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Author Archives: influencedit
Beatles anchor page is live
This one’s a beaut. Map, context, mini-playlists for your auditory enjoyment.
Raiders: Our first movie map (and favorite movie)
Just to flex the mapping muscles a bit, we took a shot at building an influence map for a movie. It’s a little less complicated than a band, in that it is a relatively narrow moment in time. There are the things that came before the movie. There’s the movie. And then there’s everything thatContinue reading “Raiders: Our first movie map (and favorite movie)”
A love letter to my wife on our 15th anniversary, masquerading as a blog post about culture.
The other night we were having socially-distanced drinks with friends-and-fellow-NYC-transplants Rachel and Josh, engaged in a lively debate about the merits and pitfalls of genre labeling. Josh shared that he had extensively studied the history of musical improvisation from 1300 to today. This fact alone is worthy of a follow-up post, but suffice it toContinue reading “A love letter to my wife on our 15th anniversary, masquerading as a blog post about culture.”
A wildly-irresponsible experiment
We probably shouldn’t be doing this. All the feedback about The Beatles chart, what’s good and what’s missing, makes us think there must be a better way to capture the wisdom of the crowd than in fb comment threads. We could do this with a wiki, but the data would not be structured enough. WeContinue reading “A wildly-irresponsible experiment”
Beatles map follow-ups
So many good things generated on social media from our last post, entirely focused on The Beatles map, which makes me think that folks didn’t actually read the full post? But I digress. Among the conversational highlights: I accidentally had two arrows pointing to Led Zeppelin. Thank you for spotting this Ian! Some additions toContinue reading “Beatles map follow-ups”
How does one map an influence?
As we begin to map influences, a whole bunch of questions arise about how the map should work. How best to represent the context of the relationship? Was the influence in the form of a direct reference, a sound, a mood, or something more ineffable? The genre whiteboard was a good warm-up exercise, but theContinue reading “How does one map an influence?”
The Great Depression Gap
Something struck us when we assembled the digital version of the music whiteboard. There was a decade-long gap in the 1930s where no major new genres of music emerged in the United States, in stark contrast to the decades before or since. That’s not to say that there was no new music. But the economicContinue reading “The Great Depression Gap”
A Bigger Whiteboard
As mentioned in the Reboot post, it quickly became clear that our efforts to map the history of culture, starting with music, could not be sufficiently represented in two-dimensional physical space, nor would a whiteboard allow us to leverage the wisdom of the community to make additions, fill blind spots, and treat this as aContinue reading “A Bigger Whiteboard”
Reboot Reboot
It had been stirring in my mind at a low simmer since my previous startup, Renew, announced that it was closing its doors in January 2020. We had six severance-fueled weeks to figure out what we were going to do with our lives, and with that bit of breathing room I thought to myself: “IContinue reading “Reboot Reboot”