Friday, January 28, 2022

The Map of All Human Knowledge

Open Syllabus Galaxy is an interactive map which allows you to search the 1,138,841 most frequently assigned texts in University syllabi. On the map university and college text books are organized spatially based on which books and articles are assigned together in the same courses. 

Open Syllabus is is a non-profit research organization that researches the syllabi of University and College subjects. As part of this analysis Open Syllabus uses machine learning and other techniques to collect the titles of texts and articles cited on reading lists in course syllabi.

Open Syllabus Galaxy maps over 1 million assigned college tests based on 'co-assignment patterns' (i.e. which tests are listed in the same syllabi). The interactive map plots over 1 million of the most frequently assigned texts in higher education. Individual texts are shown on the map using scaled colored circles. The colors of the circles relate to college subjects (which subject a text is most assigned in). Texts colored grey are interdisciplinary texts (these texts have <50% of assignments in any single subject). The scale of the circle markers are determined by the number of syllabi a text is listed in. Therefore the biggest circles show the texts which are on the most subject reading lists. 

 

The HathiTrust Digital Map is a similar interactive map which allows you to browse and explore the 14 million volumes in the HaithTrust's repository of digitized texts. The HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions which offers a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.The HathiTrust Digital Map provides a visual interface with which you can navigate the books in the HaithiTrust digital library.

The Library of Congress Classification system categorizes books into different broad subjects and then by sub-classes within each of these subjects. The HathiTrust Digital Map uses an entirely different method of classification. On this interactive maps texts are organized by the similarity in the vocabulary of individual texts.

The interactive map has two distinct modes: 'Read' and 'Interact'. If you select 'Interact' you can zoom in and pan around the map. If you then select an individual dot on the map you can actually open the selected text on the HathiTrust Digital Library website. However if you select 'Read' you can learn more about the vocabulary similarity classification system used by the digital map.



An Ocean of Books is an interactive map of over 100,000 authors and 145,162 books. On this map every island is an author and every city is a book. If you search the interactive map for your favorite writers you can find other writers that you may enjoy based on how near they appear on the map to your favorites.

The size of an author's island on An Ocean of Books is determined by the amount written about them on the internet. The more times they are mentioned on the World Wide Web then the bigger their island on the map. The position of the islands and the proximity of authors to each other is determined by the number of connections between them on the internet. If two authors are mentioned in lots of the same web pages then the closer they will be on An Ocean of Books.

The connections between authors and therefore their proximity on the map is determined by a machine learning algorithm. If you select an author's name on the map then you can read a short biography. If you zoom in on an author's island then all the writer's books will appear as cities on the map. Click on a book's title and you can read a short introduction to the selected book.

  

TheLibraryMap uses the idea of fictional genres as its organizing principle in mapping books. TheLibraryMap is an interactive map of over 100,000 books which are organized based on 'the genre and topics of each book'. On the map individual books are colored by 'genre and topics'. 

Individual book markers on the TheLibraryMap are also sized differently. The size of a book marker is related to the number of 'user reviews' (TheLibraryMap is a participant in the Bookshop.org affiliate program so I assume this relates to user reviews on Bookshop.org).

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