Selected keywords (color-coded) in Marr’s 1971 paper form clusters in different sections of the manuscript
“let me do something that I’ve never done before: I want to dedicate this blog post to @jsnsndr. we shared the same lab for a very short but intense period. it was fun! I will miss him and his questions during lab meeting. I wish him all the best with his own brand-new lab in UBC .. this sentence is crying for a link to his lab web-page.. I can’t wait to see the link to his lab page!!!!”
It is Christmas time, it is time for something light and colorful!
from Wikipedia page:
David Courtnay Marr (January 19, 1945 – November 17, 1980) was a British neuroscientist and psychologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in Computational Neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.
I have created an interactive page showing the «influential» work of David Marr (“Simple memory: a theory for archicortex.” Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. London, 262:23-81. – 1971).
In this page you can click on selected key items to light them up (exaclty how you would do with Christmas light) and highlight their occurrence in the text (click again on the selected keyword to revert it to its original status).
Why doing this?
well, during a recent meeting my PI Paul Frankland brought up something really interesting.. everyone reference to the “influential work of Marr” but how many really read his work??
Making reference to Marr lets you shine of reflected light.. you feel cool (as cool as a neuroscientist can be, obviously). Indeed citing Marr brightens up the morale… you are saying something incontestable, something that even the evilest/angriest reviewer would agree upon.
.. I am one of those that never read Marr (but I have never invoked his name during my science talks… but some of his key concepts -of course pervade my work and talks)
Key concepts emerge from the text after the text-analysis. Line thickness represent the frequency of the indicated bigram.
So I decided to let my python script read the ‘influential’ Marr’s 1971 work on simple memory for me.
The most important concepts and their relations have been plotted in this disjointed graph on the right.
then I had a look at something that really intrigues me: the spatial distributions of these concepts in the text.
key things emerge:
the word THEORY can be found all over the text, while the anatomical concepts clearly occur in the last third of the text.
not surprisingly the anatomical words (CA3, pyramidal, collateral) occur together in this part of the text.
THe keyword CA3 (hippocampal field) only emerges in the last part of the text where the frequency of other anatomical terms is increased relative to the first and second part.
And there is more to discover with the patterns generated by just these few words… I’ll let you discover these relations / text structure !
you can play with this tool here.
disclaimer:
[1] this tool is not highly interactive, it is limited, it can be improved a lot… but then again, it is Christmas time and I spent a couple of hours on it..
enough..
[2] the Christmas-light words look like small grave stones. This was not made on purpose, but it makes a lot of sense: words on a printed paper from the 70′s get buried by time and the relentless process of scientific publication…
is there any need to resuscitate these words? if so, How can we improve the discoverability of these words (and related concepts?)
But this is another story!