Last week, we curated 10 songs from the Voyager’s Gold Record.  Our class was able to select any 10 songs from the record and only had to provide an explanation of the parameters and criteria for our selections.

Group Four, Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data, Palladio

This week we are analyzing this data.  I was clustered in Group Four with Margaret and Tyler.  I kept my selection criteria simple, I simply selected songs that appealed to me which is very much how I would create a playlist of music.  I was curious to see if Margaret and Tyler used the same approach.  Tyler selected his music choices based on previous knowledge of the music, how the music representations influenced culture, and how the music influences emotions.  Margaret chose songs based on personal connections and memories.

Interestingly based on this criteria, Margaret and Tyler both selected 8 of the same songs that I selected and each of us selected 2 different songs.  In addition to selecting the same 8 songs, we also could make connections to selecting the music we did based on the music invoking emotions and memories, and for that I can see an additional cluster that could be created between Tyler, Margaret and myself.

I was curious, if any of my other classmates used similar parameters and criteria as me when making their selections.  While I didn’t look at everyone of my classmates 10 selections, I quickly found that Jamie and Andrew used similar approaches to me and made selections based on personal preferences; Jamie was clustered in Group One and Andrew in Group Three.  Even though we made different selections of the music we based our selection criteria similarly, however, we weren’t clustered into the same group.  Therefore, I don’t believe the visualizations accurately depict a social network of commonalities, other than commonalities of music choice.

In analyzing the data, there is no way to determine why each curator didn’t select the other 17 songs on the Voyager’s Golden Record.  Often, we focus our visualizations on relationships and quantities, not on the null choices.  It may be equally as interesting to find out why the null choices were made and we may be able to determine different clusters for these choices.

Palladio is the tool we used to analyze this data.  As we learned from Dr. Leetaru who wrote in Forbes magazine, algorithms decide what we consume online, however, algorithms are constrained to the information that is available which resonates with me for this task.  The data presented using Palladio is incomplete; we are working with a small piece of the whole picture.

References

Leetaru, K. (2017). In A Digital World, Are We Losing Sight Of Our Undigitized Past?  Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Forbes website: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/09/29/in-a-digital-world-are-we-losing-sight-of-our-undigitized-past/#4ddf07accd01