While reading ‘See No Evil’, I was reminded how out of the loop employees are in terms of where product comes from while working retail. Working through the pandemic, it was difficult to answer customers questions of “where the food is” when we were experiencing the panic-buy phase, where hundreds of dollars worth of groceries were purchased by a massive swarm of scared customers. The company I specifically work for allows certain employees at the store to keep track of sales in grocery section, allowing them the responsibility of ordering just the right number of product for days worth of sales for the specific store. When the store received a wave of panic buying, we were unable to meet the demands a city that is about to quarantine. In fact, even though we had access to order a specific amount, we were indeed out of the loop of how farmers and workers in manufacturing facilities were dealing with an increased demand.
“This peculiar state of knowing-while-not-knowing is not the explicit choice of any individual company but a system that’s grown up to accommodate the variety of goods that we demand, and the speed with which we want them. It’s embedded in software, as well as in the container ships that are globalization’s most visible emblem.”
Grocery stores across the country gained a large increase in profit during the pandemic, however workers operating these stores were left in the dark. Retail workers were left to deal with a swarm of customers hoarding food for quarantine, while some the workers themselves could not afford to quarantine themselves, as the luxury to work from home was not an option. I am still hopeful that retailers will recognize the kind of labor it takes to run a store while understaffed and, in my opinion, incapable of providing a safe working environment for its fellow employees given the circumstances.
When we think about infrastructure in the digital world, we have to focus on the invisible world of maintenance and repair. Thus, as Jackson Steven mentions in his article Rethinking Repair “Repair inherits an old and layered world, making history but not in the circumstances of its choosing. It accounts for the durability of the old, but also the appearance of the new (a different way of approaching the problem of innovation”( 223). As we can see, when we repair an object, we extend the life of it as we renew its appearance. So, I think that it is important to analyze some questions such as whether the action of repair may result in better products, and in a long lifecycle of them. Moreover, when we talk about the words “repair” and “innovation,” it is important to mention the relationship between craftsman and the object. In my opinion, as technology becomes part of our lives, the work of a craftsman becomes so valuable and unique.
For instance, when talking about fashion, we have to talk about how machines were created for large-scale production. In the world of fashion, in particular, fast fashion, machines are indispensable for quick production. However, as Richard Sennett mentions in his book The Craftsman, the introduction of machines gradually decreases the necessity of most skilled workers and increases the number of semi or unskilled workers. In this way, I believe that the handmade production has become something valuable that makes a product something unique. Handmade things not only innovate the creativity of the craftsman, but also remind us that technology is not everything. Behind a handmade item was someone that dedicated his/her time and put all his/her effort into making a product beautiful and unique.
At the same time, the article “See No Evil” by Miriam Posner, lets us analyze the problem of supply chain and labour conditions. I think that consumption without consciousness becomes part of the phenomenon of commodity fetishism. This is because if a consumer carefully chooses a product based on what it is made of, and how it was made, that person is able to understand the labour process and mechanisms behind the production of this particular object. In this case, the consumer is able to understand a product beyond the idea of trading value. This connection is important, if not fundamental, to establish a close link between production and consumption and to break free from the vicious cycle of work, consume, and repeat. It also allows consumers to value the interpersonal relationships of the humans that are behind the creation and production of a product or garment.
For instance, a report published by Bloomberg in 2011 makes us think about the human stories behind the production of Victoria’s Secret garments. The Bloomberg report documents the life of a 13-year-old-girl, who was abused while working on a cotton field in Burkina Faso. It was reported that Victoria’s Secret through its parent company Limited Brands purchased the cotton picked by this and other female workers at Burkina Faso to produce their clothing line. Indeed, in these cases, one cannot help but to wonder how many consumers take some time to value the human stories and labour involved in the production of the garments they purchase?
There are many examples in the history of humanity and fashion of the use of clothing as a trading commodity. However, with the emergence of fast fashion and mass production, customers are more than ever encouraged by marketing strategies to buy more frequently. The constant innovation of products in the market motivates customers to buy more often by making recent styles old or outed. In addition, people need to purchase more often in order to continually satisfy their desire to display their social and economic status. Thus, by doing so, a disassociation between consumers and all the workers involved in production occurs, delineating the case of commodity fetishism.
However, one thing is true which is, despite everything, if a company creates robots, their hardware and software will require upkeep. That makes us think that labour force and maintenance is still essential even with technological innovations.
