A while back my brother gave me several thousand songs from GoodBlimey.com. Almost all the tracks were mashups. Each song was composed of two songs by two different artists fairly equally smooshed together.
All the track titles were in the A vs. B format (e.g., Black Eyed Peas vs Kraftwerk) — and this gave me an idea.
I exported all the track data as a text file. Then my pal Chris Gansen wrote a script that nuked everything except the two artist names for each track and transformed the data into a spreadsheet like this:
A B 1
A C 1
B D 1
C D 3
C B 2
…
Then it was just a matter of plugging the data into ManyEyes and playing with the visualization types. The best by far is the bubble chart view. (Here’s the interactive chart.)Where the first two columns were artists names and the third column was the number of times they were mashed together in unique songs.
Each circle above represents a single artist. The larger the circle the more other artists the selected artist is mashed with.
The color slices actually tell you at a glance which other artists have been mashed … if you are an autistic savant who can pick out a single color in a sea of several hundred chromatic gradations, that is.
Much easier is clicking a circle which highlights the other artists with which it is mashed.
An alternate view gives the most complete information complete with number of mashed tracks per artist combination.
One other useful view was the network diagram. It shows actual connections between artist combos. The best feature of the diagram is that selected nodes highlight all the other artists with which it is matched. Easy to figure out who’s connected to whom. (Here’s the interactive diagram.)
So what have we learned? Certainly my data set does not contain every mashup ever made. But there were thousands and I think the charts give a good sense which artists mash best (look for the big circles) and mash best with whom.
But there’s far more that could be done. For one, there’s no data in these charts on which songs are being mashed. I have the info — just haven’t figured out how to integrate it. What I really would love to get at is why two artists make sense together. This would require stylistic data, notoriously subjective and consequently unreliable. Still, consider this but a start of the analysis.
Two particular projects influenced my work on this index. The History of Sampling by Jesse Kriss is a bar that I didn’t even come close to hitting, but it provided a great place to aim. And Andy Baio’s analysis of the samples in Girl Talk’s Feed The Animals showed what could be done with an idea, Amazon Turk, and some cool visualizations.
In truth, getting this data into shape was a massive pain in the ass. It was horribly formatted to begin with and took a great deal of kicking and shoving to play nicely with Many Eyes. Above all thanks to Chris — but Jesse Kriss, Frank Van Ham, and Martin Wattenberg of the Many Eyes team deserve applause too.
My brother has claimed his own parcel of the web (MySpace don’t count, sorry Joey). I look forward to redirecting all our conversation with one another to comments and trackbacks between our sites.
Enjoy: www.skipstjohn.com.
(Clearly the blog title is an affectionate homage to me. Brotherly hagiography, if you will.)
On Nov. 7 I’ll be speaking at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The talk is called “Architecting Cultural Spaces: The Past, Present, and Many Futures of Digital Humanities” as they kick off their own Center for study of the same. I’ll post to Slideshare when it is complete.
I’ve had a panel accepted for next year’s SXSW festival. It’s called Entrepreneurship in the Belly of the Beast — basically an anti-SXSW screed about the opportunities for getting away with stuff in a big company. I’ll most likely be booed off stage by startup junkies. Or fired for calling my company the Beast. Win-win.
If you’ll be at any of these events in the coming days and months, please drop a line!
Fall decided to arrive, aggressively, while I was gone. That means a few things: making fires, making booze, and making a plan for our annual holiday party. All of these take the chill off the city’s mad dash to winter.
We had our chimneys swept today for the first time since 2002. I had hoped for a small, sooty Gamfield who’d hoist himself onto the roof and into the chimney Santa-style. Alas, even your most cherished 19th century images of child labor have been superseded by technology. Basically a couple of very clean guys shove a cross between a pipe cleaner and a vacuum cleaner up the flue, turn on a machine, and stand back. Apparently our downstairs chimney looked like an emphysemic lung.
For those of you interested in what I finally did about procuring firewood, it turns out that both companies we called in Chicago adamantly do not take down live trees for their stock. Basically they both said they follow loggers around and take the tops off the trees that they leave for dead. Both thought my wife was nuts for asking for an all-elm cord and offered up a window into their supply process when she explained why. A good lesson for us in the upside of simply asking.
‘Tis also the season for things frightening, such as a five-year-old’s birthday party on Halloween. But really it means a great excuse to catch up on a backlog of horror flicks. My love of the genre has recently taken a sidetrip into the small world of sci-fi/horror video games. I had read great things about EA’s Dead Space, a first-person shooter set on a derelict spaceship and filled with all manner of nasties. Now, even though I’ve been deeply immersed in virtual worlds (direct descendants of 3D video games) I have never actually owned a game like this.
Truth is, it is scary and all for the reasons that the best horror films are. It is about what you don’t see, what you do hear, and what you think might be around that next corner. I have little to compare it to in the game genre, but as an exercise in finally being able to get the imperiled protagonist to run from the monster when you know they should, it has been very enjoyable. (Not at all kid-friendly, I might add. A few minutes of them watching me and my wife was contemplating therapist appointments for us all.)
More on this year’s batch of hooch and party prep soon …
I’ve been back from the launch hoopla in China for a week now. Seems like forever. The silence* on the blog has you all wondering if I’ve retired, no doubt.
Not exactly. Beyond Space and Time continues to stretch us to the limits with its popularity as we close in on 175,000 activated users. At all hours of every day you’ll find hundreds of people ambling about, mostly chatting and taking tours in Chinese. It’s so much more gratifying even than the unbelievable coverage the project has generated.
