I did an article on music recommendation a while back, and have been reading a lot about the subject lately for another article. One thing that always bothered me about looking at someone’s listening history–a list of songs they’ve listened to, and how many times they’ve listed to each one–is that you have no idea about the timing.
LastGraph, creates timelines and nice graphs that chart your listening trajectory. This way, you can see musical obsessions that have come and gone. Even though two people might have Cut Copy on their list, one might have just discovered them while another person stopped listening to them a year ago.
Here’s what I’ve been listening to for the past two months:
Compare that to the chart:
Yes, much better!
Anyway, apparently I’m really lazy busy studying Spanish lately, because I’ve been fairly obsessed with graphs and charts. Maybe a visual culture is making me dumb in some ways, but if it can convey better information in less time, I don’t see what the problem is. My favorite site is Wordle, which takes any chunk of text you have and converts it into a tag cloud; the more frequently a word appears, the larger it is. (They do you the favor of removing common words, like articles.) Here’s what my book proposal looks like thus far:
Lastly, there’s a public art project that draws heavily on visualization that I’m quite fond of, called We Feel Fine. It’s amazing how a few words can make you feel less lonely.
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