Jackson, Steven J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221–40. The MIT Press.
I attended the Introduction to Archival Research workshop on Wednesday, October 13 at 3 p.m. Beth Posner, Head of Library Resource Sharing, summarized the breadth and depth of current activity in digitizing archival resources, techniques and protocols involved, the larger collections of archival materials, and aids not only to reaching certain collections but also in understanding how one might best sort through them. The examples she offered were extremely helpful. By searching with salient keywords and subcategories, she could reduce a response of several hundred thousand items, to several thousand, then to several hundred, and finally a few dozen.
Despite my reasonable familiarity with OneSearch and the World Cat, she provided examples for use that I had never thought about, including some that were staring right back from the topics page: “Dissertations at CUNY and Beyond,” for example, in OneSearch. While I have happily come across useful dissertations online, I was oblivious to the availability of this option on OneSearch as well as what it could mean in terms of archival research. As she pointed out, it is very possible that someone doing doctoral research on a specific topic may have gained access to or unearthed archival material that is not yet in circulation. Looking through bibliographies of such research may provide valuable leads to important material. In addition to the “Dissertations at CUNY and Beyond” label, the same tab provides opportunities to explore other dissertation collections.
She discussed the power of the WorldCat collection and also a program specific to archived materials called Archivegrid. That collection lists 7,000,000 records from 1400 institutional archives. Ninety percent of the records are from the WorldCat, and ten percent have been obtained using Finding Aids.
In the Library of Congress categories under Archives, you can see how many collections are in which category.
Finding Aids, fairly standard among collections, include:
Collection Overview; Biographical/histories; Scope and Arrangement; Administrative Info ; Key Terms; Using the Collection.
Subheadings/electronic terms are hyperlinked. To discover collections that do not have Finding Aids, you need to search at the Repository level.
She talked some about the New York Public Library (NYPL) Archives and Manuscripts Collection, including a Guide to locating MS and Archives, and a helpful article, Getting Started with Archives. She spoke of the value of browsing the lists of collections, simply to become accustomed to how they appear, and then to learn how to search across collections, and the value of using Date Filters as well as Limit by Division.
In addition, she reminded us to search using the library’s regular catalog collection as well. For example, one might find a trove of unarchived microfilmed materials. And most important, she directed us to bring questions and issues directly to the library staff.
With regard to online archival materials, she pointed out that there is a distinction between analog and digital. She suggests that at this point, items that can be found online are probably just the tip of the iceberg. She discussed the DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) which includes specialized areas such as a Native Northeast Portal, a digital Transgender Archive, and a hub called Biodiversity Heritage Library where three of the most outstanding collections are contained in the NYPL, the Library of Congress, and Tulane University.
In the past couple of years, I have installed Zotero and started to use it as a research tool, but I have much more to learn about it. The incredible augmentation of available and accessible material through digital processes still leaves me in awe at how we can now search, connect to, and obtain information.
Just this past week, as I was wrapping up a search for photographs of Paris in the 1920s, I came upon the news that a collection of museums in Paris has recently combined resources to make approximately 62, 500 of their photographs free and accessible to the public. I scrambled to sign up to visit such a resource. On my first try, I landed in the area to purchase admission tickets for museum visits. On my next attempts, I arrived at apologetic notes about Covid restrictions and then a denial of the validity of my email address. So I understand there are still some flaws in my basic skill set, but it certainly was a thrill to learn that such a collection is going to be online and shared! Sooner or later, I’ll visit it!!
Thinking about innovation has had, for a long time, a strong association with the picture of privileged places like Silicon Valley, where an intellectual white and male elite retains the privilege of creating the new trendy gadgets of the future. Although this concept is still strong in our collective imagination, it carries a huge blind spot. It hinders our capacity to see real solutions emerging from simple people in their struggle to make technologies they have in hand suitable for our needs. In this post, I will expose this blindness by presenting a force that makes real innovation happen: the culture of repair.
Jackson (2014) defines that, in scientific computation thinking, repair is something that comes after innovation. In his words:
“innovation is reserved for new and computationally intensive “bright and shiny tools,” while repair tends to disappear altogether, or at best is relegated to the mostly neglected story of people (researchers, information managers, beleaguered field technicians) working to fit such artifacts to the sticky realities of field-level practices and needs. In both cases, dominant productivist imaginings of technology locate innovation, with its unassailable standing, cultural cachet, and valorized economic value, at the top of some change or process, while repair lies somewhere else: lower, later, or after innovation in process and worth.”
