Presentation Review – Alex Roibas

Alex’s project documents the historical progression of the guitar as well as associations shared between specific guitar models and musicians. The project is accessible to the public through a website, which uses a number of pages to chronologically separate guitars. Each page heading is labelled to identify the identity of that era, i.e. the 1950’s-1964 are labelled “Rise of Rock”.

    The site is very well done for a variety of reasons. When you are first brought to the home page there is a simple explanation of what inspired it and what the site hopes to accomplish. Also, it is very easy to navigate. The sites simplistic layout makes it such that a less than average user would not be intimidated or have any issue with exploring its content. The styling is nice and there is a uniform consistency to formatting which makes its presentation seem more professional. Alex states on the home page that he hopes the site will inspire others to learn the guitar. I think that his use of historical moments and historical icons of the guitar in the sites content was an effective way to accomplish this goal. 

    Although I did enjoy the textual content of the website, I did feel this is an area which could use some bolstering. Although the historical moments were great for the sites mission, I felt as a user that Alex’s site had piqued my interest and now I had even more questions. I would like to see some more information on the guitar models, specifically, what defined their specific appeal. Throughout the presentation it was repeated that it was focusing on big moments in musical history and guitar models; not the specific used by the musician in the historical moment. This had me asking the question, why? What separated the Fender Stratocaster from the Rickenbaker 235? What defined their appeal? As a person with limited knowledge of the history of guitars, I found the site in some ways bred these questions.

    All in all it is a very good site. It’s easy to navigate, clean, professional, and has lots of interesting content on the history of the guitar. Alex mentioned during his presentation that he had an interest in eventually including sections on the bass and drums, and I think that’s a great idea. 

Still Moving Along – Improvements to be made

    Once I had completed my data models last week for each lockout, I ran them through geocommons to get a better idea of what they’d look like when the site was up and running. I ran into one issue: My data appeared in a far too uniform fashion. That is to say, regardless of salary, country of origin, etc. my plotted points appeared as little more than blue pins. This made identifying trends very difficult.

After reading through the geocommons user guide to get a better understanding of how to customize the various aspects of my data, I decided that the easiest way to differentiate my data and thus improve its ability to be analyzed was to revisit the drawing board with how I constructed my maps.

After some frustration attempting to work within the geocommons parameters with which I have become quite comfortable, I decided to get creative. Essentially, I broke my data sets down once more into separate files as dictated by the player’s country of origin. This allowed me to layer my map and individually style players based on where they came from. This also allows me to control which layers of my map I would like my audience to focus on. That being, rather than simply provide an image with statistics written below explaining what percentage of those plotted points are from which country, it is now fully distinguishable to the naked eye. Although this was a time consuming process, I feel it is going to be a tremendous improvement to the clarity of my project.

    I have also decided that as a little piece for interaction with my audience, once my maps and data have been publicized through geocommons, a link to that more interactive map will be provided. Although it is disappointing that one can only access this material by having a geocommons account (Finger’s crossed my audience members sign up), the hope is that by making the data public, individuals who would like to see the impact another factor I had not discussed had on player travel patterns. They would simply be able to add it to the data I have publicized and regenerate the map I had initially published.