February16

Data Visualization Assignment - Call It What You Want

Chinonyerem Ukaegbu

Description

The task was to create either a data visualization or a generative text using the functions we had learnt last class.

Inspiration

As you probably can tell from the contents of the data set, this project was heavily inspired by Taylor Swift. In honour of the announcement she made of the anticipated release of the rerecorded versions of the songs from her album Fearless , I decided to base this project off the lyrics of some of her earlier songs. The visualization is titled Call It What You Want partly because I had no idea what to call it and also because it's a reference to a song from her album Reputation.

Process

There were a couple of datasets with the song lyrics separated by line number, but I needed the lyrics to be represented by one value per song entry, and then I came upon the data set accessible through this link: Taylor Swift Dataset

I needed to count the number of characters per song lyric so I first had to download the CSV file, load it up in Excel, remove the forward slashes(/) that had been used to separate each line and then use an excel formula to calculate the number of characters in each song lyric entry.
I did not need the column for the artiste's name and because each album was released in a different year, I deleted the column for album name and opted to use the column for year of release as an identifier instead.
I then created four files, one for the year of release, one for the track number, one for the length of lyrics and the last for the title of the tracks and loaded them into Processing.

String year[];
String track_n[];
String lyric_length[];
String track_title[];


void setup() {
  size(1600, 1000);
  background(105, 102, 103);

  //Load files into array
  
  year = loadStrings("year.csv");
  track_n = loadStrings("track_n.csv");
  lyric_length = loadStrings("lyric_length.csv");
  track_title = loadStrings("track_title.csv");

After I decided that I wanted the data to be represented as circles, I got to work on translating the data into what I had planned in Processing. The radius of the circle increased as the length of the lyrics increased, the songs that were from the same album had the same colour and the songs that had the same track number from various albums were on the same y-axis I did this by playing around with some values until I was ultimately satisfied with what the code looked like

for ( int i = 0; i < yearData.length; i++) {
    if (yearData[i]==2006) {   //2006
      fill(255, 236, 148);
      circle(random(200, 1400), track_nData[i]+50, lyric_lengthData[i]/20);
    }
    if (yearData[i]==2008) {   //2008
      fill(255, 174, 174);
      circle(random(200, 1400), track_nData[i]+50, lyric_lengthData[i]/20);
    }
    if (yearData[i]==2010) {   //2010
      fill(143, 96, 72);
      circle(random(200, 1400), track_nData[i]+50, lyric_lengthData[i]/20);
    }
    if (yearData[i]==2012) {   //2012
      fill(176, 229, 124);
      circle(random(200, 1400), track_nData[i]+50, lyric_lengthData[i]/20);
    }
    if (yearData[i]==2014) {   //2014
      fill(180, 216, 231);
      circle(random(200, 1400), track_nData[i]+50, lyric_lengthData[i]/20);
    }
    if (yearData[i]==2017) {   //2017
      fill(86, 186, 236);
      circle(random(200, 1400), track_nData[i]+50, lyric_lengthData[i]/20);
    }
    fill(255, 255, 255);
   

The final output looked like this:

Difficulties

The major difficulty I faced was with reading data from a CSV file with multiple columns. I wanted to access the data in a column and not in a row but I couldn't find any function that could do that which was why I had to seperate the fields into different CSV files in the first place.

Interesting Things I Found

I found out that there was a circle() function. I thought it was only ellipse() that was available. I could've used ellipse() of course but circle() was much more convenient. Also, even though I didn't use it in this program, I learnt how to create or read data from tables in Processing.

Possible Improvements

I wanted to use a sort of mouseOver function so that anytime the mouse hovered over a circle, the name of the song would be displayed but I did not know how to. I believe I'd have to rewrite the program and include a class so that that would be implementable and it would really pull the design together.

Conclusion

At first, I thought the assignment was going to be really boring because it seemed like dealing with datasets was just tedious and uninteresting. However, manipulating these data sets and being able to create visuals is actually reallyu cool and the possibilites are really endless when it comes to data manipulation and visualization.