Lecture
It was a great lecture this week, I loved hearing from all of the industry professionals about their use of data. I found it particularly interesting when Stuart was talking about the ethics of data representation and how it has been skewed so much in the media (especially in recent years with the likes of Trump and BoJo). It made me think of all of the misinformation that has been around and represented in official looking graphics - all with a nefarious purpose. I think it's very important to consider what you are saying with the infographics and consider the impact it might have on people.
Forensic Architecture fascinated me, not only because I studied Architecture but also because I work for charities that deal with human rights issues on a daily basis so this was of working was amazing. I had no idea this was such a far reaching project, it shows what you can do when you combine disciplines and strive for innovation. I really want to know more about how this works and the kind of projects they tackle in more detail.
It's Nice That - Offshore
I have loved this project since I found about it earlier in this course. It is such an important, assumption breaking piece that shows the different sides of immigration. [1]
I love how Offshore take data and transform it into a coherent story of people. It really is a great way of changing opinions on this issue and showing it in a relatable way.
Infographics can be used to show important information such as immigration stories and make it accessible to all people. The Migrant journal was clearly a product of its time as Offshore conceived it right at the point that the European right wing were driving the story of immigrants 'taking over' which anyone with brain can tell you is not true.
Workshop Challenge
This week we want you to explore your own methods of communicating a story through information design. You will be assessed on the visual impact and also the effectiveness of your communication. Take stock of what you have learned about data visualisation and the importance of clarity. Please consider the format and materials used, which can help tell your story.
Source a scientific, cultural or environmental story that matters to you.
Create a piece of information design to communicate its information and reveal a new insight.
Ideas
The idea I have decided to go with is the words per second in Hamilton. I wanted to choose something a little more light hearted than my usual anti-government choices and also I haven't seen anything like this when researching. I think it would be really interesting to see the trends around when the faster raps are and if it goes with the rises and falls in the story.
Visualising Music
This is a classical piece of music created by Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) called Prelude ‘The Polish Dance’, and belongs to a set of twenty-four short pieces for the piano, one in each of the twenty - four keys. The series of pieces was originally published in 1839 although Chopin wrote them between 1835 and 1839. [2]
This book visualises this single piece of piano music in a more abstract graphic, it is simple and understandable by everyone who has or does not have knowledge on music scores. I love the simplicity of this piece by Sofia Fotaki and it gives you a lot of information about composition just looking at dots. This simplicity is something I want to carry forward in my design, lots of information conveyed in a simple, understandable way.
An Interactive Visualisation of Every Line in Hamilton
"When I started digging through the lyrics, I was curious about two things: the relationships between the main characters, and the recurring phrases associated with those characters.
So I went through every single line in Hamilton and recorded who sang each line, as well as who that line may have been directed towards. I've noted every phrase that was sung more than once across more than one song, and grouped them into broad themes.
To explore the data, I created a visual tool to filter the lines by any combination of characters, conversations, and themes. The insights were amazing, and I'm excited to share with you both the visual tool and my analysis of Hamilton with it." [3]
This is a beautiful representation of data from Hamilton, Shirley Wu collected all of the data herself and specifically looked into the relationships between the characters and recorded who was singing, who they were singing too and who else was involved in the scene. It resulted in this beautiful collection of Hamilton data that is both simple and informative, something I will strive for in this design.
I think another interesting thing about this dataset is the new stories you can tell in Hamilton, by looking at the relationships between two of the characters you hadn't considered before you can realise things you wouldn't have otherwise considered. For example, the flirtation between Angelica and Hamilton completely stops after he cheats on Eliza, I actually thought it continued to the end but this data set shows this is not the case.
I think the new information added is one of the key strengths of infographics - the ability to see data in a different way and analyse it to come to surprising conclusions.
