It was a difficult task to analyze the data from Palladio as I struggled to understand the nodes and lines on the graph. I started to gain a little more understanding after watching some tutorials from Youtube. The grey nodes represent the students in the class and the black nodes represent the tracks. The bigger the nodes, the higher the degree of connectivity (more students choosing the same track). From this graph, it seems that the track, “Flowing Streams” is the most popular and “The Wedding Song” and “The Well Tempered Clavier” are the least popular. The graph does not offer hints on why this is the case. I expected Palladio to offer more in-depth functions where users can filter criteria like gender, time of day, ethnicity and location. These criterias affect why one would choose certain tracks and not others. I wonder how gender, choice of music and ethnicity would affect these results. These criterias would also enable a more in depth analysis of the data in our class. We all have our own biases when choosing the top 10 songs. One of my biases was that I wanted to promote Earth’s cultural diversity to life beyond Earth. I also assumed that the music would elicit the same emotions on the aliens as it would on me. Since we know little about life beyond Earth, we do not know how they would interpret a piece of music or if they even know about the existence of Earth and humans. 

This assignment has given me a more in-depth understanding of the algorithms in web structure. The search engine already has endless information stored on almost everything we want to know about the world. When we search for the term “The Golden Record”, the algorithm searches for sites that match the keywords and sequence of the words and how many other sites are linked to a site. In other words, the algorithm is always evolving and improving in order to provide users with better results (Code.org, 2017). I am reminded how our connections with each other and our communities (ie. interests, preference, behaviors) affect the algorithms. This in turn affects the kinds of results that we get from the web. 

Reference

Code.org. (2017, June 13). The Internet: How Search Works . Retrieved from https://youtu.be/LVV_93mBfSU