While serving as the newsletter editor for the U.S. Burning Plasma Organization, I implemented an Image of the Month feature intended to highlight exciting projects within the research community. Some of these described specific projects, such as the education and outreach work, while others were just curious graphics that don’t really highlight anything. An example from that latter category is the map of self-reported publishing collaborators for each of the three largest U.S. magnetic confinement fusion facilities: A Feast for Collaborators. That title makes more sense if you note that the previous month’s Image was called A Storm of Words.
The collaborator graphic is shown below in the format output by Circos, the data visualization application that organizes data sets to highlight relationships. I learned how to make this graphic by following the tutorials provided on the Circos site and my input files are provided here as an example. All three files are plain text, but note that circos.conf.txt should be changed to circos.conf to work when called by Circos (the extra .txt is added to make this a file that WordPress will allow me to share).
Settings file that is called by Circos: circos.conf
(using this default name means that all you have to do at the command line is go to the directory with this file and then call circos)
The input data: fusiondata
The links between institutions: fusionLinks
If you have Circos installed, then the above three files should allow you to reproduce this graphic.
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