Nithin, Will S, Liam, Will H, & Griffin
Our Personal Interests:
- Liam : “This is a project I have been intending to implement ever since I first learned about the wealth of data about Krlx (Carleton’s esteemed radio station). While being interviewed to be an It engineer, the question “what would you do with all this data” was the question that gave me the most pause. I am still wondering how we will wrangle the data to portray some meaningful insight into Krlx’s past, and I would love to create something tangible for senior board members before they graduate.”
- Nithin : “I’m interested in seeing how the popularity in genres of music has shifted over time and whether there are still some similarities or constants in the data between the past and the present. I believe the project will allow us to compare historical trends and track the evolution of Carleton’s musical preferences over time.”
- Will S : “I think this project will provide some really interesting data on how Carleton has become more racially diverse over the years as it will likely feature a lot of music from many different cultures, more so in the more recent years.”
- Will H : “I have similar interests to my other group members in that I want to see how Carleton has evolved over time, and how it hopefully has diversified to have a much wider array of music played. One other thing that I’m interested in is looking at how Carleton’s music tastes reflects the music tastes of the time period, and seeing if they change similarly or go off in entirely different directions genre-wise.”
- Griffin : I am interested in this data because this information will give a good spread of the kinds of music that Carleton students enjoy throughout KRLX’s history. I am most interested in which songs are repeated frequently, and I wonder if we will be able to parse out which certain songs have been used as tags for shows. I suppose which artists are the most popular in time periods, as well as learning how relatively popular contemporary music is compared to music from the past.
Sources :
Although Krlx has various interesting stores of data, we decided to focus on the song logs. For those who haven’t Dj’ed (yet), every song played on Krlx is recorded and stored automatically. The log used to be manual, requiring Djs to enter the songs they played which was a tedious process. Thanks to Ann Beimers we no longer have that problem! Getting access to this data is a matter of bothering Tim Valley (the station’s actual engineer) until he relents. As it happens, Tim is enjoying a much deserved vacation in Mexico during this term, and he will doubtless be grumpy to be receiving a string of texts from me (too late for that). -Liam
Process :
We’d probably have to group the individual songs into first different year groups and then genre clusters (could use OpenRefine). Could put data in a spreadsheet (Excel or something similar) and save as a csv to upload. Make graphs in Flourish or RawGraphs tracking the playing of songs from the most popular genres over the time period we are looking at. -Nithin
Presentation :
Visual analysis of KRLX song logs from past several years/decades to show how the music taste of Carleton students has evolved over time. Our first idea was something similar to a bar chart race showcasing song counts increasing over time. -Will S
Timeline :
Our proposed timeline would be as follows: gain access to the data, parse\clean the data depending on how it is stored, narrow down our project focus, finalize the tools we will use, create our data visualization (that showcases change over time), and present our results.
