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I'd love to learn more about this visualisation you produced. Can you say more? Is an example output or code available?


Sure. The code is a mess of scripts and initial work on a web interface. It is not currently in a form to release. It began as just an aid to help myself understand what I was studying. To get a sense of the "road map".

I collected the data in a spreadsheet for each text. The columns were "Id, Type, Name, Chapter, Description, Dependencies". Id is the margin reference from the textbook, Type is one of theorem, definition, corollary, etc., Name is for named theorems or definitions, Dependencies is a comma separated list of Ids.

I then had a small Python script that built up a NetworkX [1] representation. Initially I was using Cytoscape [2] to explore the graphs, but then started work on a web interface using dagre-d3 for automated graph layout [3]. This example [4] is very similar to the types of layouts it produced.

I found that a large textbook quickly grows into a big hairy ball, and that it is only useful if you are able to collapse and/or hide nodes intelligently. I.e. show the chapter dependency structure, or look at the sub-DAG involving a selection of nodes. I only got a little way into doing this when I got moved on to other distractions. Shazaam for bird song, or something like that...

[1] https://networkx.github.io/ [2] https://cytoscape.org/ [3] https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre-d3 [4] http://cs.brown.edu/people/jcmace/d3/graph.html?id=small.jso...




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