Linking Assignment #5
Sourrabh’s analysis of the Golden Record Quiz.
Having taken a few classes with Sourrabh, I always appreciate his data analysis competencies in all of those classes. Naturally, when it came to having a post about data analysis, I had moved to see what Sourrabh’s analysis was and was not surprised.
- How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know? What were the theoretical underpinnings of their work?
Personally, Sourrabh’s background in computer science and his background as an educator in statistics showed a much more fluent identification of how the visualization of network graphs was useful in recognizing patterns of where songs were common with everyone vs which songs were loosely connected. His explanations and blog helped me clarify even the value of distances amongst the songs on the golden voyager record and where each of the students’ song preferences were closely aligned with each other and which were far removed from each other. I can see that his knowledge of network theory was coming from experience where I was still grasping the process and training my brain to think a bit more visually when it came to data.
Compared to how I analyzed the network of data, I went with a look at inclusion criteria, more about what people went with and the common themes, while Sourrabh took a different approach and magnified the null data or data that was exclusionary. He brought up a few holistic points on culture, for example noting if something was more towards western music vs music from other nationalities (Aggarwal, 2025) and noted about missing tracks that were not in the web which I personally thought was a feat in data analysis.
- What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work? How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authoring and end-user interface?
In this case, we have all chosen Palladio to better recall the facts about network theory and visualization of graphs. In this case, our difference is how we interpreted the tools and the use of the tools. For me, I was unaware of the different null options that were available for me to see different points of data in this graph. I focused particularly on the songs on the voyager golden record and what it meant when we all have the same songs. I was also really interested in the relationship of the location of songs whether they were in the inside or outside of the web. One of the things that I probably can compare with is that Sourrabhs assessment of the songs were accurate in that as a blues and jazz fan, I knew most of the songs that had english lyrics in this album. There was a degree of bias in the songs due to how I chose a bit based on my recognition of some of the songs. I did give each song in the golden record a listen and had some songs removed just due to the fact that it was not a preference or coincide with a pattern that I don’t think matched.
- How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?
This exploration of palladio was an interesting exercise in trying to see if we could extrapolate data differently. While the above section commented on what we saw differently, we have a lot of things common with our interpretation. Sourabh and I both saw that you can’t accurately determine reasons to why something was in the middle vs something was outside of the web in a way that can accurately be said. However being able to see pertinent data points like this gave us a visual representation of what could be accurate and the ability to be able to utilize this network or web of information is great to illustrate and show possible relationships with mass quantities of data and people in short amounts of time just like an internet search engine (Systems Innovation, 2015; Code.org, 2017).
References
Aggarwal, S. (2025, March 11). Musical Preferences and Network Visualization: Insights from the Golden Record Quiz. https://blogs.ubc.ca/sourabhaggarwal/2025/03/11/musical-preferences-and-network-visualization-insights-from-the-golden-record-quiz/
Code.org. (2017, June 13). The Internet: How search works [Video]. YouTube.
Systems Innovation. (2015, April 18). Graph theory overview [Video]. YouTube.