My main reason for setting up this website, crude as it is, has been to put my work from my MSc dissertation online somewhere so that I can show people. Essentially, I downloaded data from last.fm on users' top 50 favourite artists, and then conducted a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis on the artists. You can see the results in an interactive format here. It takes a little while to load.
MDS produces a 'cloud' of points in a certain number of dimensions, usually two. This analysis produced six dimensions before my computer gave up. As a computer screen can only represent two dimensions at a time, I've given them all labels* and allowed you to change which dimension is displayed on screen. You can also zoom in and out, as often artists are too close together at large scales.
I hope you find it interesting. I'll be developing the visualisation and the explanation more over time, but this is an initial effort at getting it out there. Please send me any comments/suggestions/rants/criticism/flowers/propositions that this inspires.
* The dimension labels are based on my interpretation of the overall tendency of each axis, as well as an assessment of which user tags align with each axis. You can feel free to quibble with them - I know, for example, that Status Quo are not black, nor American - but the data fell out that way, and the labels are the best I could come up with. Improvements will be taken into consideration.
