[IAEP] More new and revised chapters of "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" ready for review, feedback

[Gary C Martin]

Hi James,

On 24 Feb 2010, at 16:52, James Simmons wrote:

> Gary,
> 
> It's kind of interesting but I see a lot of words in there like
> "should, good, putting" etc.

Well it is based on your word usage ;-b

Actually, perhaps 600 terms was a little too deep for this size of text. Just looked at the frequency filter output and it indicates every term on the map was only used 4 or more times in your text (ignoring kill-lists for prepositions, determiners conjunctions, pronouns etc). I usually have that at a much a higher frequency threshold – I guess the give away here is all that blue ocean (low frequency, weakly associated terms).

> Plus the complete text includes a lot of
> code samples, so that's going to make an SOM less meaningful too.

I do strip out source code, it's highly repetitive nature would swamp your text narrative with "self" being the dominant term.

> It's hard for me to get much of an idea of what the book is about from
> the diagram.

OK, thanks for the feedback!

> The most interesting thing like this that I've seen is the tag cloud
> for the Children's Library at the Internet Archive:
> 
> http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=/metadata/subject&collection=iacl&view=cloud

Yea, though I'd personally much rather they went the extra mile and placed related subject terms spatially near each other rather than just an alphabetical list, that way you could find subjects and associated/related subjects at a glance and work your way over a topic area of interest (I'd need some local access to their archive to generate that map, though it could be generated from a subset I guess).

Regards,
--Gary