SocialPipeline 11/20/2011 (p.m.)

• Visualization: The Spread of Dance Music - Forbes

  tags: Visualization

  • A new visualization by travel writer Osman Khan charts the “Evolution of Western Dance Music,” tracing music through time and space from Africa and the Caribbean through the development of the Blues, Jazz, Funk, Disco, and, well, you know the story.

     

     
    Screenshot of “The Evolution of Western Dance Music” visualization. Click here for the interactive version.

     

    Khan recognizes the spread of music is open to debate — in terms of how you define genre and influence, for example. (I’d also add, in terms of the size you choose to depict the continents in the associated visualization.) Khan points to his sources: Bass Culture, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, and The All Music Guide to Electronica, along with Wikipedia.

     

     

    The data marketplace Infochimps (where I found the link to Khan’s visualization) asks an interesting question: How would a visualization about the spread of music based on something like Infochimps’ Million Song dataset — a dataset about sound and recording metadata — differ from a visualization, like Khan’s, based on stories?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.