Going Down To Chicago

You guys might find it interesting that after some discussion with Nortwestern University in Chicago, I'm going to be hired on as an independent contractor for a number of months to help in doing some academic research on the relationships of musicians, bands, and musical scenes that BandToBand's data can show in terms of social network analysis (now you know what all those sociograms and funky statistics are about). I'm heading out there next week and hopefully some time later this year a paper or two might be published in some well respected academic journals. Who knew?

Have website, will travel.


Kevin

Who knew this site was more than just music dorks jerking around?

Heh. Best of luck with your research -- although I wonder if the fact that the DB is staggeringly incomplete (and biasedly so, since our method of selection of albums to add is highly nonrandom) will skew any results. I'd be very interested to know what a "theoretical fully informed" DB might tell us statistically, but I wonder if it's calculable how much different our current results are from "truth".

You are certainly correct in being skeptical about trying to make any determinations on a global basis based on the data given the non-randomness, nor completeness, of the data. However the non-random nature, or specialization of certain scenes / genres in the data is actually something helpful because you can do investigations over certain specific areas and compare and contrast them with others. Sort of like doing a sociogram for one record label and comparing it to another record label. There are certainly many areas of potential interest although I'm not sure where everything is going to lead yet. That's why I'm going, to find out.


Kevin