How Does This Project Pertain to Digital Humanities?
On the Topic of: Significance, Values, and Digital Humanities Practices
So, after talking to Brian and reviewing the project for ourselves, we decided that this project had great relevance to the study of digital humanities. The values of DH is further addressed on the “Values of DH” page.
The values of Digital Humanities are shown clearly through this project with little, but still existent holes. One value that could have been shown more clearly was transparency. They discuss EchoNest like it was an existent platform that still has employees and used today. However, EchoNest was acquired by Spotify for a €49.7M (~$66M) deal in 2014. The platform was founded in 2005.
This is what happens when you try to visit EchoNest today.
In summary, let’s once again address the values of Digital Humanities. Openness. Was this project by Daniels and Thompson open to the open to the exchange of ideas and open content? In a sense, sure, it was. The software referenced most and the core of the project, EchoNest, was not exactly an open platform accessible to the audience to be able to navigate themselves. We simply had to take Daniels and Thompson’s ‘word for it”. However, overall, the project was free and accessible for people to enjoy and interpret for themselves.
Was this project collaborative? It was about as collaborative as a project with two authors one would expect to see. Besides Daniels and Thompson, there was no clear citations of note-exchanging or outside opinions in the project. For example, this would have looked like: “We asked Dr. Suchandsuch whether or not EchoNest’s 8 data points were valid and how they came to be”. Instead, we had to do that ourselves by reaching out to Dr. Whitman himself over e-mail.
We felt like this project felt a vibrant connectedness value on this project. This project can aspire so many producers to come together or study individually and really take something from it. Not only that, but aspiring digital humanities scholars can really use this project by Daniels in particular aside from his others, to peek inside the methodology he used that he does not make as clear in his other projects. This is a closed project with sources that are dated, however, music is forever.
Finally, we get to the point of diversity. Music and diversity go hand in hand like bread and butter. Daniels and Thompson did not hold back on their findings and research and did not hold back any bias music genre or producers. It was mostly factual. On the other hand, they used Billboard Hot 100 statistics to narrate the biggest hits in music history from decade to decade. Not the worst platform you can use, but they remained content with using that single platform. We found this interesting because although the Billboard may reflect the most popular songs of all times, there’s other ways of detecting the most popular songs of all time to be able to assess the similarity of music. This goes for YouTube, record sales, awards, and much more.