Given this distinction, I ask myself who can afford innovation. If innovation is to solve problems effectively and in scale, why can’t repair be considered a genuinely innovative force as it is the way that most people in our unequal world find to transform things that are already in hand as tools in their daily lives?
Jackson exposes repair as “subtle acts of care”, where “human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished”. Using the term “care”, which is profoundly human and feminine in many aspects, makes me think about how it pushes the “human-centered design” concept, usually associated with real innovation, to another level. Repair, especially for those in economic and social fragility, may be translated as innovating to survive.
Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban designer and architect, makes this clear in his ethnographic research about Cuba’s DIY culture. To support the idea that receiving large grants and infrastructure to Digital Humanities projects hinders scholars from acquiring an intimate knowledge of digital technologies and, therefore, develop their own digital humanities knowledge, Oroza presents his concept of Moral Modulator:
“As opposed to Le Corbusier’s modulor, a physical scale based on human proportions to bridge discrepancies in measurement, the Moral Modulor provides us with a moral scale to bridge divergent measures. The proportion is the need, and its basic units are survival and love”.
In another moment, he illustrates that the Moral Modular is an individual who has the impulse to rebuild human life. He does it for his children or his family. His days are busy with searching for food, water, resources, or finding a roof.
To summarize, although innovation is firmly attached to privileged places and people, supported by the dual concept of designs and users, repair should be considered genuine human-centered innovation, as it is a practice of care and survival. By trying to understand better the way the culture of repair takes place in different societies, and how solutions are incorporated into people’s lives (especially the ones with low income in undeveloped countries), traditional innovative centers would diminish its blindness about how new products are really used, as they are often resused and transformed.
References
Jackson, Steven J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221–40. The MIT Press.
Gil, Alex. 2016. “Interview with Ernesto Oroza.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press.
Shortly before taking up this project, I became fascinated with Breton’s novel, Nadja. It occurred to me that I might experience it in more depth if I had better knowledge of Breton’s “circle,” and of the streets and areas of Paris that he mentions. Nadja is a small book—a mere 160 pages, yet out of the pages tumbled rafts of individuals and places. I realized that my plan was grander than either my time or competence permitted, but I thought I could at least give it a try. The result is offered in two parts because 1) the computer program became so sluggish that it was nearly impossible to proceed, and 2) a natural break in the material offered an opportunity to split it.
Part 1 has no “maps.” It is simply a mapping (connecting) of individuals named in the text to photos or portraits, birth and death dates, subjects, and interests. Part 2 includes a few small maps intended to illustrate areas of Paris where Nadja and Breton spent time together. There are no legends attached to the maps. I hope they are self-explanatory. The reader can manipulate the area included in each map by the plus and minus signs, pop-ups refer to specific locations that are highlighted in the blog, and arrows indicate the general direction of movement. I need more experience in custom tuning!
Breton includes 44 plates in his story – photos of shops, streets, old buildings, portraits and art works of associates, and drawings by Nadja. Near the conclusion, he discusses his intent: “I have begun by going back to look at several of the places to which this narrative happens to lead. I wanted in fact—with some of the people and some of the objects—to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them. On this occasion, I realized that most of the places more or less resisted my venture, so that, as I see it, the illustrated part of Nadja is quite inadequate” (151-152).
If Breton found his own visual supports ‘inadequate,’ why would I think that adding another layer to this collection could be of any use? Focusing on my own interests, I found that exploring neighborhoods of Paris and learning a little about Breton’s associates and associations, helped bridge the gap of time passing as well as of language and distance in miles (or kilometers). However, my presentation is both subjective, in that I looked especially at areas that captured my attention, and a creation of chance, as I had to rely on what I could obtain, and many items of interest were not available.
The birth and death dates and brief descriptions of personages and photographs are almost all taken from Wikipedia and Wikimedia sources. Plate numbers refer to the reproductions in Nadja, and page numbers designate specific passages. Breton’s Nadja, including the photographic reproductions, is available for download from the web at https://monoskop.org/images/2/2e/Breton_Andre_Nadja_1960_EN.pdf
The topic and the texts of this week are, to me, evocative of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), Agnes Varda’s splendid documentary about modern-day “gleaners:” people who live off “leftovers,” be they discarded food or broken objects. In reading, I felt like a gleaner too: the new texts kept pointing at texts we have read, and I began rescuing bits and pieces from past weeks, making connections, and recycling knowledge.
