Please Note: this app what I call a “3am Project” that’s being udpated as time allows – it’s in development. Contact Me if you’d like to help out.
There is all kinds of stunning brilliance in the world. It’s oddly incongruent to have moments when you can’t find that new idea or book or piece of music. How does one get beyond the limits of what they already know?
The music tool is a project to aid discovery and see connection. And, it’s just playing with technology.
Journey and Discovery
Learning new things is more about “journey” than one good question or google search. We’ve all done the “rabbit hole,” following the YouTube algorithm and internet searches to discover music or ideas to learn about something. The “search” is an interaction with user. In a physical library, we used to find books next to the book we were looking for — or even as we walk by some shelf and happen to notice a book that introduces an idea that is outside the box of what we already know.
There are lots of ways to explore connection that are a variation of if you like this, others have liked that. Collective intelligence, data mining, Wisdom of Crowd, Product ratings (and on) reveal group opinion and possible connections between similar things. Even iterative google searches creates a dynamic finding process.
This tool is playing with another variation of dynamic “search” process, leveraging semantic web, following connections between things. (Those connections, linked data, is provided by DBpedia.) Instead of looking at what others have liked, start following connections to new things.
There’s another important piece: In addition to using structured data to find connections between things, it’s interesting to parse free text to identify entities (in this case, musicians) and plug those entities into semantic web explorations. Sometimes, it’s not the YouTube algorithm that leads you to new things. It’s a comment made by a person who has an idiosyncratic point of view.
Mavens, Nerds, and Idiosyncratic Information
In The Tipping Point. Malcom Gladwell talks about the Maven who has lots of focused knowledge. Gladwell says these people connect us to new knowledge. I’m going to use the term “Nerd” to encompass the Maven idea. These days, Nerd is a compliment and describes someone who has deep knowledge in some domain or community.
I haven’t tried to find a study on this, but since it’s just fun, I’ll propose that the insights of the Nerd/Maven aren’t captured in the algorithm. By definition, Nerds say things or see connections that are not highly represented in a dataset. AI and large language models are trained on the past — what lots of people have said (with all it’s bias).
Nerds have spent years obsessively thinking about some topic and their ideas have filtered through their humanity to yield interesting things. They are a trove of new information and connections.
The ability to parse text in comments and social media, especially YouTube, will likely find expert-curated linkages that are not found elsewhere. This discovery tool attempts to parse free text to identify “resources” and enable journeys based on those resources.
Opinion: I believe there is less noise in comments when users are responding to a specific artifact. If you have a video about playing the music from a long lost culture, the people watching have an interest in that specific topic and are more likely to say useful things.
App Roadmap Notes
Journey concept
Navigating through a bunch of connections is a journey. It would be ideal to save journeys through connections, allow editing to focus the journey, and then share the journey with others. For example, the steps it takes to get from Bruce Springsteen to Indonesian Gamelon orchestra, which links to images and audio along the way. Other users could add detail or extend a journey.