What the Data Are
Using the song and artist logs we obtained from the KRLX database, we manually went through each of the data sets per year and recorded all the top 10 artists and songs. Next, we recorded the number of plays/times each top artist and song came up each year ( if an artist or song was not in the top 10 for a particular year, it was labelled as “0”). This was a manual filtration process and allowed us to reduce the data down to what we wanted to focus on.
Tools and Techniques
We uploaded our data to Flourish and created two bar chart races to visualize the changes in popular artists/songs across the 2013-2021 time period.
Top KRLX Songs 2013-2021
Top KRLX Artists 2013-2021
What the Data Visualization is Doing
The visualizations allows for us to see the trends in popularity of certain artists and songs at Carleton over a long period of time, making it exploratory. Several patterns and trends are seen; one example is the large resurgence of the song Take Me to Church by Hozier in 2019. There also some artists that remain in the top 10 for most of the years, such as The Beatles and Lorde.
Style
For styling and clarity, we slowed the bar chart races down, made the bars different colors, and moved the song titles and artist names to the ends of the bars. These changes allowed for the visualizations to be much more readable to the audience. For the colors, we tried to use ones that contrasted enough so that the bars could be distinguished from one another, even if a person had some version of color blindness.
