Well, hello again! Good to see you, thanks for stopping by.

The Data

Who doesn’t love TED talks? Much to my surprise, there are some people out there who have not experienced the joy and amazement of watching an intellectual talk to you about a very specific topic and convey a powerful message all in under 20 minutes!

Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down a late-night TED talk wormhole. Sure I have my favorites, Sir Ken Robinson, Simon Sinek, and Arthur Benjamin among many others and I’m sure you do too. Be sure to drop a comment below or tweet at me using the hashtag #FavoriteTED and let’s keep the conversation going.

So I found this new social network that is designed and centered around all things data! It’s called Data.World and its great. You start by uploading a dataset via csv, give it some tags, add a contributor to add to the dataset. But then users can write their own queries right in app and spit out a new subset. Or you can also download the entire dataset.

So I was perusing some of the datasets hidden in there and stumbled upon this awesome dataset that someone uploaded that contained every TED talked published through 11.22.2016. As soon as I saw it, I got excited. It was one of those rare data viz moments where you have a pretty good idea what you want the final viz to look like before you even fire up the app.

Click to view the interactive viz

Under the hood

From the moment I started designing this out, I knew I wanted this to be an interactive discovery resource. The whole idea of TED talks is to learn something new and enlighten. I wanted to keep that theme with this viz. That’s why you won’t find a way to search or filter by speaker. As mentioned above, I know three of my favorites talks by their author, I don’t want this to be a glorified Google search because I could simply Google “TED Talk Ken Robinson” and be watching it in seconds. No, I want this to be for the person who has an interest in hearing talks about “heart health” (there are 13) or “string theory” (there are 10).

The other thing I wanted to keep in mind were the graphic design elements. The TED website is very minimalist with three colors (black, white and red) and simple bold Arial font. I want users to know just by looking at it, what they are getting into.

Last but not least, I wanted to share a new favorite TED talk I just discovered from a friend after I showed him my dashbaord that uses TED talk statistics to analyze how to craft the perfect TED Talk!

Until next time!

Download the Raw Data