TheMusicalMaps

Introduction

We are The Music Maps. Our goal is to understand the trends in music over the past few years, and see if modern changes to society due to the pandemic have affected our taste in music and the frequency we consume it in. We hope to visualize this data in an easy to understand way, so that we may see which genres of music are trending and whether the location and amount of listeners have changed over the last few years.

Team members

Kai: UI/UX Specialist
Kai is a 4th year Design Media Arts major. He has experience designing websites and hopes to contribute to the group by creating readable and accessible websites.

Justis: Mapping Specialist
Justis is a 4th year Theater Design/Production major. She has a double minor in Digital Humanities and Urban and Regional Studies. She has studied web design and mapping through coursework in both of these fields and will be contributing these skills to the project.

Zhengyang: Developing specialist
Daniel is a 3rd year Computer Science major. He has worked with many different programming languages and tools and is responsible for data analysis and scripting.

Overview

Our group is investigating the changing trends of music and listening of users over time, specifically focusing on data before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is significant to see the ways in which habits and tendencies are altered throughout hardship, especially given the importance of the internet and online entertainment to connectivity during quarantines.

Methodology

Web mapping can be used to visualize location data and create interactive web maps. As we believe that music trends and popularity are heavily tied with location information, we chose to use web mapping as a medium for this project to assist us in visualizing and presenting the data.

Workflow

Week 2: Project Proposal and Plan; Research
Week 3: Organize/Clean Data
Week 4: Storyboard Website; About Page
Week 5: Design and Create Map, Layers, and Objects
Week 6: Design; Midterm Presentation
Week 7: Mapping details and edits
Week 8: UX/UI
Week 9: Interactivity and usability
Week 10: Clean Website
Finals: Final Presentation

Technical scope

HTML, CSS: For building the website Git: For working collaboratively and using version control Javascript: For working with Leaflet and front-end Python: For scripting, data analysis and working with the twitter API Leaflet: To create the mapping