THE COLLABORATION OF “THE MUSICAL DIVERSITY OF POP SONGS”
According to Lisa Spiro, author of “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” collaboration is a highly valued in the field of digital humanities. Spiro is the executive director at Rice University in the field of digital scholarship services. Her article defines the values of digital humanities and the field as a whole. Without exception this value proves itself to be essential to every digital humanities project. Collaboration allows for a more divergent, all-things-considered outcome, which in turn results in a more impactful effect on the audience. Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels applied collaboration in their studies quite nicely; they not only conducted their own personal studies to determine the diversity in pop music- they also cited alternative sources from which they harvested the project’s data.
All throughout the project, a diverse collection of links leads to different data sets, songs, and videos. Parallels are drawn between their own data and that of many other DH projects- the Music Genome Project, for example. The Genome Project is the engine that powers the popular music-streaming platform Pandora and is used to power its analytical approach to music suggestions. The authors also use quotes from John Seabrook, a reporter for The New Yorker. In a specific quote Seabrook states that he uses the “track and hook method” when talking about the data. Thompson and Daniels use a great deal of collaboration throughout the entirety of their project which strengthens it tremendously.
