ETEC 540 Site For Greg Patton

“Gold Leader: It’s no good. I can’t maneuver.
Gold Five: Stay on target.
Gold Leader: We’re too close.
Gold Five: Stay on target.
Gold Leader: Loosen up!”
Star Wars (1977)

I have no idea why, but after hearing about this “User Inyerface” project this quote got stuck in my head. And I found it really helped; through the attempts at setting up my password and uploading a picture and, slowly, extremely slowly, watching the help window slide down out of view I kept reminding myself that it’s not worth getting frustrated and to just stay on target and get through. It wasn’t until I had to prove that I was human (my family is overjoyed that I now have proof!) that I started to lose it. Choose all things that are glasses? Before my career in education, I was a licensed optician (I made prescription glasses) so this task to me seemed simple. Pictures of glasses? Check. Pictures of drinking glasses? Well… those ones are tumblers, but sure; check! Now pieces of glass? No, that is not glasses!! And then I failed. Choose all things that are light? Lightbulbs are light… fires let off light… a feather is light I guess… but that bike? Well, it’s a road bike, so it’s lighter than my mountain bike, but it looks like it’s steel so it’s not very light compared to my carbon road bike… lighter than a car though.
It was the absolute absence of a black and white answer that killed me. And with nothing on the line short of my existence as a human no less! The last screens were all personal opinions (and I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter what you chose, you were doing all those screens) and when it told me that I had not proven my humanity yet and try again! that I really started to lose my focus (stay on target) and second guessed my answers (stay on target!).
When we interface with sites on the web, we expect our interactions to be smooth and easy; instructions should be clear and concise and transitions between screens should be fluid. Everyone has gotten so used to what these screens will look like that we don’t read them anymore; we scan and quickly fill in the blanks as fast as possible to move on. The answers to prove you are not a robot are black and white (look for star wars characters to prove you are human) because it is a step in the process and not something we are suppose to put time into reflecting on if that bike really is light. Personally, I have a hard time dealing with sites that have spelling mistakes, especially professional or consumer sites as they PAY people to look out for these (and I bet my carbon road bike that we have all come across sites with one or two of these dark patterns in them and still finished our transaction), that if I was to come upon a checkout window as complex as this “User Inyerface”) I think I would happily close the window up and continue searching.
I’d stay on target.

As I have said previously, I found the task of curating the Golden Record playlist from 27 songs down to 10 a challenging task, so I thought that analyzing that data would be a somewhat daunting task as well.  But I really enjoyed using the Palladio App and seeing ways in which I could manipulate the results and devising different ways to analyze the curation data and it sparked some ideas for this assignment.  I chose to look at five different manipulations of the data.

1. Modularity_Class

Before I started manipulating the different inputs or rearranging nodes, this was the first dimension I brought up.  It put me in a group with two other people (Erin and Ravneet) where we had a modularity agreement of 7 out of 30 songs . All three of us shared three songs together.

“Modularity is one measure of the structure of networks or graphs which measures the strength of division of a network into modules (also called groups, clusters or communities). Networks with high modularity have dense connections between the nodes within modules but sparse connections between nodes in different modules.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(networks)#Modularity

The program had decided that the three of us had the densest connections together when looking at the entire community as a whole, with the least amount of sparse connections.

2. Most Similar

I wanted to know who had the most similar playlist to me, so I then went through each source (person) and put them with me to see who I had the most connections with.  Binal and Jasmine both shared six songs with me, while together we shared eight out of our ten songs together.  I found this really interesting as though I do not know Jasmine, I work with Binal!  Even though we talk daily (and not just about class), we never discussed our lists until after the assignment was handed in.  Binal and I are quite different at work; she is a fantastic teacher with a keen scientific mind and a love for helping students while my attributes lean towards the English and Socials subjects and I don’t teach much at all now that I am in an administrative role, yet we get along really well and have collaborated on assignments for other courses very capably (at least I think so!) and she is definitely someone I would consider a good friend.  So looking at this data made me wonder if maybe there is a connection between compatibility and music; maybe if I met Jasmine (Hi Jasmine!) that we would get along quite well too.  This led me to my next choice…

3. Least Similar

Melissa Drake and I share two songs out of lists: The Magic Flute and the Senegal Percussion.  Now, if I go with the assumption I made in my previous analysis, would this make Melissa and I incompatible?  In this instance, I have met and worked with Melissa in another class and have found her to be a totally awesome person.  But it would be interesting to sit and find out how much we have in common or how compatible our personalities are.  But, I think this data needs to be taken with a grain of salt as we are really looking at a small community and you have to wonder how reliable the data is on such a small sample size.

