This was my first time analyzing data in this manner so the task was challenging for me but very interesting at the same time. The main function I used was to turn on the “Size Nodes” setting which enlarged the nodes (the songs in this case) that were selected by the most people and had the highest degree of connectivity (Systems Innovation, 2015). What I found most interesting was that Track 7: “Johnny B. Goode” and Track 25: “Jaat Kahan Ho” were the two most popular songs chosen. What both tracks have in common is that they both originated from highly populated countries (United States and India) and both contain lyrics or language which may show that this was an important criterion for many people. The smaller nodes tended to be the ones that were either only instrumental with specialized instruments such as the panpipes and drums from Peru or originated from areas that had small populations which did not fully represent humanity, such as Track 4: Pygmy Girls’ Initiation Song. One thing to keep in mind is that this is only my own interpretation of the data that is formed through my own ideas/assumptions so I could be completely wrong when guessing why my peers chose the tracks that they did.

Regarding political implications, based on my assumptions in the previous paragraph, it would imply that the countries with the largest population have the most voice and representation in this exercise. What that means is that those countries would be the most influential in determining what is representative of humanity, or the nodes of the more populated countries would hold more “weight” (Code.org, 2017). The downside to this is that this results in the countries with smaller populations to not be fairly represented and will lack a voice as the larger or more powerful countries will do all the speaking and the small countries will eventually be forgotten.

I don’t think that the reasons for the “null” choices can be interpreted based on the current data set as the data/quiz was geared towards a criterion that focused on our favorable choices. There is too much variance in the 17 tracks that were not chosen by each person for us to interpret the reasons for our non-selections accurately. If the criteria in the quiz were to be changed, where we had to curate 10 tracks to be removed from the Golden Records instead of kept, then we would be able to represent the “null” choices as those become the large nodes in the data set. Essentially, it inverses the current database information and makes the “null” choices into the more populated data points.

References

Code.org. (2017, June 13). The Internet: How Search Works. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/LVV_93mBfSU

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 19). Network Connections. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/2iViaEAytxw