TedTalks

Curated List of Good TED Talks

This project was started in high school when I watched a bunch of TED talks and wanted to keep track of the ones I really liked. It started as just a simple list, but categories soon formed.

Later in life, enough friends asked me to share my list with them that I was nudged to sharing it online. Not one for writing many words, a blog did not appeal to me, but just posting [a barebones list](Good Ted Talks.md) was enough.

However, the categories I used to have no longer made sense, but the number of talks I wanted to share was just a smidge too large to make re-sorting them easy. Naturally, the first solution I reached for was to cluster them based on their transcripts, which brings me to the current state of this project.

Notes

VirtualEnv setup

source venv/bin/activate

Testing distance computation

python compute_distances.py

Storing requirements

pip freeze > requirements.txt

TODO

• Populate database with objects

• Scrape transcripts of talks to html files

• Add function to add a new talk to the database

• Basic web server to serve same content on a website

• Draft designs for UI

• Build basic D3 web animation

• Add spring physics based on weights

• Investigate clustering algorithms

  • TF-IDF with hiercharchical clustering?
  • LDA?

• Implement TF-IDF hierarchical algorithm that outputs similarity scores

• Determine aesthetically pleasing parameters

  • Term-frequency metric
  • Cut-off for including edges