Back into Editing
The interviews I’ve conducted over the last 4 weeks have inspired me to finally get around to tagging some things I acquired last year and to add a new release to the DB. This new release actually turned into much more work than I’d expected: the artist, Scattered Trees, wasn’t in there, and neither was the band’s label, Roll Call Records. The album isn’t due out until April, but I got a download link from their PR company, so I have it. Trying to figure out what to provide as evidence for the release was a little worriesome, so I just threw the kitchen sink of sources in the comment box.
I also wasn’t sure how to put Roll Call Records in there. The label is its own label, but they also apparently work with EMI so the email from the PR folks said “Roll Call Records/EMI” which is confusing. In hindsight, it should probably just be Roll Call Records but I don’t know. We’ll see how the voting goes.
In other news, if anyone still happens to be reading this blog and would like to talk to me about using MBz for no more than an hour (chat, Skype, or phone), please contact me!
Thank you so much!
I’d just like to thank everyone who took the time to complete the MusicBrainz survey. I appreciate your input! More to come as I sort through the results.
Thanks!
MusicBrainz Survey: Live!
Hey MusicBrainz fans,
My survey is now officially live and ready for the taking: http://bit.ly/cJN6xq
Even if you aren’t a registered MBz user and have just poked around at the site, you can still take the survey! I am grateful for any responses, and it will take less than 15 min to complete, max.
Thank you in advance!
Survey ready for testing!
Hey MB users,
After a post-semester vacation, I’m back and ready to test the survey for final polishing before I launch it. I’m looking for a few volunteers willing to connect with me over Skype or chat while taking the survey to provide feedback on phrasing, redundancy, and how long it takes. If you’re interested, please shoot me an email at jhemerly [at] ischool [dot] berkeley [dot] edu. I’m aiming to have the survey up and running by July 1 so I’d like to do the testing in the next 2 weeks.
Thanks!
Jess
Transcript complete!
Halfway there…
Half of the mythical interview I did with Robert Kaye is now available to read here. I’m on a roll. More to come this week.
Interesting Question
I thought this was an interesting question on the mailing list, given the unrelenting stream of find-the-next-star reality shows in the US:
The band BeForU (as with many Japanese pop bands) was formed when a label (in this case the game company Konami) held a competition to select members for a new band. Is it appropriate to add the “founding member” attribute to the member of a band AR for these people?
The answer was no: “A founding member should be a) involved in founding the band and b) a member of the band at some point – probably from the beginning.”
I actually think this was an interesting question and that a competition-formed band should be somehow noted in MB if it really is going to be an encyclopedic repository for music information.
On Mailing Lists and Wikipedia
I’m beginning to feel like MusicBrainz combines strategies, practices, and processes similar to OSS projects and Wikipedia. The mailing list style discussions are particularly Wikipedian in nature in that they are largely about very specific details that would likely go unnoticed to the average MB user. They are active, to say the least; I had to switch over to daily digest version because I was simply getting too many emails from the discussions, mainly on the Style list.
Still have not transcribed my interview. Will happen this week, I promise. I just made some calls to price out having someone else do it and, well… not going to happen. Bummer.
My survey is ready for an initial round of testing. If any MB users still happen to be reading this blog, I’d love to get 2 or 3 of you to try out the survey and give me feedback on length and whether or not the questions make sense to you. Just comment and I’ll get in touch with you!
Into the belly of the beast
This morning I finally subscribed to the user and style guidelines mailing lists (one digest a day, of course). I’m looking forward to seeing just how active the lists are and what kinds of discussions happen on a day-to-day basis. I’ve looked at the archives but I think participating in the present will help me better understand the conversations.
I still have not transcribed my Robert Kaye interview, but it’s going to be done by the end of next week, I swear. Once finished I’m going to write up a new history page for the site and figure out how I go about getting people to accept it. I think I’ll also fix up the Wikipedia page for MB because, well, it could use a little love.
In other news, I’ve made progress on the survey. I’m still waiting for approval of my second draft as well as eProtocol submission, but one of our awesome IT guys, Gary, walked me through the commands to install open-source survey app LimeSurvey on my Berkeley server so I can go ahead and begin building the survey there. I chose an open-source app like this for two reasons: the obvious one, that I’m working in an open source project so should probably use as many open-source tools as possible (hence also why I chose WordPress for my blog); and two, it seems like it’s more powerful than other options and I want to learn something new. So between my WordPress blog, LimeSurvey, LyricWiki, Wikipedia, and MusicBrainz, I’m working in/with five different open source projects/tools for this class. I didn’t intend for it to work out like this but I really think it’s pretty awesome that open source has come so far that I even can do this. I will not, however, go as far as using OpenOffice because it frankly just sucks. Sorry, Sun.
Achievement Unlocked!
I’ve finally linked Pavement members Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich to the Silver Jews releases on which they appeared. In doing so, I noticed a semantic detail that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. When linking artists to releases, you can choose from the following:
Here’s where granularity issues come into play for me. Let’s use my recurring example of Silver Jews. Cassie Berman, David Berman’s wife, wasn’t a band member from the beginning, but she was a band member on tour and on the later albums. I want to link her to the releases on which she played, but I’m not sure which of these options to select because of the way they display the relationship. That is, do I want it to read “Cassie Berman PERFORMED Tanglewood Numbers” or “Cassie Berman PERFORMED ON Tanglewood Numbers.” My suspicion is that PERFORMED is for tracks while PERFORMED ON is for albums, but I think PERFORMED ON could also be used to relate an artist to a track where s/he played a backing role.
And again, perhaps the answer is buried somewhere in the wisdom of the wiki.