Some have understandably been confused about whether the Virtual Forbidden City is part of Second Life. (Many people consider virtual worlds and Second Life the same thing.) The short answer is no. The VFC is a separate download. For those of you who are curious — just not maybe 200 MB curious, yet — you can get a taste of the project in Second Life at our little marketing outpost for the project. The island is called BeyondSpaceAndTime and, if you have Second Life installed, you can go directly.
* If you like your ramblings more frequent consider following my Twitter stream.
For starters you could talk to one of the over 93,000 people who have registered as visitors — or the several thousand others who have gone in simply as guests. Don’t believe the numbers? If you headed in right now you’d be with 717 other museum-goers from around the world. (At this hour, I hope your Mandarin is good.)
Feeling anti-social? I don’t blame you. It is the most visited museum in the world in real life. So have a wander off on your own. Use the map to find locations of interest. Filter by building, artifact, scene, tour, activity or even visitor name.
Still needing the alone time? Go to your scrapbook and enable Private Virtual Forbidden City. The madding crowd will disappear before your very eyes. The palace grounds are yours alone. (If only in real life, alas.)
What’s that? Eye Candy, you say? Click on nearly anything and get copious textual and photographic info. Think of it as a 3D interface to a textbook’s worth of material.
For the more visually-minded of you, the Virtual Forbidden City permits a kind of educational vandalism. Rip buildings and artifacts off their moorings for closer inspection. Zoom, rotate, love.
The vastness is wearying, I know. That’s part of the design. The architecture of the real Forbidden City is a psychological machine. By the time you make it to the emperor all you want to do is kowtow to relieve the aching of your feet. In the VFC you can encounter one of seven emperors (beyond space and time, see). These are called scenes and they present the city as a living thing.
Oh, you’re having fun now! Good for you. If you care to share, take a photo. Send it to a friend via e-mail or to one of your pals on Facebook. Or just save it to your scrapbook as quick placemarks for easy teleportation (no more walking!) whenever you like.
* And before you mail me, yes, I know the Chinese invented gunpowder. You can practice archery. How’s that?
Today, after many long years of work with a team I can only describe as better than the best, The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time was made public.
There is much to say and show, but for now I’ll give you a description, a video, and a link — and much appreciation for those of you who have followed, supported, or helped build this most amazing project.
The Virtual Forbidden City is a 3-dimensional virtual world where visitors from around the world can experience the Forbidden City in Beijing. You can explore the magnificient palace as it was during the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 until 1912, the end of the Imperial period in China.
Like recently when I was contemplating my annual purchase of firewood. Burning real wood in a fireplace is one of my great loves during long Chicago winters. I easily tear through a cord per winter, sometimes needing extra. And yet, that’s a lot of wood for what is largely aesthetic comfort (though our basement needs all the heat help it can get).
So this year I wanted to learn more about my options. Usually I get wood from one of any number of local, similar operations. A couple of laborers-for-hire pull up in a pickup, throw a bunch of wood in a pile in your garage, and then depart. God only knows where they get this wood from. Or if the company has any interest in the sustainability of the forests from which the wood comes.
So I turned to Ascent Stage’s resident guest restoration ecologist, Cory Ritterbusch, for his usual clarity of insight. I asked about places in northern Illinois where I might deal with a firewood vendor who thinks about his source as much as his sale. Cory noted:
Right now our firewood industry has not been hit by the same environmental stewardship programs that paper and building materials have. So there is nowhere to point to for sustainable, managed firewood processes locally.
Most green thinkers choose their firewood by species to reduce the risk. Oak and Hickory are the preferred woods to burn in the fireplace, but that is done at the detriment of cutting very important slow-growing specimens.
Environmentalists will ask for Red Elm or “Elm” as they are usually standing dead trees having died due to Dutch Elm Disease. It is also a great burning wood offering high temperature, little ash and easy split-ability.
Didn’t know that. Did you?
The smell of burning firewood was constant in Ghana. In the morning, stepping out of my room to the call of the roosters; in the daytime walking down a crowded Kumasi street; at night when the smoke of a thousand dinners ascended and mixed above the town. The tang of wood on fire is for me essential Ghana. I came to love it.
But the wreckage it has caused! The denuded countryside, once rainforest, strikes you like returning to a loved home without any furniture in it. The same space, but not the same place. The soil, suddenly chemically-bereft of sustaining anything but what just got ripped out, is no longer landscape but ecological cul-de-sac. Redwood-sized trunks lashed to wheels and an engine barrel down dirt roads one after the other. it is stark cause-and-effect, easier to see than in the West with our complex chains of supply.
This is what Africa has done to me. Not a blinding moment of enlightenment, but many small moments that creep up without real thought. The things I saw there will be with me forever, ineradicable viruses of the imagination.
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
Alicia Escott’s artistic thinking focuses on grappling with what it is to live a human life amid a moment that is profoundly rare in the geologic and ecologic history of the planet.
Coming to PlayStation 5 and PC in 2024! https://babystepsgame.com
Play as Nate, an unemployed failson with nothing going for him, until one day he discovers a power he never knew he had… putting one foot in front of the other.
Explore a world shrouded in mist, one step at a time. Hike the serene
In 1941 Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who reported from Germany in the lead-up to the second world war, wrote an essay for Harper’s about the personality types most likely to be attracted to Nazism, headlined “Who Goes Nazi?” “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what
In the burgeoning bicycle city of Paris, France, those looking for a more gentle, environmentally friendly funeral service now have the option of a hearse powered by a cargo bike.
Rex Sorgatz (RS) wrote the very popular Key Art Edition. We are happy to have him back. Rex here. The year was 1998, and people on the internet were mad at Disney. But it wasn’t wokeism or bloated cinematic universes or theme park prices that had them riled up.
We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration.