There is an interesting dialogue between “Capacity through care” (B. Nowviskie, 2019) and past articles that reflected upon the dangers of replicating exploitation dynamics through archive building. Texts such as “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities” (Gallon, 2016) and “More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology” (McMillan, 2016) come to mind. They warned us of big data’s unintended consequence: burying humans. They presented us with alternative methodologies functioning as antidotes for the voracity of knowing it all, preserving it all, and publishing it all that characterizes our western practice of research –a practice that has been propelled by the ongoing development of powerful digital tools (“Toward Slow Archives,” Christen & Anderson, 2019).
In “Capacity through care,” however, Nowviskie tells us to fear not. She tries to assuage our humanist anxiety “about data-driven research and inquiry ‘at scale’,” and to dispel our “deep-seated—and ill-timed—discomfort with the very notion of increased capacity in the humanities.” She suggests that, if we embrace a feminist ethics of care while we tackle our digital humanities tasks, data-driven research will help us to see connections among parts, and relations with the whole, without losing a sense of empathy toward the object of our research. She invokes a feminist ethics of care.
Susan L. Star in “The ethnography of infrastructure” (1999) summons an ethics of care too, albeit not explicitly, as she invites us to think of our computers as sewers, and of digital infrastructure as the architecture of our homes. The way we build these “objects” will markedly affect our functioning, our lives. In her article, the ethics of care is also present in the act of making “invisible work” visible in our projects.
The relational is as present in this text as it is in the one above: infrastructure has relational properties. Moreover, the relational is encouraged in the practice of partnering ethnographers and computer scientists “for the purpose of usability.” We must build infrastructure, like archives, in dialogue with the community that will use them, and with utter respect toward its group practices and culture (again: “Toward slow archives”).
Star also extends a call to her readers to find the master narratives that guide the development of infrastructure, a topic we have seen in most past articles: the importance of detecting underlying stereotypes and presumptions at all levels of the DH work.
Miriam Posner’s “See no evil” is also related to relatedness, or lack thereof, in that it investigates fragmentation in knowledge about supply chains operations, and the human consequences of such. Modularity, or rigid compartmentalization, enables blind spots in the distribution of goods by technological means. Modularity acts as a defense mechanism –denial– that keeps us from seeing the traumatizing processes of supply-chain operations, and to go on enjoying our gadgets in unproblematic ways.
“Rethinking Repair” (S. Jackson, 2014) and “Interview with Ernesto Orozco” (A. Gil, 2016) align with the feminist ethics of care and relationality when they promulgate a connection to our objects beyond the consumptionist “use-and-discard” model. Gil, in his take on Orozco’s “technological disobedience” concept, invites digital humanists to break apart, so to speak, their instruments of work and reassemble or reuse them for a longer life or for an entirely different life. Gil also takes from Orozco the rejection of “finitude:” and object is never finished, whole; its life is never overdetermined by its initial intended use.
An interesting idea of Gil’s: easy access to digital tools becomes, paradoxically, an impediment to getting to know them, that is, to connect with them. In other words, wealth separates us from the know-how. We become expert ignorant-users of technology.
I write from a 2011 MacBook Pro that works just fine, but that I am forced to replace because I can’t upgrade its operating system any longer. Orozco’s laptop power cable broke down when he was responding to Gil’s interview questions. He considered buying a new one, but decided to search for ways to repair it.
Although I find the invitation to break my computer apart quite tempting, à la Cuba, I will never know what to do with its tripe, no matter how much I read about putting it back together or reusing its parts. As a society, we have much to learn about, and fight against, programmed obsolescence. An ethics of care may guide us in this process: rather than attaching ourselves to objects as a result of unbridled consumption, let’s care for them.
Des glaneuses, by Jean-François Millet – The 19th century painting that inspired Varda’s The Gleaners and I. Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20111149
This past summer after reading the novel Klara and the Sun at work, my colleagues and I were asked to think about a line of inquiry. My inquiry is around stigma in community colleges. I believe that stigma is connected to a person’s mindset, which can be affected by a person’s background such as gender, and race. This led me to think about mapping community colleges student populations.
