Visualizing Jay-Z

Posted: June 11th, 2010 at 1:42 pm | Tags: data visualization, hiphopwordcount, in-progress

One of the many things I’m doing this summer is interning for Tahir, at Eyebeam. I’m creating a few visualizations from the data that he is compiling for Hip-Hop Word Count, an ethnographic database of hip lyrics from the 70′s to the present.

The first data pack I had access to was Jay-Z. For the image above, I used Protovis¹ and re-purposed the Parallell Coordinates example. The data represented are: the year the song was released, word count, syllable count, and sentence count. I’m still working on this particular visualization². I need to figure out how to make the data more meaningful³. I also need to refine the UI a bit⁴.

1. which I found easier to use for visualizations then Processing because in Processing, I’d have to mess with tons of for() loops and lots of declarative statements for drawing data points and axis’. It would be aces if there was a Protovis library for Processing. [↩]
2. just finished re-formatting the data [↩]
3. I definitely should add the song names, but what else? [↩]
4. this is interactive, but I’m not ready to make the live version public yet [↩]