Digital humanities projects are created on three levels: sources, processes, and presentation. The beginning to any project is getting a database and finding credible sources to add context to interpret the database. These can be in the forms of scholarly articles, books, or other works. After all the “raw” materials are acquired, data visualizations are made of the dataset and research is conducted on the sources found relating to the topic of the dataset. From there, researchers are able to piece together the meaning behind the data through combining scholarly works with visual projections. Once these arguments are made, the final project clearly communicates findings through both data visualizations and written text and usually expresses an argument or idea drawn from this finding.

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The creation of this project is a result of combining our data with research. We took The Million Song Database and reduced our set from one million to just over four thousand in order to have a more manageable database to work with. By cleaning the database, we also removed data points that had little to no information, so we only were analyzing the songs with the most information for the best possible outcome. From there, we created various visual maps to showcase how music taste changed throughout history. Paired with the numerous scholarly articles we researched, we were able to come to a better understanding of how and why music taste changed which is now portrayed on this website. To find our sources, our team searched for works on different topics within the music world. We used class readings such as Kate Turabian’s Book A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, These, and Dissertations to better understand how to conduct our research. We also found The National Information Standards Organization online article “Understanding Metadata: What is Metadata and What is it For?: A Primer” helpful in understanding why our data was important and how we could use it to powerfully communicate ideas. After understanding how to put the pieces together to create the project and communicate our findings well, we compiled our work into this project website. The website showcases our interactive visualizations along with text to describe how we interpreted our findings.