The Inspiration

Inspiration comes from many places. It can come when you are reading a book, a poem, an article. It can come when you are walking on the beach, enjoying the peaceful pacific sunset. It can come when you are taking a hot shower. I mean, it can come from anywhere.

For me, it came from Nanjil Nadan.

Specifically, from this video between 2:20 - 3:05 mark:

Here, he talks about the list of words used by Shakespeare and then continues to talk about Jeyamohan, his prolific writing, and posits that if someone can categorize the words used by him it would be more than 100,000. Readers who have a sharp eye or good memory will point out that this video was from 2014, about 6 years ago!. Yes, I have been thinking about this on and off for about 6 years. Now is the time to act on it!

Jeyamohan wrote books for his children when they needed something good to read. Kannadasan would do the same for his kids, but with poems. I am neither a writer or a poet. But being a software engineer, I can help with organizing his work and answer some of the questions posed by Nanjil Nadan.

I have a reasonable idea of what needs to be done and have toyed with the idea did some POC (proof of concept) over the past several weeks. It took me to places I haven’t been to before. Originally, I was thinking of doing all the work myself. While exploring the possibilities, by chance, I happened to stumble upon Text Mining with R by Julia Silge and David Robinson. This took me to the world of R and all the cool things that one can do with text. This is great, but now I have to publish the results somewhere. Again, with Google’s help, settled on GitHub pages (well, mostly because it is free-:)). Now, for the last part. I need to generate a website without spending too much time on HTML/CSS etc., Looked at Jekyll, Publii, and a few other things, but finally settled on Hugo. Reasonably simple (documentation could be better), yet powerful.

Now all that remains is to start publishing the findings, get feedback, and iterate over it!

The approach and what I am planning to publish is coming up in the coming blog posts.