A fascinating project from graduate students at Stanford, MIT, and CalTech, and a senior research scientist at Yahoo! (described here and available in greater detail here) seeks to make visual the interconnections of 10,000 music artists as perceived by their audience. Based on user ratings and preferences from 150,000 Yahoo! Music LAUNCHcast members, the project clustered artists together, connected them across clusters, and mapped out the data in a visually stunning way.
Really cool.
I’m one of the people who worked on this visualization. Just today, we came out with a few pictures of the flickr social network. These pictures are different from the music ones in that we don’t get as intuitive an understanding of the data. (There are clusters, but we don’t have a sense of genre to understand them like we do for music.) Nevertheless, the pictures are still quite breathtaking.
Feel free to contact me with any questions.
(Click my contact link to go to the visualizations.)