What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
nytimes.com
What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#2Interesting. It would be nice to see mathematics.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#3Is there any kind of proposed standard for the metadata of a syllabus? I'd love to use it myself, I find myself recreating my own syllabi as a plaintext (Markdown) document, over and over, when it seems like the recipe is clear enough to do it in a way that can easily be converted into machine-readable metadata.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#4Is it possible to download the bulk data, e.g. CSV files via FTP, for noncommercial use in a personal database?
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#5When ever I want to learn something on my own, especially a comparative study, I include the search terms "syllabus' and 'reading list'. I figure there must be a class somewhere that has already covered this ground.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#6Something's wrong here. My department has public, well archived, trivially crawlable syllabi going back to 2002. So I did a search of my own department's syllabi using the provided database, and discovered: zero of the entries returned are syllabi. They're just references to books.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#7Something's wrong here. My department has public, well archived, trivially crawlable syllabi going back to 2002. So I did a search of my own department's syllabi using the provided database, and discovered: zero of the entries returned are syllabi. They're just references to books.
Co-author here. Yes, this UI is showing metadata extracted from the syllabi (namely, text assignments). Not the documents themselves, which, unfortunately, we're unable to make public for a mix of copyright and privacy reasons.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#8Is there any kind of proposed standard for the metadata of a syllabus? I'd love to use it myself, I find myself recreating my own syllabi as a plaintext (Markdown) document, over and over, when it seems like the recipe is clear enough to do it in a way that can easily be converted into machine-readable metadata.
No, I don't believe there is, but something like that would be fantastic. I believe some universities in the UK publish reading lists in XML format, but I don't know of any US universities that do that.
It would certainly make this kind of citation analysis much easier and more accurate. Syllabi are tricky to work with because there's basically no standardization in how texts are referenced / assigned. Sometimes there's a full, structured bibliographic citation, but more often it's just a title / author pair, and the formatting can vary widely. It's an interesting information extraction problem.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#9Interesting. It would be nice to see mathematics.
I am surprised math isn't included. At least, there's computer science. BTW, I like your free Linear Algebra book.
Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
#10Is there any kind of proposed standard for the metadata of a syllabus? I'd love to use it myself, I find myself recreating my own syllabi as a plaintext (Markdown) document, over and over, when it seems like the recipe is clear enough to do it in a way that can easily be converted into machine-readable metadata.
No, I don't believe there is, but something like that would be fantastic. I believe some universities in the UK publish reading lists in XML format, but I don't know of any US universities that do that. It would certainly make this kind of citation analysis much easier and more accurate. Syllabi are tricky to work with because there's basically no standardization in how texts are referenced / assigned. Sometimes ther…
Other author here... There is this new W3C initiative: https://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/