Mapping platform
A determining factor of what platform I would use for the praxis is that I didn’t want my map to be static. Although I knew leaflet would provide endless opportunity, I do not currently possess the confidence to use an interface that requires a lot of coding. With that in mind, I opted for Tableau. It was easy to install the desktop app and to upload the data, however I struggled to populate the map.
Mapping
Tableau needs coordinates, however if possible, it will generate the longitudes and latitudes. Given that I was using the community college address, and the fact that tableau generated longitudes and latitude, I thought I was fine. Unfortunately not all of the community colleges were showing. This resulted in me having to research how to get the coordinates.
I discover a google add on called geocode. Which allows me to convert a list of addresses on google sheets into coordinates. If you have multiple Gmail like myself, the add on may have difficulties working. What worked for me was switching to incognito mode.
Formatting the data
As part of the interactive mapping, I wanted to present some of the data as a pie. It took some time to work on the marks to understand how to create the pie. Once I figured it out, I unfortunately ran into another hurdle. The design of my map makes it too cluster to present the race population. I then tried to populate the gender population and discovered that when hovering over the data it only gives the percentage of that gender. If I chose to include the percentage of both genders, it would then duplicate one of the gender percentages, which could confuse the audience viewing my map.
Aside from the visual presentation, I unfortunately encountered some other data struggles. One item I couldn’t figure out, is how to organize my data so the gender (male and female) would be next to each other, as well as the race. Another origination issue I discovered is that not all names of the community colleges are visible, one must zoom in to view some of the other community colleges due to an overlap on the other community college’s name.
As seen above, the percentage for female was missing since we are viewing the side for male. If I made the gender population a constant detail, the gender (in this case male) would become visible twice.
Conclusion
My mapping concept came pretty easy to me, I wish I could say making it come to life was just as easy. I had to work on organizing the data, a bit more than I expected, and Tableau sadly was more of a challenge than I imagined it to be. One major takeaway I got out of creating this map, is your vision of the map may change, as you need to determine what is the priority. While I really wanted to make the map visually appealing and have the data be more interactive, the priority was being able to provide all data. Lastly, after further exploring Tableau, I can see myself enjoying it for data visualization, however I am not certain about creating more maps.
The world of commerce and business is one with billions, if not trillions, of small, individual, interconnected, ‘moving parts.’ I consider every factory, each company, everything they produce, mine, manufacture, source, and sell to be a moving part. All of these moving parts require people to do the work of planting the seed that will become a crop to be harvested, processed, and shipped around the world by other laborers. Often, the supply chain does not end there, and grocery store employees will keep inventory of this particular food, shelve it, scan it when it is sold, and replace it when it runs low.
In an ideal world, each and every laborer at every stage of the supply chain would be paid a fair, living wage. However, this is rarely the case. The CEO of Starbucks has a staggering net worth of $5.7 billion, while workers can expect to make minimum wage of 15 dollars an hour in NYC, while that number drops to 10 dollars an hour in Texas, which is, admittedly, slightly above Texas’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
The farmer who planted the seeds and did the work of tending them, watering them, and harvesting them, can expect to be paid even less, according to an article from GreenBiz:
“In 2012, Starbucks reported its average price for green beans was $2.56 per pound. However, that is the price it paid to the broker, not to the farmer. After backing out shipping, insurance, importer and exporter and mill costs, that price would be closer to $2.20 paid per pound to the farmer. By 2014, Starbucks was only paying $1.72 to the broker (maybe $1.36 to the farmer). By paying the lower amount, Starbucks took $387 million out of the farmers’ pockets. As green prices keep falling, Starbucks has continued to pay coffee farmers less, while charging consumers more.” – Dean Cycon
This is, perhaps, one of the greatest ethical concerns surrounding modern commerce, consumerism, and capitalism – that those at the very bottom of the supply chain, often working in the Global South and suffering from extreme poverty, make pennies on the dollar, while the CEO lines his pocket at the expense of the farmers, the factory workers, the delivery truck drivers, the minimum-wage laborers, the environment, and the consumer. This dichotomy is discussed at length in Posner’s “See No Evil.”
