When I first pulled up the Golden Record data, the sheer number of connections was overwhelming, making it difficult to glean meaningful insights. All 27 songs were selected by multiple people, and there were no unanimous decisions where everyone agreed upon a certain song to include. Even organizing the data in a circle to make the connections easier to see did not make any trends obvious. I decided to look at the songs that received the most (11 or more) and the least (3 or fewer) selections from the class. What was it about the “popular” songs that drew so many people to include them, and why did some songs receive so few votes?
The four songs most agreed upon by the class were Flowing Streams, The Brandenburg Concerto, Jaat Kahan Ho, and Johnny B. Goode. Four very different song styles from four different cultures. According to the methods employed by many search engines, these four songs would represent the most important data based on the number of connections to them (Code.org, 2017). In analyzing these connections, I noticed that 18 of the 19 students were represented in the data. Of those 18, only 2 people had a single song they chose included in the data, while the rest had multiple. These four songs seem to be the most representative of our class’s choices, though they still do not include everyone. What is really interesting is that there is nothing obvious in the data that explains why the songs were more popular than the others. They don’t seem to share many qualities that would explain why so many people picked them. Perhaps their popularity lies in the diversity they represent, but that is merely speculation that would require further investigation and illustrates why popularity on its own isn’t necessarily a valid indicator of importance.
Six songs received 3 votes, and 1 received 2 votes, representing the lowest number of selections. There were 13 different students represented in this group, with the majority (8) having only 1 connection to the songs. Shui’s bubble stands out in this data, as he is connected to five of the songs in this group; that represents half of his 10 selections. I was immediately curious as to why he chose these songs when most people did not. This led me to go back and re-read his blog post that offered a rationale for his choices. One of the criteria he used in his selection process was to eliminate musical pieces that include vocals (Yu, 2026). By removing all songs that prominently feature spoken language, he effectively reduced the pool of available songs and thus chose more of the songs that were less popular. This also illustrates an important part of what is missing when we look only at data points to draw conclusions. Without the context given by Shui’s blog post, I would have been left to speculate on the reasoning behind his choices, and I know my conclusions would not have been accurate. It also explains why Shui and I have so few shared choices for this assignment. One of my primary inclusion categories was language variety, which made it difficult for us to choose the same songs. All of this is completely invisible in the raw data on the graph and can only be explained by examining each curator’s thought process.
I also took a look at modularity group 4, which my data belonged to. In this group, only one of my selections wasn’t shared with at least one other member. The rest had multiple connections. It is very difficult to say if there is a reason we made similar selections. Still, 19 of the original 27 selections were represented in our small group, indicating significant variance in the songs we chose. It would be interesting to find out what selection criteria we used. I suspect we all valued the variety of cultures and languages represented in our selections, but the actual correlation between our choices could be due to any number of factors and would require a much deeper investigation into all of our selection processes.
References
Code.org. (2017, June 13). The Internet: How search works. [Video]. YouTube.
Yu, Shui. (2026, March 7). ETEC 540 – Task 8: Golden Record Curation Assignment – Shui’s site. Blogs.ubc.ca. https://blogs.ubc.ca/shuiy/2026/03/06/etec-540-task-8-golden-record-curation-assignment/