I found Module 9 on the ‘Network of Text’ to be quite interesting. The supplementary videos in 9.1 gave vocabulary and identity to what was presented in Palladio. I had the interesting fortune to tinker with the networks in Palladio before viewing 9.1 and my experience was limited to thinking about the way the dot dance around and sensing commonalities. However, after 9.1, the dots became nodes within a multiplex network and the edges of the undirected graphs told stories of degrees of connectivity.
I could relate this to the research I have been doing for my final assignment which explores who has the control to selects criteria for organization of books in the library under the context of Melvil Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System. To quickly summarize part of my investigation, I am looking at how Dewey’s opinion, authority and bias got to be the standard for organizing texts. Similarly in our task, each participant was the authority on curating their list and, just like Dewey or any other figure tasked with making decisions using subjective guidelines, the curation is in the eye of the beholder (or ear of the listener!).
In task 8, I chose to curate The Golden Record based on beat, rhythm and patterns that would be conducive to locomotor movement in my early childhood PE classes. ETEC 540 peers had other creative justifications. For example, Sasha classified types of instruments and Alanna noted that her choices were founded on length of the tracks, others chose based on if the tracks had words or just music It is fair to say that while Palladio presented the data visually, it did not account for reasoning. In module 9.1 it mentions that search algorithms are able to be aligned to certain demographics, something that is missing in this Palladio network. To use an example from the side conversation in the group three chat, would there be a difference if network was organized under the facet dimensions of decade of birth? (i.e.: Group One born in 1960’s, Group Two born in 1970’s, etc.) Perhaps growing up listening to music on a record versus a CD or digital form could have an impact on choices? Other possible characteristics could include:
- travel history (have you visited countries outside your continent?)
- location of birth or formative years
- do you use music for certain purposes (i.e. working out, driving, relaxing)
- personal preferences (i.e: I DO NOT like electronica or anything that resembles it)
- linguistic diversity (what languages do you speak or how many are you fluent in?)
I was in group 7 with Helen. I found our multigraph visually appealing as It suited my preference for clean, linear organization (and I could manipulate it to be even more so!)
The fact that I got to know Helen a bit last semester in our ETEC 590 working group was a bonus that I could have some background context about her and try to draw conclusions about other things we had in commons though previous conversations and work. According to her task 8 post, Helen curated her list with two factors in mind: emotional response and equity of regional coverage. We had a high degree of connectivity with 7/10 selections where my degree of connectivity.
My degree of connectivity with Laura was lowest at 2 and she attributed her choices to ‘focus on global and temporal diversity and the human voice’. This is not to say that because we only agreed on two songs, that my choices were void of these characteristics. However, I think it is more likely to say that Helen and I had a compilation of 7 songs that tugged at emotions, were vastly global and could be used in an action-packed Kindergarten PE class.
I created a community of individuals based on having 4 common songs with each person Kristen, Sasha, Daniella and Jamie:
Degree of Commonality = 4 Jamie, Daniella, Kristen, Sasha, Valerie
I found it interesting to map out to see that while I had 4 in common with each person, there was not one single song that all of us had in common. However, I could see by the list on the bottom that there were three songs that none of us curated to our list (Panpipes of Soloman Islands, String Quartet 13, and Gavotte en Rondeaux) It was fascinating for me to see the network and inter-relation between each of our sub-group, especially the out-laying songs that no one chose. I was puzzled at how a network could be weighted to show the pieces included, but found that the information not chosen could be just as thought-provoking, yet it was missing in the visual.