In “Capacity Through Care,” Nowviskie suggests that feminist ethics and thought are, perhaps, part of the solution. She says, “A feminist ethic of care seeks instead to illuminate the relationships of small components, one to another, within great systems—just as many platforms for large-scale visualization and analysis and scholars’ research agendas do.” This feminist ethics of care is a tool we can use to expose what is in “the black box” and shed light on unfair, unjust practices.
In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” We need new tools, such as feminist ethics and praxis, to start to tease apart the oppressive patriarchal framework that keeps so many people trapped in poverty and empowers the cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white male of European descent above all other groups.
As Ernesto Oroza puts it, “renewed answers will always come from the resistance.”
I used ArcGIS StoryMaps to map active and defunct jail facilities in New York City. My map intends to visualize the presence and distribution of these facilities in the city, so as to correct against the tendency of these facilities to become invisible and hidden.
Method
I sourced data on the facilities from the Bureau of Prisons, the NYC Department of Corrections, and Wikipedia. I used blue markers for active facilities and red markers for defunct facilities. In my annotations, I included the lifespan of each facility and distinguishing details. I tried to make my map “non-sovereign” by avoiding dehumanizing language like “inmates,” and instead making clear that people are confined in these “facilities.”
Findings
The map shows that jails and prisons have historically been concentrated in Manhattan and around the East River. The map also shows that the number of active facilities is rivaled by the number of defunct facilities. Eight out of ten of the facilities operated by the NYC DOC are located on Rikers, and a more detailed map would lay out the size and distribution of facilities on the island. It’s interesting to note that, outside of Rikers, there are as many federal facilities as there are NYC DOC facilities in the city.
Conclusion
I found ArcGIS easy to use but limited, as you can’t easily integrate graphs into the map or visualize data. I also could have used a feature to better integrate timelines or chronology. The program is perhaps most useful for drawing connections between different locations.
My map shows that jails and prisons are historically quite populous in NYC, and asks what it means for a city to have so many sites of confinement. How does our liberty relate to their confinement? Further, by visualizing the sites of closed prisons during our current wave of prison closures, the map anticipates a an abolitionist future in which prisons are a historical anomaly.
The Project I learned recently that Spotify displays the top five cities where listeners for a given artist are located. When I started poking around the various artists I listen to, I noticed that there were a lot of repeat cities, Chicago in particular. When prompted to create a map for the class, I thought it would be fun to map where the heaviest concentration of listeners of my favorite artists are located. This map would not give much space any kind of analysis or comparison, but would be fun for me to see.
Software choice I chose to use Tableau for two reasons: first, it has a very user-friendly interface, with being able to easily drag and drop features and attributes into the map and very easily toggle symbolizations like size and color. Second, I have never made my own dataset before, and I liked how easily Tableau can work with messy data and let you work with the data within the software itself once the data was already connected. For instance, I did not have geographical data in my dataset and was able to link my cities to points of latitude and longitude in Tableau itself.
The Data Using a service called mytopspotify.io, I was able to pull the top ten most played artists of all time on my Spotify account. They were David Bazan, Milo, Pedro the Lion, Mount Eerie, Aesop Rock, The Front Bottoms, WHY?, Open Mike Eagle, Immortal Technique, and Built to Spill. I then referred to each individual artist’s Spotify page to pull the top five cities that each of these artists are listened to on the platform, along with the number of listeners in each city (it is worth noting that there could be and likely are crossover listeners for multiple artists, so my numbers are probably thrown off by the same user being counted more than once in the total count for a given city). The dataset I made was as such:
Making the map The process of making the map was relatively simple. I set the latitude and longitude for each city in Tableau and dragged the data for my cities into the X and Y axes to create my map. I dragged the data for the artists and the amount of listeners into the details for each point so each particular city would display the data linked to it. I set the point for each city to be visualized as a pie chart so show what portion of each city was made up by listeners of what artist, with each artist having its own unique color. Lastly I dragged the data for the mount of listener for each artist per state into the size featuring for each point. This made it so that cities with more listeners of my artists would be larger in proportion to cities with less overall listeners of my top artists. The result was the following map:
Conclusions The results of the map were not surprising or all that interesting (it makes perfect sense that listening habits of fans of these indie artists are concentrated to large cities), but was a great exercise in practicing mapping and thinking through all the necessary steps to visualize the data. I think there would be many more decisions to choices to explore, but this was an excellent introduction.
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