Sources
Source: The Cave – Carleton Archive
Format: Carleton has an archive of all the artists/students bands that have performed at the Cave since 2003. It’s primarily a bullet point list sectioned off by trimesters of that year. Each bullet point is of the format “day, month, date – artist name.” Using this information, we’ve created a CSV file to store this data under two columns (date and artist), and have been manually entering all the values.
Source: LastFM
Format: This source is many, many web pages with listener counts, genres and origins for many artists. We manual entered the listener counts into a CSV that has them corresponding with the artist. We searched and copied the listener count into the spreadsheet.
bibliography
“Last.Fm | Play Music, Find Songs, and Discover Artists.” Last.Fm, https://www.last.fm/.
The Cave. “Archive – The Cave – Carleton College.” Carleton College: A Leading Liberal Arts College in Northfield, Minnesota, https://www.carleton.edu/student/orgs/cave/archive/.
Processes
Data Collection
As a group our first job was to collect data from the aforementioned sources. We hand entered the bands and dates from the Cave website and LastFM. We crossed checked and made sure that there were no typos in repeat groups. We also had to deal with a lot of ambiguity when trying to figure out the genre of artists, since sometimes there were multiple groups with the same name.
Data Cleaning
We then had to sort our data into CVS files that would work for JSTimeline and Flourish. For JSTimeline we had to have every date included, and the dates had to be separate columns for month, day, and year. For the network we had to have one instance of every group, so we needed to create a spreadsheet that got rid of any repeats from our dated sheet. Luckily, we had a system that filled in the listener count and genre from this sheet into our date chart and added any new entries to the date chart into the Network chart.
Data visualization
For the Timeline we used the software: JSTimeline, which required us to fill our a CSV spreadsheet with dates, titles, headings, and had options for pictures. Since we had so many band entries we decided to just include genres in the description for each band, and focus more on date. Ideally we would add pictures of bands performing at the Cave, but this was too much for the scope of our project.
For the Network we used the software: Flourish, which required us to draw connections and choose target nodes and edges. We had to create a target spreadsheet to highlight these connections. The Network ended up having the nodes be bands, which differentiated in size by listener count and in color by genre. The connections were when a band played together.
You can click on the pages to Network and Timeline to learn more about those.
Presentation
In terms of a project, we needed to display our findings so we created this WordPress site! It has limited changes to it’s format, since we thought a simple display would do well for this project. We especially wanted to include pictures from the Cave though, so all photos on this site of band are from the Carleton Cave website.
Audience
We intended for this project to be for Carleton students and those connected to the Cave to look and see the rich history of the Cave. That is why we made it pretty accessible on this WordPress site and mainly focused on our data visualization as opposed to our findings. Given more time, this project could evolve to be a more full, more updatable version and resource on the Cave but the time constraint of the class only allowed for us to focus on the data visualization. This data visualization is the main difference between our project and the archive that we used as our source for the project.
About the Team
Read more about the interests for the team members on this project!
Nelson:
As a current Cave employee and someone who has played at The Cave, I am fascinated with its history. I would love to see how bands that started at The Cave, like mine, are faring now!
Margie:
I hadn’t interacted with the Cave much before this summer, but I got to spend a lot of time there then. Being able to have live music and gatherings again at such a local space is really exciting, but it’s also really hard to wrap my head around some of the amazing groups that performed in that very space. It’s fun to see how the Cave, which to me is kind of a homey space, has hosted and evolved over its history.
Nora:
I find the history of the Cave interesting, being that it is the first student-run pub. I think it will be intriguing to examine how music tastes and the bands/artists performing at the Cave have evolved over time.
Vanessa:
I find the Cave’s concept as a whole to be super cool and I think it’s great that Carleton has created such a space for students to use that is both appropriate for college students and flexible. I’m particularly interested in music/live performance, so I think it’d be interesting to present the evolution of bands/artists who’ve performed on campus (could potentially look into the information available on Sproncert if data on the Cave isn’t sufficient). For our network analysis, the nodes could be bands and the edges could be genres. Color coding the nodes based on what year the band performed may also be beneficial.
Ryan:
I went to the Cave only once but it was on Diwali. There wasn’t any live performance but there was music to which a lot of people danced including me. I got intrigued by the Cave since then. More precisely, I’ve always wanted to know about the bands that used it the most and where these people are today.
