[Its.an.education.project] Fwd: Its.an.education.project curiosity

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Gary,

excellent work, I love the map!

Maybe this is something that we could add to Walter's SugarLabs digest 
on a monthly/weekly basis?

Cheers,
Christoph

Gary C Martin schrieb:
> Hi List,
>
> I sent this to Marco, off-list, as a curiosity (I'm not currently 
> subscribed to its.an.education.project so please cc me if needed). 
> It's basically a self organising map (SOM) visualisation of the new 
> list activity up to a day or two ago (more description of the 
> visualisation technique in my email below). Here's a link to the image:
>
>     http://garycmartin.com/som/2008-May-its-an-education-project-list-som.jpg 
>
>
> I was trying to get an idea for the topics being covered here without 
> burning my time by reading all of the archive, but if folks find it of 
> some use I could automate the process. Perhaps monthly/weekly list 
> views, wiki content, etc?
>
> --Gary
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> This is very nice! I'd actually post it on the list, you don't need to
>> be subscribed to do so...
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Marco
>>
>> On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> 
>> wrote:
>>> Hi Marco,
>>>
>>> Just a random aside, didn't want to post formally as this is just a 
>>> rough,
>>> but though you might find it vaguely interesting/curious.
>>>
>>> I recently noticed the its.an.education.project, but I'm reticent to 
>>> join
>>> yet another list that potentially another set of distracting rants or a
>>> talking shop – be they good or bad, my opinion reading bandwidth is 
>>> pretty
>>> saturated now with the existing lists... Anyway, I've been working 
>>> on a Self
>>> Organising Map (SOM) that uses a geographic like landscape metaphor for
>>> visualisation***, and recently hooked up a text front end for 
>>> extracting
>>> word distance metrics from bodies of text – I've been testing it on 
>>> works of
>>> literature from Project Gutenberg up to now, but have wanted to try 
>>> it on
>>> bulk mail feeds for a while.
>>>
>>> *** Code is all Python/PIL but too CPU intensive for an XO, though 
>>> it might
>>> make nice visual index/content pages for wiki content and such, with 
>>> URL
>>> links...
>>>
>>> The SOM acts as a kind of spacial summariser visualisation of the 
>>> content,
>>> where height indicates strong connections between terms, proximity
>>> represents term association, and label size is a rough guide to basic
>>> frequency of the term. Now there are many "correct" maps for the 
>>> same set of
>>> data, each generation will usually settle into a slightly different 
>>> set of
>>> local minima, but the associations are no less valid for each.
>>>
>>> It's currently picking the top ~200 terms by frequency, after removing
>>> linguistic junk words. Here's the map that generated for the
>>> Its.an.education.project May archives, as of yesterday. Note that 
>>> the map is
>>> continuous (wraps around North/South and East/West, surface of a torus
>>> actually).
>>>
>>> Probably just a curiosity, but might be more useful on your disk 
>>> than mine.
>>>
>>> --Gary
>>
>
>
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