Curation of the Golden Record took place last week, with each of the members in the class choosing 10 of the 27 tracks. The graph below was the initial graph of the class’ data created by Palladio.
Initial Graph
At first look, this initial graph was somewhat difficult to decipher. There were nodes representing curators and nodes representing tracks connected with a number of edges. The size of the node represented the number of links it had to other nodes.
As I had never seen this program before, I found it necessary to investigate its functions. It took a bit of trial-and-error to find the connections I wanted to see.
Communities and Tracks
Here I found the connections between communities and tracks. I was expecting there to be more distinct divisions between the communities, but obviously that isn’t so. In this particular graph, there are still numerous connections between all of the communities and most of the tracks.
My Community
My particular community was the smallest of them all with only three members. With myself having only three links to Victoria and five to Michael, it doesn’t seem like this is a very strong community. On the other hand, looking at Michael’s connections, five to myself and six to Victoria, this seems like a stronger community.
This led me to question what criteria were used in forming the communities. Was there a preset number of communities, or did the program use its algorithms to figure it out? Were the communities formed on the basis of the number of songs in common or the types of songs in common, or some other basis?
This type of graphic visualization is useful for seeing connections and patterns between groups of data, but it does nothing to explain them. I see who chose each track, but I know nothing about why the choices were made or the criteria that were used. I also see nothing about the tracks that were not chosen and the reasons for leaving those tracks out of the list. One also needs to be cautious and not make assumptions regarding the inclusion or exclusion of tracks by individuals.