Accessible Navigation
Creating an interactive cartographic map presents unique accessibility challenges. Screen readers cannot natively interpret 2D Canvas or SVG coordinate locations without explicit semantic structure. This is not a niche…
Spatial Cartography and Navigation
Concept mapping, Self-Organizing Maps, graph pathfinding, accessible navigation, and wayfinding across complex learning journeys.
Triangulating in Complex Concept Spaces
In physical geography, wayfinding involves orienting oneself relative to known landmarks, assessing terrain contours, and choosing pathways that reach a destination. The term itself, and the questions below, come from…
Concept Mapping and Self-Organizing Maps
The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a neural network architecture introduced by Teuvo Kohonen in 1982 as an unsupervised method for projecting high-dimensional input onto a low-dimensional (typically 2D) lattice while…
Graph Traversal & Pathway Interrogation
A large, densely cross-linked site has more potential connections between articles than any reader can hold in their head. The value of turning that into an actual graph, rather than leaving it as an implicit similarity…
Discrete Voronoi Topic Territories
In early iterations of spatial concept maps, topic regions were rendered as overlapping translucent rectangles or ellipses. While simple to compute, overlapping shapes created visual clutter, blurred domain boundaries…
K-Blades vs. Self-Organizing Maps: How the Live Concept Atlas Works Now
The atlas generator went from training a 40×40 grid of neurons for up to 800 seconds every time the site's content changed, to computing a pairwise similarity structure directly from page embeddings in about 230…