4. “Classical” Music

I use the term classical loosely here, like in a record store where they put everything under certain large genre labels, but one thing I noticed right away with the Golden Record playlist was the abundance of classical pieces.  By my definition of classical (European Classical) there are eight tracks of music; this is quite a lot of a playlist that is suppose to represent all the music of the Earth.  There was some justification made in the podcast we listened to, that classical music is very math-like and there is a chance that extra terrestrial life may understand mathematics. (#65, Voyager Golden Record. Twenty Thousand Hertz)  But that made me start to think about biases and stereotypes in regards to music. I think there is a bias in our culture that “smart, educated” people enjoy classical music (and jazz tends to get thrown in there as well), while others enjoy the “simpler” sounds of pop music (this would encompass country/hip hop/rock too).  This playlist actually reinforces this bias; to be blunt, a bunch of smart scientists got together and made a playlist with eight out of twenty seven tracks coming from the classical genre.  And twenty out of twenty-one students from our class chose at least one song for their playlist, and some would argue that, as we are in a Masters program, we all fall into that highly educated bracket that appreciate classical music.  Interesting…

5. American Culture

Examining the euro-centric bias of classical music made me want to look at another cultural assumption.  Within the Golden Record playlist are three songs that could be argued as forbearers to American Jazz, Blues, and Rock music.  American culture, with music being a part of it, is one of the most dominant cultures on Earth, and this influence can be seen within the curation data.  Seventeen people out of the twenty-one chose either Melancholy Blues, Johnny B. Goode, or Dark Was the Night; eight people chose two songs, and one person chose all three.  This was a substantial amount, but it wasn’t as big of an impact as the classical pieces had (though they did not take up as much of the playlist).  How come?  Could it be that these songs, as the ancestral beginnings of these music genres, sound dated and not as “valuable” to keep as others?  I know myself that I found Johnny B. Goode as not the example of rock/pop that I would choose; the spacecraft was launched in the late 1970’s and there had been an abundance of examples of rock/pop that I would have thought more suitable to be immortalized (there was this small band called The Beatles I think that may have had a hit or two).  Could this also show the fleetingness of rock music compared with the stalwart music of the classical genre?  Do “smart scientists” always go back to the roots of a culture instead of immortalizing more modern?  More food for thought.

I love how the analysis of the data has allowed for more questions and examination in regards to the choices made; this could be such a powerful tool when it comes to political or societal analysis.  I think the only real drawback is making sure the community participating is big enough to mirror the results for a population.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(networks)#Modularity

Episode 65, Voyager Golden Record. Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast

“Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all, you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”

Rob (John Cusak), High Fidelity (2000)

This assignment brought me back to my younger years when I worked (volunteered really) in my friend’s record store in Nanaimo. We listened to EVERYTHING that came into the store and critiqued, lambasted, and relished all of it. As long as it was in the store, we could listen to it. Now, I have Spotify… it is what I used to find the songs on the Voyager Golden Record (there was a playlist!) because, as big as my collection is, it did not have all those cuts. Spotify is expansive! But… I have records that are not on it; quite a few actually. This brought back Abby Smith’s article “Why Digitize?” and the notion of digitalizing everything.

“Depending on the policy of a library or archival institution, the original of a scanned item may or may not be retained after reformatting.” Smith (1999)

A big part of the story behind a record is that artwork that graces the covers and inside of an LP. Time and effort go into that process and I believe that it is becoming a dying art form as we all enjoy music digitally without stopping to take in the entire package (I can still remember the first time I saw my Dad’s copy of The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers with an actual zipper built into… I still have it!) like the artist expected. Just because we have digital copies of something does not mean that the original should be discarded and forgotten.

So, back to our assignment, I found this “curating” quite a hard assignment as not only am I judging one artist’s work over another without really any knowledge about a lot of these pieces, I am tearing apart some pretty smart people’s mixtape. I decided in the end to go with the easiest knowledge base I could think of: I went with songs I liked and felt I could connect with. And in that there are biases: I’m not a fan of voice-only tracks (I actually prefer instrumental music), classical music with loads of instruments (symphonies) tend to make me zone out, my parents’ favourite music obsession when I was young was collecting Mozart operas (and listening to Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band on repeat… sigh, thanks Dad) so I have a sentimental attachment, I really enjoy music that is different, with strange sounds or instrumentation, and I think both Louis Armstrong and Glenn Gould are musical geniuses. So, with all these biases completely on my sleeve I went and chose my ten. Which leads me to another quote:

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”

Rob (John Cusak), High Fidelity (2000)

My Voyager Golden Record Mixtape

“Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05

Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51

Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08

Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48

China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37

Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30

Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12

India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55

“Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15

(Most of the writing for this was done while listening to The Beta Band’s 3 EPs… which will make sense if you have seen High Fidelity.)

Reference:

Smith, A. (1999). Why digitize? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Council on Library and Information Resources website: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/