Beginning with the trends illustrated in our Data Visualization page, we gained a deeper understanding and appreciation for KRLX’s history. The strangeness of the radio’s personality especially shines through the outliers (looking at you Scott and your ‘Microphones’). Of course Carleton does follow the world’s mainstream musical taste such as Taylor Swift, the Beatles, and Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West), but we also like to play a lot of bizarre things. The commitment to Weird Al’s Albuquerque and the untimely resurgence of Hozier’s Take Me to Church are both perfect examples of KRLX’s unique radio personality.
Apart from the KRLX’s song database, we delved into the radio’s rich history through its Google Drive. It contains countless forms of media such as: pictures of old boards, social gatherings, pranks, music (naturally), PSAs, and even Carleton news. Although still quite a confusing tree of directories, the current programming director, Lauren Witmer, began taming the vast amount of data into something actually legible…Perhaps it could be the focus of a future DH project?
While learning more about KRLX’s history, we picked up and improved some technical skills along the way. Firstly, Liam became more comfortable working with large amounts of data in python, specifically the csv reader library. He feels like he could further refine the data cleaning process in the future. Will H focused on creating the flourish bar chart graphs that visualized KRLX’s changing history. He also implemented a handy few tricks to make the graphs more readable. On top of that, we all became more comfortable working with Spreadsheets after being forced to clean the data manually (OpenRefine failed us).
Overall, we finished our project having learned quite a bit more about KRLX’s history while learning new skills.
