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What are the recurring topics in TED

Today I explored TED talks data, their topics and viewerships.

Today I explored TED talks data, their topics and viewerships.

Given the diversity of ideas at TED, the talks often have several related themes and tags.

To visualize the frequency of individual themes and their various combinations, I used a tool available in R/python/D3 called UpSet which was developed by a group of Harvard researchers that uses matrix, bar plots and add-on attribute plots to depict part-to-whole relation as well as the intersection of different sets.

First I look into the frequency of top 30 themes (out of 48 themes in total)

We can see:

  • The Creative Spark is the most common theme
  • The top themes focuses on unconventional wisdom, forward-looking thinking and meaningful storytelling
  • Frequent combinatory themes include the Art Unusual & Creative Spark, Spectacular Performance & Creative Spark, What Makes Us Happy & How the Mind works

Similarly I take a look into the tags/topics and since there are 289 of them so I took a sneak peak on top 30 which covers half of the talks, so this only reflects talks within this 30 tags and doesn’t contain other tags.

We can see:

  • Technology, culture, science, global issues and design are hot topics
  • Science & technology, design & technology, biology & science, global issues & culture, as well as music, arts & entertainment are some of the recurring combinatory topics

Next I looked into the talks with most views and favorites by topics during 2001–2012. Whereas a talk appears in more than one topics, I’ll label the next most favorites.

Ken Robinson’s 2006 Talk on Schools kill Creativity are most viewed talk of all time with 12M views and 3K favorites.

Looking at keywords in the title could also gives us an idea of the topic. Here are 10 most frequent verbs, adjectives and nouns in TED talks’ titles:

And among the content of talks, the word people appeared around 10K times among a total of 1000+ talks.


Related articles:

Finding the Characteristics of TED talks The Occupation of TED speakers

This is #day60 of my #100dayprojects on Data science and visual storytelling. Full code on my github. Thanks for reading. If you like it, please share it. Suggestions of new topics and feedbacks are always welcomed.


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