The Invenio project was part of the course requirements for my CMPUT 660 – Web Services course. When I took the course (Winter 2008), I was reading lots of celebrity gossip websites (such as Perez Hilton) everyday and was listening to a ton of top 40 hits in Winamp. It was around this time that Perez Hilton starting posting information about new, unsigned (or little known) artists in the USA and Europe. About once a week I would be finding out about some new person that I had never heard or, or had not yet gotten ‘big’ in Canada or Alberta. This started me thinking about how music starts to spread across North America and why some artists are popular everywhere, but some are entirely regional.
For my final course project, one of our requirements was to incorporate geographic information into a web service. Coupling this requirement with my thoughts on music trends, I decided to build a web service that would geovisualize radio station music. (At the time, XM and Sirius weren’t as big as they are today, and this project was a few months before last.fm [i think that’s right] came out with their big analytics software and algorithms). Over a period of 6 weeks (last week in January until 2nd week in March), I collected and organized the music chart information for 190 radio stations that are registered with Nelson SoundScan/Billboard Magazine.
I then took this information, and created a data-intensive, REST-based, RIA entitled, Invenio. Invenio combines a variety of different technologies (Yahoo! Maps, Amazon Associates Web Service, REST, and the Adobe Flex framework) to geographically visualize aggregated music chart information. You can watch a short-ish / long-ish video about Invenio’s features below (or on Youtube here). This project was very successful for me – I got a publication accepted into Cascon 2008 (co-authored by the course instructor Dr. Eleni Stroulia). You can read the paper in it’s entirely here on the ACM website or email me and I can send you a copy.
If you don’t feel like watching the whole video (I know it’s long), here are a couple of pictures that illustrate Invenio’s main features:
In the main Invenio view, you can select the artist, song, and time period and then view the song’s position on each of the 190 radio stations in the US and Canada over this time period. Each circle represents one radio station (or song, or artist, depending upon the view). In some views (Track By Artist), the size of the circle indicates the song or artist’s chart position, in other views the color of the circle indicates the genre of music (Track By Success). Pictured above is the Track by Success view, whereby one can view the top of bottom genre that was on year radio station during the selected time period. If one chooses to ‘View All Weeks’, then they will see a geographic time-lapsed animation of the options they have chosen (e.g., How Alicia Key’s song ‘No One’, fared on the charts for the 6 week period).
In this second picture, instead of circles to indicate song position or genre, we are shown the artist’s album cover (pulled from Amazon) that contains the song that is currently on the chart [in this case in the #1 position]). The main window’s maps are fully interactive – you can zoom in and out, pan the map, and change it’s type (e.g., satellite, hybrid, map). You can also elect to have tool tips appear (that provide additional information about the radio station and link to the radio station’s website). Also, you can provide other additional information which is pulled from the Amazon web site (i.e., album price, a link to the album’s page, a review of the album, the number of lists that the album is on, the genre of music, etc.).
Another type of visualization that is available in Invenio are the Cover Flows or Display Shelves (when I was making Invenio, Apple hadn’t popularized them yet). Each radio station has six display shelves associated to it, and each display shelf visualizes the music that was on each week’s chart. One can select a radio station using the combo box (or by clicking on a circle or artist album cover in the main application window) and all of the display shelves will appear. Once they appear, you can choose to flip through each of them individually, or ‘lock’ them according to chart position or song. This alternative view makes it easy to see how a song has fared using a method that is very different to the main application’s map. Similar to the main application window, you can choose to see tool tips and additional artist/album information from Amazon.
The last visualizations that are contained within Invenio are the charting views. Because most people are used to viewing information via charts rather than display shelves or maps, I chose to include three different charting options in Invenio. There are Bubble Charts (the picture directly below this one; the size of each bubble indicates the position of that song on the corresponding radio station’s chart), a line chart indicating a chart score (the picture in the middle; the average position a song across all radio stations), and a vertical chart (the picture at the bottom; it indicates if each song/artist has been fairly consistent over time or if the have had a large variance in chart position over the given time period).
