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

[Gary C Martin]

On 18 May 2008, at 22:27, Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> Gary C Martin wrote:
>> 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
>
> Cool!  I had never seen something like this before.  What software
> did you use to produce it?

I've been tinkering with various SOM implementations in my spare time,  
off and on over a number of years now. This map output is from several  
Python modules; one to convert text into a matrix of distant metrics;  
one that uses the matrix to train a SOM; and one that takes the  
trained SOM data and uses PIL to output the cartographic like map image.

> Olpc and Sugar still seem to be going together.
>
> Marco and Bert should be careful: they're getting dangerously
> close to the dark side! :-)

:-)

Yes I was quite surprised to see the big M – sorry Marco, I don't mean  
you ;-) – down in the drink. I expected to find it more strongly  
associated given what I'd been reading on some other lists. Its low  
height suggests it is only weakly associated with the other terms  
shown on the map (indicated height is based on mean association  
strength), even though the term came up pretty frequently (the medium  
size font that was assigned happens to indicate its frequency came  
somewhere between the top 12.5% and 50% out of the terms shown).

--Gary