Seeing the data of everyone’s choices for their record curation was somewhat difficult to interpret, due to all the edges and nodes that were involved.
Therefore, for my reflection, I will do an analysis on a smaller scale.
I had parsed the information according to the different communities first to see who I overlapped with the most– Agnes, Alexis and Emily.
Next, I tried positioning the nodes of our names in the four corners to form a quadrant. In the center are the tracks that all four of us have. Depending on who has similar tracks, the nodes of the track names are listed in relative location to our names.
Criteria
I was prompted me to take a look at their blog post and read up on the criteria of their choices and what their justifications were behind their decision-making process.
- Agnes: “showcase aspects of civilization on earth and how humans live and interact with the planet; varied types of musical formats” (Plourde-Doran, 2022)
- Alexis: “geographical and cultural diversity of sound, instruments, and languages” (Reeves, 2022) with more tracks for larger continents (i.e. Asia and Africa)
- Emily: “songs that included vocals, for sampling human voices in different frequencies, languages, dialects and tones” then filtered geographically (MacDougall, 2022)
Both Agnes and I thought about the aspects of civilization as a criterion.
Alexis, Emily, and I all had geography as a criterion.
Agnes, Alexis and I included tracks in music, vocals or both (i.e. we did not exclude based on musical format) as a reflection of diversity.
Connectivity
Now knowing the above information, I assumed that I would have greatest overlap with Alexis, given we chose the tracks based on geography; next would be Agnes, as we considered the civilization aspects of the tracks; lastly with Emily, as she first filtered via whether or not tracks have vocals, which would have disqualified a good portion of tracks to begin with.
According to the network visualization, below is the count of our overlapping tracks (i.e. connected nodes). This reflects the assumptions that I had made!
Top Hits
Looking into the track choices, I found 3 songs that all four of us had chosen:
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- Track 2: Kinds of Flowers
- Track 5: Morning Star Devil Bird
- Track 23: Wedding Song
Geographically speaking, Track 5 was the only song from the Australia/Oceania region; Track 23, as it was the only song from South America region; Track 2 was the only song from Southeast Asia region.
One interesting thing to note is the ways that each of us have categorized the geographical regions.
Alexis categorized America into North and South America, but did not divide Asia into sub-regions. She did account for continent size and included extra songs accordingly from Asia and Africa.
Emily did not clarify the regions when choosing the tracks, though in her list she did include Mexico which was separate from her choice for North America, so, there is an assumption that it was divided by sub-regions, which was made clearer when she decided to prioritize Indigenous voices when it came to narrowing down the three songs from “North America”.
In looking at the visualization, though one can see the commonalities of tracks chosen between each person from the cohort, and where we overlap and “connect”, it does not reveal the “why” and decision-making processes, which needed to be supplemented with other sources of information.
Along similar lines, even when the “why” and decision-making processes were clear, differences in the “algorithm” such as weight in the sequence of information parsing or categorization can also influence how the original data is processed “upstream” which then alters it as it flows “downstream” to data-post-production of the visualization.
References
Code.org. (2017, June 13). The Internet: How Search Works . Retrieved from https://youtu.be/LVV_93mBfSU
MacDougall, E. (2022, June 29 ). Task #8: The Golden Record. ETEC 540. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540emilymacdougall/2022/06/29/task-8-the-golden-record/
Plourde-Doran, A. (2022, July 8). Task 8: The Golden Record Curation Assignment. Agnes’s Webspace ETEC540. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540ag/2022/07/08/task-8-golden-record-curation-assignment/
Reeves, A. (2022, July 9). Task 8: Golden Record Curation . Alexis’ Communication Junction. https://blogs.ubc.ca/communicationjunction/2022/07/09/task-8-golden-record-curation/