Reviewing the network did not make sense to me in the first place. I am going to be honest- I have ALWAYS struggled with deriving and summarizing messages from even the most straightforward charts. This visualization on Palladio was for sure a mind-boggler.

Unable to make any connections, I started playing with the interface. It was not until I had spent a considerable amount of time moving the nodes and edges around that I discovered the first connection. This was when all the curators were moved outside and the songs remained inside. Immediately, based on  the sizes of the nodes, it became obvious which songs are “more popular” or “less popular” than the other. However, there was no insight into why more members gravitated towards some of these songs.

It looked like most of us in the group selected similar songs. Interestingly, there were only two of us in the group who selected “Men’s House Song” and “Pygmy Girls’ Initiation Song”. It did not take long to identify that these two songs were less popular based on their significantly smaller nodes compared to the rest. 

I grew curious and thought of finding out who would have possibly picked the same songs as I did. It would be interesting to find out if great minds really think alike, or more precisely, HOW do minds think alike. Well, I found the opposite. With most of the other members in the class, I would have picked 5 or 6 similar songs. However, Ping and I only had one song in common- Flowing Streams. While mine was chosen because of the country of origin- my aim was to be as inclusive as possible and  to select at least a song from each continent, I was not sure why Ping chose that particular song. I am heading to her blog to understand her choices of songs right after I am done writing this blog. I wondered if cultural similarities could have influenced Ping’s choices. But then again, the reason behind my choice was not cultural affiliation either.

This got me thinking, why and how did we select our 10 songs? What were our criteria? Was our selection of songs based on the country of origin, genre, percussion used, the time the song was composed and played, or if the song evoked some forms of liking? Without doubt, we were all connected by the edges, but the exact reasons behind our connections are left with rooms for interpretation. I am suddenly reminded of Boroditsky’s (2017) emphasis on how our thoughts are influenced by the languages we speak. In order to interact and communicate with others, we string words together to express our feelings and thoughts through a common language. In this case, Palladio is our common language and our group members are joined by edges, but then when “words” for reasoning are missing from our picture, we lack in a more authentic interpretation of the chart. IF a rubric existed and everyone chose their songs according to “that” rubric, I wonder if our list would have been more consistent?

Reference

Boroditsky, L. (2017, June 7). How the languages we speak shape the ways we think [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg