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D3js Tree of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (pbellon.github.io)
87 points by motohagiography on July 26, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



Reading all these other examples, feels like Tractatus would be a useful example tool for teaching graphs and RDF. This person's example on github was my favorite of the ones I found, as I was going to implement it like this myself, then had the sense to look it up and see if anyone else had.

Some time ago I posted about using these trees for expressing complex ontologies in a way that you can absorb them quickly, Tractatus is a great example of something impenetrable but consistent that could be used as a test for the quality and usability of a teaching ontology scheme.

His hierarchical format preceded modern software, but I wonder what his opinion might have been on tabs v. spaces. :)

Given it's a treegraph of axioms and rules, I'd wonder if there is an isomorphic or homomorphic graph that could form a syntax tree for a domain specific language or the basis of a reasoner or even a classifier. It's as if the Ted Chiang story writes itself.


Another D3 visualization of the Tractatus and also includes the earlier Prototractatus as well.

http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/map/


Thanks, this is closer to what I was expecting. Maybe I can finally understand Wittgenstein by using this tree diagram as scaffolding...


Similar in old-school DHTML, German only:

https://www.masswerk.at/WebTLP/pages/map1.html

Normal text view: https://www.masswerk.at/WebTLP/




Great idea, but it would work much better as an educational tool if the text was also presented, with text highlighted to show the conceptual connections.


Michele Pasin's PhiloSurfical web app did a visualization of the Tractatus in the early 2000s, using Common Lisp and Javascript. The app is revived here [1]. There is also code [2] and a writeup [3].

1. http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tractatus/tabs.html

2. https://github.com/lambdamusic/PhiloSurfical

3. http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-ontos/article/view/2...

I recall the original version could show the text in the original German or a choice of English translations, but I can't find that in this revived version.


If you’re just looking for the original text, then acabal did a high quality epub (with MathMLed equations) at https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...



"Analyzing the structure of the Tractatus, we found a style of outline with useful properties that is not supported by modern outliners." [1]

1. https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/2008-12-06


Useful for family trees!


* Unless consanguineal


That's cool. It'd be easier to use if in addition to the mouse enter and the arrow keys were handled. That tree gets kind of deep.




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