Rational Project B

This project has been very inspiering in order to present data in alternative ways. It has made me realize how word can sometimes be more confusing then helpful. It also have made me think more about what the important thing in my design is. Is it the colours, the text or the shapes?

I chose to visulize my music list on last.fm. The data is containing all the music I have played since the 17th of January 2008, so almost one and a half years. in order to not get to much data I chose to use the artist that had three plays or more.

My fist idea was to make some sort of tag cloud. I needed something that would visualize amount of plays in size and also show the country. After have looked around for a while I realized just how many tag clouds there were out there and also how boring they were to look at. I wanted something that was appealing to the eye and in the same way would represent my data. I also started to understand that maybe the actual words is not the most important for the whole experience. The names of the artists is off course an important part of my project however the more I thought about it the more I wanted the viewer to immediately get an impression of the image. So I dropped bits of the idea of a tag cloud and looked around for alternatives. I then remembered one of the pages we had a look at during one tutorial, the news map. The news map collect information from Google News and puts i together to create a visual map that displays the hidden patterns from the aggregator on Google News. This was more what I was looking for. It shows the heading news in different countries and it allows you to put in certain criteria in order to find specific news. The visual effect of this is that with simply a few key words and different font sizes and colors, you can quickly get an idea of the news world each day.

To apply this on my project I decided to relate the different artists to each other, depending on their play count, with different font sizes. The amount of plays times three gave me different font sizes that immediately gave the viewer an impression on what had been played a lot and what hadn’t been played much at all. I then decided to create a new world map, where the countries with many artists and/or high play counts became bigger and the countries with fewer artists and/or fewrer play counts got smaller. The result is “my world of music”. Looking at this new world it is obvious which countries that is most popular in my last.fm charts. You can either see this because of the size, but also in the amount of black that is covering up the countries. Some of the countries, Scotland for example, does not have that many artists but “Belle&Sebastian” have been played a high amount of times and therefore increases the size of the country.

I feel like my visualization of the music data is satisfying and it was fun to make. The actual design was challenging and took up a lot of my time. I have learnt a great deal of new things and I will definitely take this knowledge with me since it really simplify and lighten up ways of presenting data.