CSPAN Booknotes

This is something like an art project for me. I have watched so many hours of CSPAN over the years (especially back in my Poli-Sci days). I’m always looking for ways to bring my tech skills back to those old-days interests of mine.

If asked to deliver an elevator pitch for this project, it would be thus:

You wanted a chat app? Well, this is how we do chat apps. Brian Lamb, his CSPAN show Booknotes, and all of his guests are live again! They are so back.

This project has two main components:

1. Dataset Creation: A Python-based data pipeline that crawls, parses, and organizes transcripts from the classic CSPAN show Booknotes
2. Interactive Chat App: A web application that lets users “resume” historical Booknotes conversations using AI

I first had to crawl the show’s archives to collect the interview transcripts and program metadata for each episode.

With that, I created this web application to allow for us to simulate rebooting any of the past conversations.