Task 9: Network Assignment

While reflecting on this massive intricate web of connections, it’s interesting to see all of my classmates choices connected and organized based on their choice of songs. The initial web with everyone’s choices and names overwhelmed me – so I first looked at it by breaking it down into each community and looking at those smaller webs first. I looked at each community one by one and tried to figure out why each person was placed into that particular community. I paid the most attention to my own community, I thought if I’m placed in this one maybe I myself can try and figure out why we are in the same connected web. Initially, I assumed we must be in the same community because we chose all the same songs, however the closer I looked I realized within that community were several song choices I did not chose – so then what was the criteria for this community? Were the songs we chose the same genre, do we like the same style of music, maybe the tempo of the songs were similar? I am completely unsure as to why we were in the same community, and my initial assumption of same music selections was incorrect as I further investigated.

While analyzing these links between myself and my classmates I certainly do make a lot of assumptions as to why we are linked the way we are, assuming same music taste, perhaps they were past dancers too as myself, however I have no definitive answer to these questions, more data is needed. I have no idea why my classmates chose the songs they did by looking at these links and this web, I even found myself guilty of misinterpreting these links and assuming they chose for the same criteria I did. They very well could have made their selections based on something completely different than myself, perhaps choosing based on era, type of instrument used or tempo versus my criteria of selection based on nostalgic feel. This data in this web shows song selection and links between each student however it does not dive deeper and tell the story of why each song was selected. It would be interesting to see if somehow the song selection in combination with reasoning could have been an additional attribute to the web with a colour map linking a reason for example: nostalgic reasons (pink) or instrument used (red) would have added a little more context as to why some students are linked versus others are not as closely linked, otherwise it is difficult to determine reasoning behind linkages.