Reflecting on the Golden Curation Assignment Groupings

I was both excited and intrigued to see what visuals would be constructed based on the Golden Curation Assignment that we had completed the previous week. I have posted screenshots of the visuals created above.

After looking at the visuals, I realized that the four people in my group that had the most similar choices to mine were Tanya, Stephanie, and Barbara (indicated by the same green colouring of their circles). I was unable to find Barbara’s blog site, however, after looking at Tanya’s and Stephanie’s rationale behind their song choices on their blogs, I could conclude that all of us tried to pick songs to showcase Earth’s cultural diversity. Stephanie and I both tried to pick tracks from each continent on Earth. Tanya and I had about four tracks in common in total, while Stephanie and I had six tracks in common. It was also interesting to note that two people in the entire group – Stephanie and I, were the only ones who chose the Solomon Panpipes track. This leads me to believe that I had the most tracks in common with Stephanie.

Although the visuals show you who you had the most tracks in common with along with the tracks that were picked the most and least (indicated by the size of the red circles in the second visual), the visuals do not show you the similarities in rationale behind choosing the tracks. Just because we have tracks in common with others, does not necessarily mean we had the same reason behind choosing those tracks. For example, although one criteria behind choosing the tracks for Tanya was cultural diversity, she also chose tracks based on themes or genres (she tried to pick tracks that represented beauty, hope, love, and joy and tracks that represented human struggles, sacrifice, and resilience). This cannot be shown in the visuals. Although Stephanie and I had the most tracks in common and we had similar thinking in terms of trying to pick tracks from each continent, the visual does not show why I chose certain tracks over others. I tried to pick tracks that sounded different (for example, if there was a track picked from Europe that was too similar in terms of its sound to one picked from Asia, I would have picked the other track from Europe for the Golden Record). Again, this cannot be depicted or shown in the visual. Keeping the above-mentioned in mind, the visuals do not show me who from among my classmates thought the most like me when completing the Golden Curation Assignment. It would have been extremely cool to see visuals representing like-mindedness in terms of choosing the tracks based on rationale.