Lots of meetings in the past week or so. A lot of things discussed. Let’s get right to it.
I first emailed my Processing professor Lawrence Fialkow about my project. I wanted to get some sort of feedback as to what was the best course of actions to take, technical wise, with my project. He directed me to Andrew Pletch, the head of the Computer Science department.
Andrew wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped. The meeting itself was just so unorganized (he forgot we even had a meeting even though we just spoke that morning). I didn’t get the chance to even show him what I was working on. In either case, it just seems like there was some mis-communication. Oh well.
I went back to meet with Lawrence who suggested that I write up everything I have done so far and send it to them. He passed it along to Professor Easwaran, who is on sabbatical. So I’m waiting to hear back from him.
I then met with Arthur this morning (can’t believe I waited this long to). His advice was incredibly helpful on the data and visualization itself. One of the most interesting things that Arthur would like to see is how the public connects to the songs. For example, is there a nostalgic value that happens now? Do songs that make it to the top song remind adults of songs to the past? Or is it only dependent on the current generation? What about optimistic or pessimistic qualities associated with the songs? (something I started, more along the line of a theme, but never finished) How about the TIME SIGNATURE? I don’t know how I forgot that.
We then started talking about the visuals. One of the things I really wanted to know was how can this project benefit from other visualizations? (other information based off the same spreadsheet visualized) So he asked me if the visualization is motivated. Meaning, when reading from left to right, do the BPMs, for example, go up in value? That can be away to show different visualizations. Instead of making different graphs, just use the same graph but have it reorganize itself based on what the user will want to see. The same visualization can be visualized at least six different ways.
I also spent about 3 hours last night with one of my suite mates who is a Computer Science major. He was willing to look at my code to see if he could help with the plugin issue with Sigma. In short, I need to wait for the sigma.js to be updated. Based off the feedback from Arthur, I definitely have more questions.
So I have a good amount to work with. First, I need to cleanup the spreadsheet and Gephi file. It’s time to get this out of the test mode I have it in. Adding color is the next step too. Going off of that, I want export it as an SVG file and start exploring how this can look in print form.