February 2025 Podcast Vibes Presentation
I gave a talk today about my podcast analysis project (previously: Note: Podcast Vibes, Podcast Vibes Prototyping), connecting it to some visualization design work from over a decade ago which explored ways to visualize and organize text corpora with vector-based embedding models.
I’ve put annotated slides up here.
This was in 2013 when AI research was just beginning to be taken over by deep learning.
I remember being amused when a team member referred to this phenomenon as deep lemming.
Our main visualization was called a concept cloud and it used semantic vectors to make a more meaningful word cloud visualization, in which not only the size but also position & color of the words was used to convey the structure of conceptual relationships in the underlying text.
This work was done in collaboration with many people on the team, including Elia Robyn Lake, Jason Alonso, Ken Arnold, Avril Kenney, Christina Laverentz, Alice Kaanta, and Andrew Lin.
Writing about this brought back memories of the infamous Ass Headache Problem, and the time when our stemming pipeline thought that “Emily” was an adverb and “Coca Cola” was the plural of a singular “Coca Colon”…
Language modeling has come a long way.