Week 8 – Golden Record Curation
Melody’s Blog Post – https://blogs.ubc.ca/melomart/2020/07/01/task-8-golden-record/
My Blog Post – https://blogs.ubc.ca/brianhametec54066b/2020/07/03/task-8-golden-record-curation/
The story of the Golden Record is fascinating, and I had actually not heard of it until taking this course. I chose to explore Melody’s post for this task because we had a number of songs in common based on the data from Task #9. I was curious as to the reasons WHY we had 5 songs in common, initially thinking it it may have just been due to chance. However, after further investigation, I was pleasantly surprised to find that these connections came about as a result of some similarities in the reasoning behind the choices.
One of Melody’s strategies for paring the list of songs down to just 10 was to have diversity geographical and cultural origins of the songs so that it would be representative of the whole world, not just one country or cultural background. Some of what she tried to do echoed my thoughts as well. When I made my choice, cultural representation was a very important aspect of the selection process. Another similarity to our strategies was looking for musical diversity among the selections. Melody did this by selecting pieces that had different instrument groupings and sound. When I engaged in that process, I was able to use my musical background to make my selections based on musical genre, tone color and instrumentation.
I found her webpage structure had a very simple layout and structure, which worked in some ways and didn’t in others. On the positive side, the simplicity made the text easy to read, with no distracting elements that took the focus away from the text. The sidebar on the right with recent posts and comments is useful because the reader can quickly jump to a new post without scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page. However, the sidebar only contained recent posts, so one would have to go to the homepage to find older posts, which is an extra level of navigation that seems unnecessary.