Visualize Philosophical Connections
By: Cynthia Giles
Tags: Philosophy, Language, Ideas, Data Science, Data Visualization

Visualize Philosophical Connections

This intriguing graph displays all the reciprocal links in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Is it a whirlwind? A cat’s cradle? A swarm of bees?

No — it’s a directed graph.

For scale . . . There are 1685 nodes in the full graph. The largest component of reciprocated nodes (pictured above) includes 1223 of them.

Each of those nodes is a point where reciprocal links converge in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), a widely accessed collection of rigorous but mostly readable articles related to philosophical studies.

The SEP’s parameters for inclusion are very broad, and you will find articles that cover many topics in the physical and social sciences, mathematics, and philosophical aspects of the humanities. I’ve never come away empty-handed, no matter what I was trying to find out about — though I usually consult the easiest parts (summary introduction, outline, references, bio if it’s a person).

Quartz has published a useful overview of the SEP, describing what it offers, how it got started, and how it keeps going. And more detailed information is available at SEP’s own About section. Briefly summarized —since its inception in 1995, grant funding has provided for administrative costs and a small staff, but the academic authors and editors contribute their work without payment.

So it really is a labor of love for the philosophy community.

Which brings us back to visualization. The attractive abstraction shown above is the outside view of a complex directed graph created by Moses Boudourides (Northwestern University) and Mark Alfano (Macquarie University).

To find out what’s inside, just go here and start clicking. Each click takes you further “in” — so your journey looks something like this:

Anywhere along the way you can pan to see what’s nearby and trace the connections that radiate from a specific node. The connections are made from the Related Entries section at the end of each SEP article.

That’s really about all you can do — but if you’re interested in thinking about philosophy in the broadest possible terms, just roaming around in this thicket of topics and interconnections is fascinating. For one thing, you will be amazed by the sheer number of page titles, which range from the obvious to the exotic.

For another thing, you are likely to be surprised by the way some ideas are related to other ideas by way of yet other ideas. This spatial view of the SEP is notably different from the linear experience of browsing through a series of entries, whether done randomly or on some sort of thematic journey.

But besides the amusement value of exploring the viz itself, you can take advantage of the data analysis done by the authors.

In the explanatory paper LDA Topic Modeling of SEP Reciprocated Entries, Boudourides provides additional technical information about how the graph was constructed, along with some preliminary views of what it tells us.

For example: In the first run of a Topic Modeling analysis on the full contents of 1354 webpages of the nodes, the authors identified six topic concentrations, which they have tentatively defined as Objectivity, Theory, Society, Philosophy, Morality, and Mathematics. And for each one there is a word cloud.

There is also a word count provided for each of the topics, weighted for relative importance. Here’s an example:

It’s interesting to look over the six different perspectives, and consider the types of language associated with each.

For context, it should be noted that the SEP is essentially crowdsourced from a somewhat random lot of professional philosophers, and that may tend to smooth out institutional or attitudinal biases. I couldn’t find an official number of contributors, but a very horseback analysis of the author list got me in the vicinity of 900.

There’s no easy way to see the credentials or home institutions of the authors, but I checked three at random, and one came from the University of Georgia, another from the University of Vermont, the third from the University of Queensland (Australia). So it’s likely there is a fair amount of diversity.

Collaborator Mark Alfano adds some notes about the project on The Daily Nous, where he reveals that there are a few islands of data disconnected from the central mass. He observes:

“We might wonder how, given meaning holism and the relevance of everything to everything else at least indirectly, these islands exist. My guess (which we are going to be checking) is that the islands are associated with aspects of (the history of) philosophy that contemporary Western perspectives tend to ignore or denigrate. So for instance, I hypothesize that one of the islands will be Chinese philosophy, another of the islands will be Indian philosophy, and another of the islands will be Africana philosophy.”

Not exactly a surprise, if that guess turns out to be accurate — but the data-driven indications produced by this project are at least thought-provoking.

The links provided above make up a golden ticket if you want to roam around this SEP viz. I enjoyed my own semi-guided tour, and hope you will too.