Open Syllabus Galaxy is a visualisation representing more than a million of most frequently assigned texts in the Open Syllabus corpus, a database of almost 8 million university syllabi.
The Galaxy is an attempt to give a 10,000-meter view of the “co-assignment” patterns in the OS data – basically, which books and articles are assigned together in the same courses. By training node embeddings on the citation graph formed from (syllabus, book/article) edges, we can get really high-quality representations of books and articles that capture the ways in which professional instructors use them in the classroom – the types of courses they’re assigned in, the other books they’re paired with, etc.
The visualisation is done really well with different categories represented by colour, and individual resources by circles of varying size relative to the frequency that they’re assigned. Selecting specific items presents additional information on that item (see below).
I spent an hour browsing the Education category and could’ve spent hours more. This is a fascinating tool if you’d like to find additional resources for inclusion in your own modules and programmes.
There’s also an interesting blog post with some of the more technical details of how the visualisation was created.