After collecting data on over 600 artists/bands that performed at the Cave over the last two decades, a main takeaway we gained was that a wide variety of artists have played at the Cave (shocker, we know). We encountered artists with over 1,000,000 listeners per month to student bands who are now undetectable. Our Network Analysis is comprised by artists who perform in a multitude of genres from across the country. Our timeline leads viewers on a story of our data, depicting which artists performed at the Cave, and which returned year after year.
Some things we noticed are that many of the big artists didn’t come back to play at the Cave again. But notably a lot of their openers and other “mid-sized” bands came back to play or maybe had already played at the Cave. Notably, many of these artists were locals to the Twin Cities or Chicago. This close proximity allows for Carleton to pull some bigger name artists that maybe wouldn’t come to such a small venue either way.
As for the technical aspect, as a group I think we learned a lot about data collection and cleaning. Since that was the biggest part of our work, we definitely created some efficient solutions for having to hand enter all of our data. Manipulation of spreadsheets was definitely a big part of that data cleaning that really helped us be efficient in collecting data. This was apparent when we made a spreadsheet that included every group once, from our master list of every date that had an artist play.
