one colleague suggested, it'd be sweet if instead it reflected the grant amount...).

I'm not sure when they'll release this version publicly, but I'm calling it right now: the amount of biomedical science done in America will plummet for 1-2 weeks while everybody plays with the new toy. Er, way to go, NIH!