#9 Data Portrait

Description

In this week's assignment, we created a visualization with a week worth data of our own. I chose to do three songs I listened to each day, giving 21 songs in total. The collected data categories were: song title, artist, duration (min.), word count, and the number of times the word love appeared. I listen to songs a lot, have it on whenever I do something, and wanted to see the trend in the songs I choose, which can reveal about my emotion/mood status.

Design Process

So in my design, each circle represents a song, and the size is relative to the total count of word 'love'. I didn't want there to be so much information all at once, so made the artist's name and the title of the song only visible when cursor goes over the dots.

Reflection

This project was interesting in that it informed me a lot about myself through self-tracking daily habit of listening to music, which is an act that comes so naturally that I don't reflect upon it. First, I earned that I like listening to pop songs, and in particular those about love. I found the correlation between the title of the song and the frequency of the word love. Not surprisingly, 'Savage Love' song had the word love come up 38 times, giving highest rank in the frequency. But song like 'Mad at Disney', which doesn't have any sort of love association in the title, ranked second place in the love frequency (26 times). I think the data visualization doesn't account for the lyric description at all, so it can be misleading to just look at the title and the love frequency, and make assumptions about whether it is a romantic song or not. Also, there are other ways to express romance without using the literal word love.