Before this task, I thought I was a visual learner; however, after looking at our class data on the Palladio app, I was incredibly confused, overwhelmed, and just ?????, and I wondered if others in the class also felt the same way!
During my first attempt at analyzing the data, I was able to figure out that of the six communities formed, I was part of five of them. Then after playing around on Palladio some more, I was able to find the list of the Golden Record tracks sorted by size from largest to smallest. By looking at this list, I found that out of the top ten pieces selected by our class (Tracks 25, 18, 3, 23, 24, 14, 7, 1, 9, and 20), seven of them were those that I included in my curated list (Tracks 25, 18, 3, 24, 14, 7, and 9).
While the visual representation generated on Palladio is a great first look at the data of our class, I believe that there are some limitations. The visualization of this data can show us which pieces were popular, as well as the links between classmates that chose similar pieces, but there is no indication as to why these pieces were popular, or everyone’s reasoning behind their choices. Only after looking at the webspaces of my classmates was I able to see that we all had very different criteria when it came to our selection process–some selections were made with musical/cultural diversity in mind, while others were made based on emotions and pure feeling. These differences in our selection process criteria make me wonder about the validity of the list in the above screenshot, and whether or not the data would be more valid had there been some sort of rubric everyone had to follow when selecting their pieces. I would also love to see a detailed explanation of the criteria used for the Golden Record itself!