Hamilton Data
Words per second in each Hamilton song
My Shot: 3.36
Room Where it Happens: 3.29
Meet Me Inside: 3.23
Non-Stop: 3.22
The Reynolds Pamphlet: 3.2
Blow Us All Away: 3.16
Cabinet Battle 2: 3.15
The Schuyler Sisters: 3.13
Helpless: 2.96
Right Hand Man: 2.92
Cabinet Battle 1: 2.88
The Election of 1800: 2.84
Wait For It: 2.8
Schuyler Defeated: 2.78
Say No To This: 2.74
Aaron Burr, Sir: 2.7
We Know: 2.68
Guns and Ships: 2.66
Ten Duel Commandments: 2.65
Story of Tonight (reprise): 2.62
Satisfied: 2.59
Stay Alive: 2.58
Take a Break: 2.57
Farmer Refuted: 2.56
Alexander Hamilton: 2.54
Washington On Your Side: 2.52
Yorktown: 2.48
The Adams Administration: 2.35
Stay Alive (reprise): 2.28
One Last Time: 2.26
The World Was Wide Enough: 2.25
Your Obedient Servant: 2.17
What’d I Miss?: 2.1
Story of Tonight: 2.05
Hurricane: 2.02
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story: 1.95
A Winter’s Ball: 1.91
Best of Wives and Best of Women: 1.6
That Would Be Enough: 1.54
It’s Quiet Uptown: 1.46
You’ll Be Back: 1.4
Dear Theodosia: 1.37
History Has Its Eyes On You & Burn (tied): 1.32
What Comes Next?: 1.24
I Know Him: 1.07
[6]
Unfortunately the only solid data I can find is on Reddit. I know this isn't the most reliable data set so I am going to take a random selection of tracks and work out the words per second myself. I will do this my taking number of words in the song and dividing it by the number of seconds in the song. Here goes:
Reynolds Pamphlet - 410 words, 2m08s - 361/128=3.2 correct
Helpless - 740 words, 4m10s - 740/250=2.9 correct
One Last Time - 676 words, 4m59s - 676/299=2.2 correct
I have come to the conclusion that this data is reliable. I also want to look at the speed of individual verses from songs as I think it would be interesting to map this alongside the average words per second of the entire song.
Top 5 songs with the fastest verses:
Guns and Ships 2m07s 339 Words 160.2 words per minute 54 words in the fastest 10 seconds
Satisfied 5m30s 812 Words 148 words per minute 50 words in the fastest 10 seconds
Washington on your Side 3m01s 433 words 143.5 words per minute 42 words in the fastest 10 seconds
My Shot 5m33s 1112 words 200.4 words per minute 40 words in the fastest 10 seconds
Cabinet Battle 1 3m31s 617 Words 172.2 words per minute 37 words in the fastest 10 seconds [4] [5]
Visualising Hamilton
I put the data into excel so I could easily sort through it before making my infographic. (I say easily... as easily as someone with middle school excel skills can manage!) I initially pasted the info in and thought great, the songs are in the musical in speed order, then I realised that the data was already sorted and that wasn't actually the playlist at all. I then rearranged the songs into the correct set list (on the right). I then generated some rudimentary graphs to see any patterns that came about. The musical is certainly full of rises and falls, usually in line with what Hamilton and Eliza are going through.
I then decided to add in the data about the fastest verses to see the pattern with these too.
I thought it was quite interesting that the fastest verses didn't actually match up with the fastest average songs and the fact that they were quite evenly spread throughout the musical.
I now want to experiment with ways to show this data visually. I have decided to take out any song under 1 minute and the reprises to show the full songs rather than snippets. Therefore I will be working with 42 songs in Hamilton.
Chrome Music Lab Spectrogram
A spectrogram is a picture of sound. A spectrogram shows the frequencies that make up the sound, from low to high, and how they change over time, from left to right. Spectrogram is an open source website. [7] I thought it would be interesting to see the difference between the fastest and slowest song in Hamilton to see if it would be a good way to represent words per second.
Guns and Ships
I know Him
I love the visuals of this however I don't think it is the way to represent the exact number of words per second as it is slightly abstract and doesn't communicate the data in an effective way. Also because it considers both the music and the lyrics is is not an accurate representation of speed of the song.
There is another function where you can click to represent a beat. I'm going to try this to represent each song in a video to see if this is more successful at representing the words per second average in each song.
I really like this abstract effect. I think the beeps work far better than the original music version. I think it does a good job at representing how many lyrics are fit into one second. However, it is still very abstract and I can't represent the fastest verses at the same time. I think I need to develop different ideas before landing on my final one.
Abbas Mushtaq
I found this collection of posters on Pinterest and unfortunately I can't find them anywhere else! [8] They were designed by Abbas Mushtaq and represent the volume of music - the darker the square, the louder the song. I think this is a beautiful representation of the music, it is informative and a piece of art. It is important to me while designing my infographic about Hamilton that it is also something that people would want to display, I want it to be beautiful and informative and I think these posters by Mushtaq do just that.
