Five years ago, I discovered that our juke box software iTunes was keeping a count of each dance we played to the end of the recording. I combined the data, and created a Hit Parade from about 80 weekly sessions of our group.
I published this "hit parade" of the 100 most-frequently-danced for that brief period. Ed and others have been doing maintenance on the files, identifying the more popular versions... which saves time when they are requested. Our library has a few or even dozens of choices for each dance; this pre-winnowing saves some searching time on Thursday evenings.
Compiling the list was tedious. All the spellings must be unique for each dance. There are known flaws in the system, but the results are still interesting and useful.
I can't recommend manual data massaging to anyone else, and I won't ever do it again... too tedious.
But software could do the job from data uploaded by many groups. Ultimately, there could be a juke-box 'ap' running on a tablet computer. We could learn something useful if we knew the top 100 folkdances done by other groups.
Here is a Hit Parade of the New Orleans dances, collected for about 80 evenings shortly after Katrina.
I published this "hit parade" of the 100 most-frequently-danced for that brief period. Ed and others have been doing maintenance on the files, identifying the more popular versions... which saves time when they are requested. Our library has a few or even dozens of choices for each dance; this pre-winnowing saves some searching time on Thursday evenings.
Compiling the list was tedious. All the spellings must be unique for each dance. There are known flaws in the system, but the results are still interesting and useful.
I can't recommend manual data massaging to anyone else, and I won't ever do it again... too tedious.
But software could do the job from data uploaded by many groups. Ultimately, there could be a juke-box 'ap' running on a tablet computer. We could learn something useful if we knew the top 100 folkdances done by other groups.
Here is a Hit Parade of the New Orleans dances, collected for about 80 evenings shortly after Katrina.
(coming soon)
No comments:
Post a Comment