11 Comments

  1. Jeremy
    Posted January 11, 2011 at 4:48 pm | Permalink

    Very cool overall, but it sounds like your stated scoring mechanism would give more weight to albums in the longer charts. Is this the case?

    Reply
    • phodgeszoho
      Posted January 11, 2011 at 5:16 pm | Permalink

      Hi Jeremy

      The weighting for albums is based on the sum of (100 – the position in each chart)

      So an album with a No 1 position in a chart would get +99 to it’s score regardless of the size of the chart.

      Reply
      • Jeremy
        Posted January 12, 2011 at 12:50 am | Permalink

        As I thought. I’ve been working in a not entirely dissimilar ranking space for much of the last year so your scoring mechanism jumped out at me as being subject to a few issues.

        To provide a simple example, imagine for a moment that the largest chart has five entries in it and that a shorter chart has two. The five-entry chart will contribute 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 0 points to the results, for a total of ten. The two entry chart will contribute 4 + 3, for a total of seven.

        This has a number of side effects, the most obvious of which is that the two-entry chart ends up providing a smaller contribution to the final scores than the larger chart.

        Another side effect is that once you include a number of additional longer charts in the data set, albums appearing on them but further down them can effectively gang up and outweigh the contributed albums of smaller charts, even ones ranking much higher within them.

        There are a range of options available but as always they each have their pros and cons. Without making this comment much longer (or having to invoice you ;) ) there are a few brief suggestions I can make:

        Whatever you do, strive to keep the scoring mechanism operating on a single dimension of information if at all possible. I doubt you would do this but mention it because it is always tempting, always looks like it will create better results, and almost always makes a difficult scoring mechanism even harder to get under control.

        The most obvious (but likely the most problematic in its own ways) option is to restrict each chart to the length of the shortest chart. This is by far the simplest but is highly sensitive on the length of the shortest chart.

        As the next most obvious alternative that is still based on your current scoring mechanism, consider determining the total contribution of each chart using your current scoring mechanism and then weight the charts (and in turn, their contributed scores) so that the charts all contribute equally.

        There are an infinite number of further options, of course, but this comment is long enough already so I’ll leave it as one of those “exercises for the reader” :).

        Reply
        • Jeremy
          Posted January 12, 2011 at 12:52 am | Permalink

          re: “Whatever you do, strive to keep the scoring mechanism operating on a single dimension of information if at all possible. I doubt you would do this”

          When I wrote “I doubt you would do this” I meant to write “I doubt you would deviate from this”.

          Reply
          • phodgeszoho
            Posted January 12, 2011 at 9:38 am | Permalink

            Hi Jeremy

            Thanks for your feed back, all very valid and interesting points. I did go through some of these thought processes when i was working out how best to aggregate the Top Album Charts and “score” each album. As you have suggested, I did consider only including the first 20 albums from each chart but than this would not really work with the Top Ten Charts which would possibly need to be excluded as a result. I think in the end my decision to include all the albums from each chart was based on the motivation behind why I love End of Year charts and that is primarily to discover new music! So the more albums included the more there was for me and other people to discover! Also some of the more interesting discoverers can often be buried down the bottom of these charts, especially with the larger ones.

            I did think about different approaches to scoring each album that would try to incorporate it’s proportion of the chart it was placed in but in the end I decided to try and keep it as simple as possible. So effectively a no 1 in each chart scores the same regardless. It is true that this means the larger charts have more of an influences over the final result and also that some albums can “gang up” but in same ways I kind of like that. I like bigger charts as they give us more information so I guess in some ways I am happy for the bigger charts, which are contributing more, to therefore influences the results more.

            However, you have given me some ideas. As the whole thing is interactive and all the scores, counts, rankings etc are actually calculated on the fly in the Flash front end I see no reason why I cannot give the user the option to play around with how these are calculated for example limit the results to just the Top 10 albums from each chart.

            One thing to point out is that the genre “ranking” which determines the genre bubbles’ proximity to the centre of the circle does take into account the different chart sizes. As this ranking is trying to reflect the composition/nature of each chart, an indie album appearing once in a chart of 100 has less weight than if it appears in a chart of 10. The genre ranking also takes into account the position of that indie album in the chart. This was important because the position of the bubble need to be able to distinguish between a chart with an indie album ranked at 1 and a chart with an indie album ranked at number 10. i.e. this chart is more indie than overs because it has more albums ranked higher proportionally.

            PS Yes, please do not invoice me! :-)

      • glenn mcdonald
        Posted January 12, 2011 at 6:11 pm | Permalink

        Your point scheme produces results that are only very minorly different from simply counting the polls, and simple poll counts have the distinct advantage of being easily understood, so I encourage you to consider dropping the points entirely!

        Reply
  2. glenn mcdonald
    Posted January 11, 2011 at 8:30 pm | Permalink

    Any chance you could provide the data in downloadable form, too?

    Reply
  3. David boyle
    Posted January 11, 2011 at 11:36 pm | Permalink

    Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Taking a mass of data and making it’s simple, accessible and interactive. I love it! Can’t wait to listen to those I haven’t heard so far. Firing up Spotify now … Thanks!!!

    Reply
  4. phodgeszoho
    Posted January 12, 2011 at 1:35 pm | Permalink

    I have added functionality that lets me limit the number of albums aggregated from the source charts.

    So if you want to see what this visual looks look just using the Top 10 albums from each chart than here it is:

    http://lab.zoho.co.uk/lab/end-of-year-top-albums/index-limit.php

    For the moment the limit number is passed in via the HTML page and there is no user interface to change this but if I get time I will add the ability for the user to set the limit from within the visualization.

    Reply
  5. glenn mcdonald
    Posted January 12, 2011 at 6:09 pm | Permalink

    A Needle version of the underlying data is now up, too: Album of the Year. Visually this is the antithesis of a Flash visualization, but because Needle is data-agnostic, you get more flexibility in querying and analysis. I added various rankings of genres by poll, polls by genre, albums by genre, poll similarity by album overlap, and some other things. Any view in Needle can be exported in text, CSV or JSON, too, so that should save you the work of adding dynamic exports to your visualization!

    Reply

10 Trackbacks

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