This week we looked at multiple digital humanities projects and analyzed how they worked. During the viewing process, we not only looked at how the authors put their work together, but we also delved deeper into understanding the meaning behind the projects… Why did they choose this? How is it related to digital humanities? What are the effects? What is the author trying to prove?
In class on Thursday we talked about the “Who Read What?” project. We studied the inner workings and also theorized why the author chose to put this project together. A conversation that stood out to me was when our professor related this project to how individuals could view music in the same way. This helped me better understand the project, for I’m a big music junkie rather than an avid reader. Being a music journalist myself, I was able to grasp the motivations behind the project better and explain it in my own words.
The author wanted to organize and study how a group of Goodreads users consumed media. They used a multidimensional algorithm called t-SNE to put the data into an eleven-dimensional format that viewers could interact with by clicking, moving, and scrolling. What interested me most was how the project took something that would normally be difficult to visualize and turned it into something interactive and easier to explore.
Thinking about the project through music made me realize how digital humanities could also be used to study music taste. Instead of looking at what Goodreads users read, a project could examine what artists people listen to and identify connections between different music communities on an app like Spotify or Bandcamp. It could potentially show how people with similar tastes overlap and discover new artists. It is inspiring me to maybe create something like this for my project late in the semester. It was pretty cool to look at, and I’m glad we did!
