Temporal Mapper

V.1.2.1 - March 03 2026

---

This is a library for using the Mapper for temporal topic modelling. The primary components are:

• A scikit-learn compliant Mapper class temporalmapper.Mapper implementing density-based Mapper.
• A much messier wrapper class temporalmapper.TemporalMapper that computes additional data useful for temporal topic modelling.
• Interactive and static plotting functions such as TemporalMapper.temporal_plot.

Direct questions to Kaleb D. Ruscitti: kaleb.ruscitti at uwaterloo.ca .

Complete documentation is under construction on Read The Docs.

Example:

United Nations General Debate Corpus

The United Nations General Debate Corpus contains transcripts of the United Nations General Debates from 1970-2014. We can chunk and embed these transcripts using SBERT and produce a topic model of the dataset using Toponymy.

Then using this repository, we can model the changes in the topics over time, producing a graph whose nodes are topics at a given time:

Installation

Install from PyPI: pip install temporal-mapper

Or, clone the repo and install:

git clone https://github.com/TutteInstitute/temporal-mapper.git

cd temporal-mapper && pip install .

Development Instructions

Getting set up

(Mostly for my future self...)

Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/TutteInstitute/temporal-mapper.git

Then make a virtual environment and install the package and pytest.

cd temporal-mapper && python -m venv .venv

source .venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt && pip install -e .

Before making any changes, check that the tests run successfully:

cd tests && python -m pytest mapper.py