Further Ideas
I have had quite a lot of ideas about how to represent the data for my Hamilton Infographic. I am going to digitally mock these up to decide which direction is right for this project.
Circular plot
I really like this representation of Hamilton words per second. However I do have a concern over the use of circles- I think it looks like the time is getting longer rather the word count is going up. I don't think this necessarily works as an infographic as I think it may be a bit confusing to someone who doesn't have any previous knowledge of it. This was confirmed in my tutorial when Paul suggested the same thing.
Linear
My second idea was to do it in a linear diagram. I don't think this is very visually stimulating however, and doesn't have the artistic aesthetic I want to go for. Hamilton is an innovative musical so I think I should be aiming for an innovative visual to show my data.
Colour
Looking at Abbas Mushtaq's posters really inspired me to experiment with this relating to the Hamilton musical. However instead of the darker squares representing volume, they will represent more words per second. I decided to look for colour inspiration from the cast of Hamilton and thought who better than Daveed Diggs who played Lafayette and Jefferson in the show and was responsible for the fastest rap ever in a musical - in Guns & Ships. I came across this great mood board on Pinterest and thought purple would be the perfect colour to use in this experiment.
This shows each song represented by a purple square, the darker the square the more words per second. I really like this and want to add the 5 fastest verses as some further information.
I really like the dynamic aspect of this but think I need to show both so people can compare the fastest verse to how fast the song is. I think in order for this to be successful I need to animate it so each box beats per second the number of words per second in that particular song.
I presented these three ideas (circle, linear and colour) to the group in the Crit this week and they all said the colour one was the one to go for. I also agree and I am going to take the advice of my peers and carry this one forward.
FInal Piece
Summary
As my final piece this week I have created this gif to show words per second in Hamilton. I have included the logo, a brief explanation and also the track list so you can find your favourite songs and work out how many words per second are rapped. Although the animation is not perfect I am pleased with this outcome and think I have come up with something that shows the information in an abstract but understandable way.
I have really pushed myself outside of my comfort zone this week - at the start of development I was sure my final piece was going to be the circular diagram however the research I did pushed me in a different direction and rather than fight it, I decided to whole heartedly go for it! The research on Abbas Mushtaq and the experiments I did in the Chrome Music Lab Spectrogram inspired me to represent this music data in a more visual and colourful way. Using Daveed Diggs costume as colour inspiration I think adds another layer to it as that is also representative of the speed of raps in Hamilton as he is responsible for the fastest.
If I were to go further with this project I would want to represent the set list in a different way as it just looks a little stuck on the bottom. This week I think I spend more time on the development than the final result so I really could have done with more time. I would also tighten up the animation as there are parts that are a bit dodgy - the second set of five squares should replace the originals rather than just go on top for example.
Overall I am pleased with this weeks result, I think by thinking about this in a different way and not getting too stuck on one idea really pushed me to try something new.
References
[1] It’s Nice That (2018), Nicer Tuesdays: Offshore Studio, [online] 12 June, (Accessed: 16/2/22)
[2] Fotaki, S. (2020). Visualising music. Available: https://cargocollective.com/sofiafotaki/Visualising-music. Last accessed 16/2/22.
[3] Wu, S. (2020). An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton. Available: https://pudding.cool/2017/03/hamilton/. Last accessed 17/2/22.
[4] Libresco, L. (2015). Hamilton. Available: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hamilton-is-the-very-model-of-a-modern-fast-paced-musical/. Last accessed 17/2/22.
[5] Hamilton Musical. (2015). I analysed all 20,000 words of Hamilton. Available: https://imgur.com/r/hamiltonmusical/YGP2aPB. Last accessed 17/2/22.
[6] Noh, U. (2018). I calculated the words per second in each song. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/hamiltonmusical/comments/8t21ai/i_calculated_the_words_per_second_in_each_song/. Last accessed 17/2/22.
[7] Morrill, J and Smus, B. (2022). Spectrogram. Available: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/spectrogram/. Last accessed 17/2/22.
[8] Zapponi, C. (2022). Visual Music Posters. Available: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/273030796132188673/. Last accessed 17/2/22.
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