Researches - Sustainability in Architectural Education: a Pilot Study on Interactive Visualization of a Scoping Review

Abstract

Doing a literature review is imperative for any scientific research for depicting the cur- rent state of the art, explaining what a research output will take part in the future, and offering future research directions. Existing literature defines four review types depending on their overarching goal, search strategy, appraisal of included studies, analysis, and synthesis. Review papers or reviews in articles mainly use Gantt charts to describe the number of publications addressing specific topics, the number of cita- tions publications received, or draw co-citation or keyword co-occurrence networks supported with narratives. Hence, they remain inadequate in providing a visual over- view of a specific research field, as they are not created by linking each publication to its research objectives, topics, case studies, methods, etc. This study believes that visualizing these links is potent for new researchers to access relevant literature and draw research gaps. This study aims to offer an experimental visualization entitled ReSeARCHeS, which is an interactive visualization of research outputs on learning environments (including tools, methods, courses, curricula) implemented towards to facilitate the integration of sustainability in architectural education. Based on the scoping study stages (work-in-progress), this study collects and categorizes relevant research outputs published from January 2018 to September 2020 on two electron- ic databases. The last step of this review, which involves the syntheses and analyses, is still on-going for a broader timeframe. The study codes each output based on con- tent analysis with pre-defined categories from the field of architectural education. It then builds a network by linking each output to its codes on Graph Commons. This paper discusses possible applications of ReSeARCHeS in broadening researchers’ un- derstanding of a field and contributing to the universal circulation of knowledge and experience.