SOMs and Constructionism

[Gary C Martin]

> Thank you Gary. Really nice. I think your SOM visualization are the  
> most human-readable I have seen. What software you are using to  
> generate these? Is it open source?

It's been a personal project I keep dipping in and out of over a  
number of years, no I've not released the code as open source (not  
sure where I'm going with it yet). It's currently just a few Python  
modules and that seems to be most flexible, though I could do with  
spending some time optimising some of the code bottle-necks to C.

> Would it be anyhow possible to make the map interactive so that  
> clicking the concepts could bring some  relevant texts snippets /  
> quotations from the textual data?

Yes, probably simplest plan would be to link to a list of each term's  
occurrence locations (as each term potentially links to many  
locations). Generate HTML map mark-up for the final image label  
locations, with each linking to a page, for each term, showing a list  
of occurrence links (and some snippet text for context). Could be a  
nice way to auto-document something organically changing like a wiki  
where things quickly get out of control, but could be a way to browse  
mail archives also.

--Gary