In my post on the Network Assignment: Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data, I was connected with ten of my peers, some who I have taken previous classes with in the MET program and others who I have made connections with through the linking assignments, notably Brian and Katelyn. However, I was not connected with one of my peers, Andrew Shedden, and in his post, he devised insightful questions as grounds for understanding our classes’ selections.
Andrew’s blog is arranged similar to the orientation of a piece of paper, and his focus is textual. He numbers his three main points of distinction about our community of practice and highlights certain questions and sentence fragments in bold to emphasize certain ideas. Andrew highlights these three questions as driving points of the subjective factors which influence musical curation.
How does educational attainment influence musical taste?
How do economic realities influence musical taste?
How does educational pursuit influence musical taste?
Andrew concludes by stating, “Looking at my choices, as objective and removed from the decision as I tried to make myself, I still ended up mainly choosing songs that I had a pre-existing relationship with. Did others due the same (regardless of their justification)?” I would argue that the song selections are reflections of the factors Andrew mentioned, but also reflect environment, culture, and methods of learning.
In my post, I wanted to further investigate graph theory and work to understand the reasons for not only connection among others, but the absence of connection. As mentioned in my post, “I averaged the amount of links that Brian, Katlyn and myself had to others…. there was roughly a 60% rate of connection among all group members and the group was more interconnected than sparsely connected.” In reflecting on these connections a few weeks later, I see clear patterns that connect our thinking and construction of knowledge through similar cultural reference points and methodological approaches, which illustrates further why the three of us are interconnected in multiple ways. Without intention, I have written linking assignments to both Brian and Katlyn’s work. Coincidence? I don’t believe in them.
Andrew posed another question in his work, “To what extent do our group’s similarities bring our opinions about music together?” Andrew described his process of listening in detail, and although I do not have the same musical equipment, I engaged in a very similar process. At the beginning of my post, I reference subway systems data and the need for qualitative data to provide information on ability, and access to increase ease of use for all people. By reviewing the work of my peers who has an alternative way of approaching the data, who I am more sparsely connected with in the Using Golden Record Curation process, it highlights to me the importance of the multiple factors that bring people together in communities of practice and the importance of diverse expressions of meaning in order to trigger new ways of approaching the data. To rephrase his question, to what extent do our group’s differences advance our understanding of our own opinions about music and relation to one another?