Link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540jseaton/2021/03/15/examining-the-golden-record-curation-data-task-9/
Summary: In this post, James examines the results of the Golden Record Curation data aggregation. He primarily looks at the results of the class as a whole before reflecting on the process, critiquing the methods used to curate the songs. He suggests three alternative methods that could be used to “make the curation process more representative of the collective will of the curators” (Seaton, J. 2021). These methods include ranking through true majority rule, rank-order voting, and iterative voting.
Reason:
I found it interesting that he didn’t explore the similarities between our group which I personally found unique amongst the groups in its similarities. I disagree with his conclusion that “although we selected enough common songs to be grouped together, this is no way expresses how similar our reasonings were”. When reading the reasoning shared in our previous tasks, all three of us (Deidre, James, and I) had incredibly similar thought processes and criteria for our choices. It could be possible that James is trying to refute a confirmation bias of matching data to a possible outcome when, chronologically, the data simply reflects the choices we all made separately. James focused more on examining the data generated by the whole class, something I did not focus on. It was through his reflection I realized that everyone in the class had chosen Johnny B. Goode!
I appreciated James’ thoughts on the curation process and his suggestions to improve the task with a variety of solutions. I felt he raised a valid point where his peers were seeking to avoid repetition in songs (I definitely cut down the amount of classical music in the list!) could end up with multiple songs still making it into the curated list. It would be an interesting progression or extension of the task to have the whole class generate a curated list following one of James’ suggested voting methods – this would truly reflect Sagan and his groups’ task of collaboratively choosing a list of songs to include.
Seaton, J. (2021). Examining The Golden Record Curation Data (Task 9). James Seaton’s ETEC 540 Blog. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540jseaton/2021/03/15/examining-the-golden-record-curation-data-task-9/