Research you can look at

An interactive research portal for SISJ. Researchers' own CSV, Excel, and PDF files become maps and charts on the page.

FIG. 00

2021SISJ — Society of Indonesian Science JournalistsVIA PT Centaury GroupTHE HARD PART

The problem

Every researcher submits a different format. A portal that only accepts one shape of data is a portal that publishes summaries of research instead of the research itself.

The approach

Read the file first — CSV, Excel, or PDF — work out what is actually in it, and only then choose a visualisation the data can honestly carry.

ISN Lab publishes research on the web the way research is actually read: by looking at it. A Laravel backend holds the material, a Next.js and Tailwind front end presents it.

My contribution was the part in between — the feature that takes a researcher's own files and turns them into interactive maps, charts, and other visualisations on the page.

01 / What the project is

Three things worth knowing.

The shape of the work, before the part that was difficult.

FIG. 01

A portal for research, not for papers.

The point of the portal is that a finding can be explored rather than described. A reader should be able to move through the data a researcher collected, not read a sentence summarising it.

That only works if the visualisation comes from the researcher's real data. Retyping numbers into a chart tool would have made the portal a publishing surface instead of a research one.

FIG. 02

Every researcher sends a different shape.

The files arrive as CSV, as Excel, and as PDF. None of the three agree on where a header sits, how a region is named, or whether a column holds a number or a note about a number.

There was no format to standardise on, because the material was already collected. The intake had to accept what researchers actually had.

FIG. 03

Read the data before choosing the visual.

So the tool reads the file first and works out what is in it — which columns carry places, which carry series, which are labels — and only then decides what can honestly be drawn from it.

That order matters. A map is offered when there is geography to put on it, a chart when there is a series to plot. The data decides the visualisation, not a template.

02 / The hard part

Formats that never agree

The hard part was not drawing the chart. It was deciding what the file in front of you could support.

FIG. 01 — HOW IT WORKS

How it works / step 01 of 03

Take the file as it is.

CSV, Excel, or PDF, with whatever layout the researcher used. No preparation step, no template to fill in first — the intake starts from the file that already exists.

03 / What you can open

Published and live. The links below go to the project itself.

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