A Map of TED World (not affiliated to TED)

2021-07-28

TED talks, like history, don't repeat, but they often rhyme. There's implicit in them a "map of the world," a cartography of topics and language styles that's worth exploring not just to find talks related to each other, but also the very different ones. Similar to map of the SP500 latent cartography, I've built (unaffiliated to TED, so don't go blaming them for any problems) a map of TED World, a visual guide to some of the talks โ€” those I could get transcripts for โ€” using Google's BERT NLP model and a couple of other tricks to build a two-dimensional map of similar (sometimes obviously so, sometimes not) talks.

There isn't much on that page, because what matters is secondarily the map, and primarily the talk. You can move around it and zoom in and out in the usual ways. Hover over a point to see the title of the talk, and click on it to go to TED's site to watch it โ€” then come back for a different one. An interesting way of using this map is to zoom into specific geographical features to explore clusters of talks, but the map is there to use however you want.