Word Clouds of ADS Chapters
Applied Discrete Structures 2023-10-26
I'm teaching the second semester of our Discrete Structures sequence and gave a quiz simply asking students to define group. The results were not so good. The emphasize how important it is to know this and other definitions, I decided to construct a word cloud of Chapter 11, which is an introduction to Algebraic Structures, mostly groups.
My first attempt - just asking Mathematica to construct a word cloud of the text - was not satisfactory since all the non-math words got in the way, although group was still prominent. My solution was to take the index of the book and generate a list of the words in it. Then I selected from the text only those words that appear in the index, keeping duplicates. The result is pretty good. I did the same for the chapter on graphs, Chapter 9.
Word Cloud for Chapter 11 Word Cloud for Chapter 9 One benefit of doing this is that I could catch words that should be in the index that are missing. One word I expected in the graph cloud was edge. It was totally missing because I had neglected to include it in the index - something that I'm going to fix!