Conversation

I'm fascinated by

digital garden of his notes at notes.andymatuschak.org. At the same time i'm disappointed by the tools available to navigate those kind of information spaces. So here is quick thread how I got from the hairball graph to a readable concept map 1/5

259

Marcin Ignac

@marcinignac

Jul 13, 2020

Hairball graphs happen when you apply force directed layout to a densely connected graph. 3 examples below. For

@andy_matuschak

i've made a web-crawler to find all the notes on his page and their connections. The next two are Foam (foambubble.github.io/foam/) and

2/5

My first attempt is using

@TensorFlow

JS and Google's Universal Sentence Encoder to find similarities in the note's titles, umap-js for layout and k-means algorithm for clustering. While clusters are a bit arbitrary the similarity finding worked quite well! 3/5

Marcin Ignac

@marcinignac

Jul 13, 2020

Next i tried to find note similarity by checking if notes are connected and then adding cluster names manually. Yes it's a very rough generalisation but nevertheless good starting point for exploration. Example gem on Enabling Environments notes.andymatuschak.org/z8jg7T3YhvyXiE 4/5