Yellow Magic Orchestra<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nClearly the scope and discipline here are limited, and the results varied depending on how well each artist was accounted for in the Wikisphere.<\/p>\n
My scripts also took a couple of scenic detours based on how chronologies overlap on Wikipedia. One of my many Brian Eno scripts jumped over into Harold Budd\u2019s discography, and then pulled in part of the Cocteau Twins\u2019 oeuvre. Another skipped over into U2 territory. I decided to let these unintended offshoots stand in my final product.<\/p>\n
I used OpenRefine to clean my data as well as reasonably possible. Cleaning mostly entailed merging aliases (\u201cClint Ruin\u201d = \u201cJim Foetus\u201d = \u201cFoetus Over Frisco\u201d = \u201cJ.G. Thirlwell\u201d), removing nodes named for instruments and technical credits (\u201cguitar\u201d, \u201cmixing\u201d), and cleaning up names that included instrumental designations (\u201cElizabeth Fraser – vocals\u201d).<\/p>\n
The alias situation was most complicated within the vast P-Funk pantheon. This being the most heavily African-American segment of my graph, it led me to consider how tools for network analysis may be poorly suited for representing black communities.\u00a0 But I digress. Here’s the graph:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/04\/graph.png?resize=300%2C300\")
<\/p>\n
The finished network is messy, but I\u2019m still pleased with it. It does justice to the work of great session musicians like Carlos Alomar and Bernie Worrell\u2013and those are just ones I knew about. It also made me aware of a few other prodigious collaborators whose names I\u2019d overlooked before, like cellist Jane Scarpantoni, engineer Bob Clearmountain, and percussionist A\u00efyb Dieng. These three are all \u201cbridges\u201d between disparate groups. I guess this is something network analysis can do well!<\/p>\n
Still, there\u2019s no avoiding the fact that my main graph is too large and dense to represent in a static image. This is made all the worse by my poor understanding of the \u201cpreview\u201d function in Gephi. I\u2019ll need to familiarize myself with it more later.<\/p>\n
I decided to try my hand at a hypergraph. With the numbered modularity groups I used to color my graph, I used the VLOOKUP function in Excel to substitute group numbers for names in my adjacency table. I loaded the new table into Gephi, in a new workspace, and graphed the groups with the same colors as clusters from the original graph, and sized based on the percentage of original nodes in each group. Here\u2019s what I got:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/04\/hypergraph2.png?resize=300%2C235\")
<\/p>\n
I named the nodes in the hypergraph after the fact, based on the clusters from the first graph. The interesting thing to me here was how closely the Bowie, Eno, VU, and Laurie Anderson groups clung together. Maybe it\u2019s a generational thing. Either way, the logical next step here would be MORE DATA.<\/p>\n
Every time I updated my graph with more information, new deficiencies and loose ends revealed themself. Some major figure, appearing as a guest on a single album, begs to be represented further and lend their own discography to the network. Furthermore, some discography scrapes close to my heart (namely Current 93) were abortive due to poor or inconsistently formatted Wikipedia entries.<\/p>\n
A valiant project would be to encode discographies as linked data. The fastest route to that goal, as far as I can tell, would be transferring \u201cpersonnel\u201d sections from Wikipedia album pages into the Infobox, so that they might be enshrined as linked data on Wikidata. That would open up avenues of inquiry liberated from the tyranny of the frontman, so to speak. But that\u2019s a task for another day, or many days sometime in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went a little nuts for this week\u2019s lab, attempting to recreate digitally a network graph I drew by hand almost ten years ago. At that time I was a college student (or college radio DJ moonlighting as a student), besotted with my own ever-shifting cross section of rock and roll hagiography. Here is that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259,"featured_media":9267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-labs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/04\/net.jpg?fit=3024%2C4032&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paBdcV-2ps","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9270,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266\/revisions\/9270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9266"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/04\/net.jpg?resize=225%2C300\")
<\/p>\n