Northwestern IT Services & Support: Media and Technology Innovation

This morning we launched the NU Global Opportunities website (http://global.northwestern.edu), a dynamic and searchable  site that maps Northwestern’s international programs and profiles the academic interests of the University’s faculty and administrators. The site was developed with the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies as an initiative of the Office of the Provost to help gain more insight into Northwestern’s international relationships. The site allows visitors to explore data in a variety of ways including guided and faceted search, maps, and visualizations.

Our central development concept was to allow visitors to parse through and view the data in as many ways as possible so that people could uncover trends, relationships, and threads that had never been noticed before. The search functionality sits at the beginning of this process, and the user has a lot of control over the search through open-ended keyword search, guided vocabulary search, and faceted narrowing of results. The visitor can then view their particular search in a number of ways including textual, mapped, and keyword tag cloud.