Certain fields of study tend to cover many of the same topics. Many times, the two fields go hand-in-hand. Electrical engineering, for example, ties tightly with computer science. Same thing between education and sociology. Daniel Ramage and Jason Chuang of Stanford University explore these similarities through the language used in their school’s dissertations.
Topic distance is explored between departments from 1993 to 2008. Select a department and it goes to the middle of the circle. Departments with dissertations that were similar for the year are highlighted and near closer. The closer to the center, the more similar. Alternatively, you should also be able to find departments who are fairly different from the rest.
You can also use the time slider on the bottom to check out how some departments grow closer to another over time.
Apparently there were some strong similarities between the communication dissertations and the one from applied earth sciences. Who knew? [PhD Dissertation Browser]
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why would the distance between econ and polsci be different when econ is in the middle and when polsci is in the middle?
We just added a landing page with a bit more info about the underlying text model. The model takes each dissertation as an unobserved mixture of departments. The amount one department borrows from another (what % econ is political science?) may not be the same as its inverse (what % political science is econ?).
there must be some kind of scaling at work (e.g., the distance from the center is somehow based on the total similarity between the selected field and all others). take a look at music vs computer science, then computer science vs music.
that makes sense, thanks!
Thanks for the great charts. You are the Data king!
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