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Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

genmon.github.io

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Re: Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

#41

Post by zeristor »

astroalex wrote: post #28

I love this project!! Ever since my partner and I discovered In Our Time a few years back, it’s been our go-to podcast to listen to together. Part of the allure is that the archive is so vast, but that makes it hard to browse. My partner made her own archive of In Our Time here, if you’re interested: https://shelby.cool/melvyn/ She used Wikipedia to find and categorize each episode. I also really like that she indexe…

That's really impressive.

I've had a mild idea for ages to have a sort of annotated In Our Time. Listening to the podcast on a webpage as the text rolls by links could appear to explain or give background to the item or person being discussed.

SMIL is the multi-media mark up language. Generally if one thinks of something there's someone on the Internet who has already had that idea.

Additional: I think the BBC is very careful about transciptions. They've sold a book of the transcripts of several episodes, but it would be a great way to go through a subject.

Re: Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

#43

Post by genmon »

jack_riminton wrote: post #42

In Our Time has been a life-long companion, one of things that makes me proud of the BBC

Have you read the New Yorker articles about it?

On _In Our Time_ -> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/podcast-dept/escape-the-ne...

Profile of Melvyn Bragg -> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/t...

Both well worth your time.

Re: Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

#44

Post by pigscantfly »

genmon wrote: post #32
CrypticShift wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent! I'd love to see a script that sends a list of "descriptions" (1-100 words) to ChatGPT and directly gives you back a ready-made (embedding vectors closeness) map in a (textual) graph/chart format (like your above map or your plot https://interconnected.org/more/2023/02/in_our_time-PCA-plot... )

It turns out that "closeness" is usually hard to visualise/explore when you're dealing with a 1,000-dimensional space... and PCA has the failures mentioned above. It's weird -- it's locally useful to navigate, and at a high level kinda useful, but only if you squint and don't look at the problems. So I feel like a fisheye visualisation would be appropriate? That's something that I'm exploring in other projects.

I'd suggest trying t-SNE [1] instead; you'll be losing almost all of the variance by projecting onto the first two eigenvectors produced by PCA.

[1] http://karpathy.github.io/2014/07/02/visualizing-top-tweeps-...

Re: Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

#45

Post by genmon »

gwern wrote: post #39
genmon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out that "closeness" is usually hard to visualise/explore when you're dealing with a 1,000-dimensional space... and PCA has the failures mentioned above. It's weird -- it's locally useful to navigate, and at a high level kinda useful, but only if you squint and don't look at the problems. So I feel like a fisheye visualisation would be appropriate? That's something that I'm exploring in other projects.

I wouldn't necessarily reach for PCA. No reason to think that the first two principal components necessarily encode anything particularly interesting. If you want to lay out each point in 2D in a way which keeps similar points nearby, something like t-SNE is worth a try - visualizing embeddings is what it was invented for.

Excellent, new to me and I'll give it a go, thanks!

I gravitate to PCA for terrible reasons (undergrad so it's what I think of first) and like you say, it's beguiling yet disappointing, the components rarely have any human meaning.

Re: Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

#49

Post by DC-3 »

Nice project OP. I also love In Our Time.

Some favourite episodes off the top of my head:

* Wilfred Owen - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001df48

* The Evolution of Crocodiles - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zmhf

* The May Forth Movement - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001282c

* The Valladolid Debate - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fgmw

* Gerard Manley Hopkins - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003clk

* Henrik Ibsen - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b42q58

* Wuthering Heights - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b095ptt5

And finally, in which three mathematicians heroically attempt to explain asymptotic analysis to (septuagenarian novelist and cultural broadcaster) Melvyn:

* P v NP - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06mtms8

Re: Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

#50

Post by bscphil »

astroalex wrote: post #28

I love this project!! Ever since my partner and I discovered In Our Time a few years back, it’s been our go-to podcast to listen to together. Part of the allure is that the archive is so vast, but that makes it hard to browse. My partner made her own archive of In Our Time here, if you’re interested: https://shelby.cool/melvyn/ She used Wikipedia to find and categorize each episode. I also really like that she indexe…

> She used Wikipedia to find and categorize each episode.

This is a really clever use of an existing dataset. I clicked through before reading this and was stunned by how thorough the tag set was. Even more obscure things like "Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford" have multiple episodes. I'm going to keep this in mind on future projects for sure.

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